Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, Christchurch NZ – Photo: David Wethey/NSPA/AP
A crew of volunteers in Christchurch, New Zealand, including five professional engineers and a draftsman from global engineering firm Aurecon, are coming together to build a temple for the earthquake-stricken city. . . and then burn that temple down a few weeks later.
The Temple for Christchurch project is inspired by Burning Man and the Temple built there each year, which attendees use for valuable catharsis by writing about their lost ones on the walls before the building is burnt to the ground. The people of Christchurch will be allowed to visit their Temple and write on the walls for several weeks before the structure is burned as a public event.
Photo: Kirk Hargreaves/Christchurch Press/Reuters
There’s some interesting architecture to the project, too; at 6.3 meters, the building’s height will reflect the magnitude of the biggest and most destructive earthquake in the recent spate, which devastated Christchurch on February 22nd, 2011. The lines of the building’s 40-meter length and 25-meter width will be designed to mirror the seismic waveform of the quake, as recorded at the monitoring station closest to the epicenter.
Hippathy Valentine, a leader of the project, said that the volunteers are driven by the city’s need for a little catharsis and emotional balm in the aftermath of the devastation.
“We plan to open to the public in June on the site of the old Convention Centre on Peterborough St. before [moving the Temple] outside of the city to be ceremonially burnt. We hope that people will share their earthquake experiences and use the Temple as a catalyst for reflection on how the earthquakes have affected them, their city, and their communities.”
Aurecon structural engineer Luis Castillo called the design of the Temple “right at the cutting edge of architecture for the new Christchurch.”
Some areas were badly flooded – Photo: Mark Mitchell/NZ Herald/AP
“The project gives us the chance to ‘think outside the box,’ to be creative while having a good grasp of the many technical issues that range from material properties to spatial vision,” said Castillo. “We created a balsa wood model to help crystalize our thinking.
“It was also a great opportunity for Aurecon staff to be proactive in bringing the city back to life and creating a means by which [local residents] can go out and enjoy it.”
The Black Rock Arts Foundation is lending some support to the project, and you can too. Get involved, or just show your support for the Temple for Christchurch with a donation of money, food, tools, or other resources, by visiting the project’s website, or by going directly to their Indiegogo campaign.
Good on ya for it, too. . . she’ll be right, mate, with time and hard work and a little good old-fashioned soul-cleansing fire.
Jerry Snyder’s enthusiasm is infectious. His face breaks out in moonbeams as we hit the high points of the Pier Crew’s project for Burning Man 2013. We’re at the Generator, a fee-free community art space in Sparks, Nevada, where Jerry and the crew are building his brainchild: a giant wooden puppet of an ichthyosaur skeleton.
WHATSBLEM THE PRO: This is a puppet? And there’s a sort of carny tent revival show, right?
JERRY SNYDER: Right. It goes with our premise of this guy, sort of an uneducated miner who finds these bones and thinks these are God’s image on Earth.
WTP: He wasn’t an archaeologist? He was a miner?
JS: Well, in reality, Dr. Camp was a UC Berkeley paleontologist who did serious work very painstakingly, over the course of years. . . he did science. The name, though, is way too good to waste. We figured, he’s Dr. Camp, let’s make him campy. We’re sort of reinventing him as this itinerant miner who wanders into Berlin, Nevada, an ignorant, uneducated guy who has this revelation that this is God’s portrait on Earth. This is the face, the image of God!
WTP: God looks like an ichthyosaur. Sounds legit so far.
JS: God is a fish-lizard! This is God’s message to his Creation! So he recreates this skeleton and goes around preaching to people from town to town in this sort of tent revival, saying “I’ve seen God, He saved me! He pulled me up from the depths of despair and sin and privation! He showed me His face! If you really believe, you may make the bones of God move, you may manipulate God Himself, become one with God, and make God’s bones dance across the desert night!”
WTP: Preach it, brother Camp!
At what point exactly does this story diverge from the actual story of Dr. Camp?
JS: Oh! Uh, entirely. It’s entirely made up. Dr. Camp was a respectable scientist who wasn’t a bit kooky, as far as I know.
WTP: Let’s talk about you for a minute. . . how did you get here?
JS: Well, my first burn was 2004. My first almost-burn was 1994, when I was an art student at UNR, and a friend told me “hey you should go to this Burning Man thing,” and I didn’t. Oops. Ten years later, we finally made it out there.
I’m from Yerington, Nevada originally. I lived in the Bay Area for a few years but moved back here in 2001.
Jerry Snyder and a rib for the Ichthyosaur Puppet
When I was an art student at UNR, I always felt like Reno was right on the verge of something really big; it’s felt like that ever since. Things come and go, but it really has developed a lot. Burning Man has had a lot to do with that, and that fosters a very specific kind of art; it’s often very sophisticated outsider art, by insiders in non-art worlds. . . techies and geeks.
WTP: I think some of it could fairly be called craft, or even research, but I like the way it inflames the passions of the inner child in people.
JS: With the Pier, and the ship, and this project, we started thinking: let’s just build the stuff that we wanted to build when we were seven years old and weren’t able to.
WTP: Yeah! I know exactly what you mean. . . that’s why I wrote an obituary article when Gerry Anderson died.
So the Ichthyosaur is a marionette?
JS: Yes, it’ll be hanging from a 20′x20′x60′ structure. It’ll move in a swimming motion, the flippers will move, the head will move side-to-side, the jaws will open. . . of course, this is all dependent on how well we can figure out how to do all this stuff. No one’s really done this. . . it’s not like you can just Google “how do I build a giant dinosaur puppet” and find much on the Internet.
WTP: And you’ll have a live human playing Dr. Camp?
JS: Yes, I’ll play Dr. Camp; Ed Adkins will play Dr. Camp, I think Brandon Russell will play him, and so will Ian Epperson.
Some of the crew at work
WTP: What sort of interactivity will it have?
JS: Aside from making the puppet move, Dr. Camp will be preaching and there will be hymns sung, pilgrims will come and be saved; basically, we’ll have a full free-form tent revival meeting going on. The rest of the time the place will be staffed by one or two people so that you can come and play with the puppet if you like.
We’re working on the hymnal; Brandon Russell, who wrote the ship’s log for our project last year, is writing our hymns, and they’re hysterical. A few of them are on our website.
WTP: Why do this? Will you burn it, or are you taking it home from Burning Man?
JS:(laughs) Because I want to see it. It’s in my head and it wants out.
What we’re thinking about is possibly donating it to Great Basin Brewery, if it’s technically feasible. They have a location that has a high ceiling, and I’m hoping we can hang it up there. They’ve been really generous and wonderful to us and to other burners so many times, we would really like to do something nice for them. We didn’t get a Burning Man grant, so Great Basin has been a godsend to us and really gone out of their way to help us out.
WTP: The Pier Crew is also running this build space, right?
Space, time, tools: The Pier Crew’s gift to the Reno arts community
JS: Yes! It’s called “The Generator” and we’re super excited about this project. I just look around and smile whenever I’m here. . . we have an incredibly generous donor who foots the bill, and we’re going to be able to provide this amazing resource to the community, with tools, full metal shop, full wood shop, and so on. Anyone will be able to come down here and make art, when we’re all set up.
WTP: Tell me what you want people to know about the Ichthyosaur Puppet.
JS: In part, it’s silly. In part, it’s just making a giant dinosaur. . . but there’s also a sense in which I am totally fascinated by the intersection of art and religion, and this notion of them both being made-up stories that are trying to get at the truth. I don’t mean that to be insulting to people of faith at all, but I like playing with these notions of misinterpretation, and faith, and the ways in which we try to explain the world. Maybe the way we see the world is just wrong, and the things we accept as reality are something else altogether. I like putting characters into that particular kind of confusion.
Burning Man is suing Pershing County for trying to increase levies on the event. Despite recent legislation passed by the Assembly in Nevada, the lawsuit continues. Pershing County hit back with a motion to dismiss – which was dismissed. The Judge recently made a preliminary ruling, dismissing some of Burning Man’s claims but allowing the lawsuit to continue (and the lawyers on both sides to continue to get paid).
Last week, a federal judge in Reno dismissed several claims in a lawsuit filed by Burning Man organizers against Pershing County over a disputed festival ordinance.
On Thursday, Pershing District Attorney Jim Shirley responded, calling U.S. District Court Judge Robert Jones’ ruling on April 26 a victory for the county.
“The dismissal of three of the six claims that Burning Man filed was a huge victory for Pershing County and a huge defeat for Burning Man,” Shirley said in an email. “That means that Burning Man failed to even make a facial showing on those three claims. The judge also pared down two of the other…claims, meaning he dismissed portions of them. This was also a victory for Pershing County and a defeat for Burning Man. To portray this otherwise, is not only laughable, it is an enormous spin on what the judge’s ruling really means.”
He added, “In Pershing County, we are enormously happy with the ruling because we had such a burden to prove the claims did not merit going forward. The judge was reviewing allegations which were full of hyperbole and inaccuracy.”
Black Rock City LLC sued Pershing County last year because of a county festival ordinance that would regulate the annual arts and free expression festival, which attracts more than 50,000 people each year.
…
Jones threw out Black Rock City’s claim that the county cannot regulate the event because it’s already permitted by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency.
Perhaps predictably, the BMOrg claimed victory also:
On Monday, Burning Man representatives claimed victory, too.
“The biggest claims in the lawsuit were the First Amendment claims and contract violation claims,” said Ray Allen, the government relations and legal affairs manager for Black Rock City. “We’re focusing on the First Amendment aspects of it and the breach of contract and for us it’s a win because those get to move forward.”
The matter is expected to go to trial on Sept. 24 in Reno.
“The judge’s ruling is a major victory for Burning Man,” said Black Rock City general counsel Terry Gross. “The county attempted to dismiss the entire case, and the court denied that as to all critical claims.”
The legal battle is moving forward at the same [time] as a bill in the Nevada Legislature that would exempt federal land from any local ordinances.
Three claims get to be heard: so the glass is half full? More money to be spent on lawyers, for an ordinance that might be over-ridden by State legislation – a victory?
In other bad news, it looks like Burning Man is being targeted for an 8% state tax in another new bill that appears mostly aimed at the legalized brothels in the tax haven state. We predict this tax being passed on to us punters via higher ticket prices, rather than BMOrg eating the cost.
Larry Harvey, Ed Lee and David Chiu announce new Burning Man HQ in 2011
A year or two back, Burning Man moved their offices into a new building in Market St. An area “best known for drug deals, graffiti and vagrants“, it’s close to City Hall, in the heart of San Francisco. Burning Man’s move was announced proudly in 2011 at the United Nations Plaza (the UN was created in SF) by Mayor Ed Lee, and Board of Supervisors President David Chiu – who (like a number of SF politicians) has hardcore Burners on his personal staff and has made the trek to Black Rock City personally. They saw Burning Man’s presence as something that could transform the Tenderloin and Mid-Market area, through public art and “civic responsibility”.
Now that building has been sold, for a pretty reasonable price of $200/sq ft in San Francisco’s booming real estate market – the fastest growing market for Class A office real estate in the US in 2012. According to the San Francisco Business Times:
The long-neglected office building at Sixth and Market that houses Burning Man has sold for nearly $17 million, another example of institutional capital pouring into the Mid-Market neighborhood.
image from Playajoy.org
SF Investment LLC, a joint venture between Seattle-based Columbia Pacific Advisors and San Francisco-based Long Market Property Partners, has closed on the acquisition of 995 Market St. The price was just under $200 a square foot.
“We are excited to be purchasing this asset, especially in the midst of all the positive developments taking place in Mid-Market,” said Justin Shapiro, a partner with Long Market Property Partners.
Who are these hedge funds? Did the Burning Man founders cash out of Black Rock City, LLC, and plough the money into real estate developments? We’ll probably never know, as these are private companies.
As might be expected, in 2 years there is no word yet on whether Burning Man has been effective in spreading the Playa gospel to transform inner city San Francisco. Did they create new jobs, foot traffic, and services? I used to live very close to there until quite recently, and trust me, it’s still a shithole. If you ask me, Twitter is more likely to reform the neighborhood than Burning Man. But I still hold out hope that when BMOrg says they will do something, and it will be wonderful, that maybe they will actually do it and it will actually be wonderful. Others, perhaps with an eye on history, might be more cynical…
The International Arts Megacrew is a crew of builders that has earned a massive amount of respect from the citizens of Black Rock City, in particular with the success of their very ambitious and brilliantly executed Temple of Transition in 2011.
The IAM has announced their project for 2013, a mysterious structure called THE CONTROL TOWER. I met with Irish, one of the group’s leaders, to find out more.
Whatsblem the Pro: Welcome back to the States! Tell me about the IAM.
Irish: Thanks. IAM is a loose collective of people from over twenty countries, of which the core group is based in Reno. The crew initially grew from a group that knew each other from working together at the Black Rock International Burner Hostel (BRIBH) camp from around 2005 onwards, particularly members of the leadership team: Kiwi, a master carpenter and general contractor from New Zealand, myself, an artist from Dublin, and Beave, a notorious international man of mystery from England. IAM has since expanded to include many other people, including our architect Ken Rose and a wide diversity of crew from Reno and further afield.
The BRIBH was a camp that sought to provide burners from overseas a means to integrate faster at Burning Man by providing a surrounding community and a shared project – camp construction – for them to get involved in, even in their first year at Black Rock City. Attending Burning Man from overseas is a daunting task, both psychologically and logistically, and the role of the Burner Hostel was to make the journey easier, allowing international participants to spend more energy on really getting stuck into Burning Man while knowing they had a sweet home base to return to whenever they needed. . . and this philosophy of providing accessible experience to international burners continues in our art projects today.
IAM crew distribution — Image: Josh Simmons/IAM media team
The first big project we did, Megatropolis, grew from a whiskey-sippin’ conversation at Kiwiburn 2010 between Kiwi and Otto Von Danger, there at the time to build his Cow with Gun project. Too late to apply for a grant that year, we hustled, begged and borrowed to raise the funds required and drove to the playa on fumes, where, over the course of twelve hotdog-eating days, twenty-five of us managed to pull off a pretty big and popular project. Black Rock FX came in at the end to help us with an epic, pyrotechnics-intensive burn.
Our crew that year included people from New Zealand, Ireland, the UK, Australia, the USA, Hong Kong, Canada and Germany.
Megatropolis went so well that at some point during cleanup, Kiwi jumped to the next logical conclusion: building a Temple.
Megatropolis burning — Photo: Chris ‘Kiwi’ Hankins
This was a very different project – much bigger, far more complex – and being the Temple, required a lot more sensitivity and thought. With a crew that topped out at just under 400 volunteers from over twenty countries at Hobson Square, an awesome warehouse complex on 4th Street in Reno, we spent an extremely intense four months pre-building, then had an even more intense time with the on-playa build. . . so intense that we needed a year off to recuperate in 2012.
The Temple of Transition appeared to be well-liked by the community; afterwards we heard estimates that there were around 45,000 people at the Temple burn, which hopefully means it was a special place for a lot of people and that it performed its intended function effectively. The Temple is a well-understood, well-developed concept that had been explored and clarified over the preceding decade by David Best and other Temple architects and crews, and we tried our best to create and honor that same experience and feeling on our watch.
The IAM’s Temple of Transition, Burning Man 2011 — Photo: Scott London
Whatsblem the Pro:Well done, it was a great Temple.
What is the Control Tower? What does it signify artistically, and what do you hope to achieve with it?
Irish: Where the Temple was serious, the Control Tower is designed to be fun, both for participants to interact with and for us to build!
Sensible grown-ups that we are, we realized that the theme is likely to inspire all manner of bizarre air and space craft, no doubt operated by a babbling smorgasbord of unlicensed, cantankerous, and demented pilots, all buzzing around Spaceport BRC in the most uncontrolled, abstract, and fundamentally irresponsible manner. Very dangerous! Very haphazard! So we figured we’d step up to do our civic duty and provide some modicum of air traffic control, provide landing clearances, define flight paths and so on. . . all of which can only realistically be achieved from sixty feet above the playa, high atop a flaming, laser-shooting Control Tower.
Aside from selflessly providing this vital public service, of course, we wanted to focus on two key principles this year: interactivity and collaboration. So every system on the tower – flames, lasers, lighting, sound – will all be interactive via a number of secret game-like methods which will have to be discovered upon visiting the installation. Many of these systems will be built by a rapidly expanding list of awesome collaborators including UV99, Mischief Lab, BambooDNA, Audiopixel, the Media Architecture Institute, Ideate, Play)a(skool, several 2012 CORE crews, and even some peaceful, softly glowing visitors from the Fractal Planet, so the project is shaping up to be a collaboration of epic proportions. We strongly believe that collaborations yield the best Burning Man projects, so we’re really excited about where the Control Tower project is going to end up by the time we actually get to playa!
The Control Tower. Not pictured: your mind exploding — Image: IAM
Whatsblem the Pro: What is the Org’s involvement in the project? Does it meet your expectations?
Irish: Sadly, we did not get a grant from Burning Man this year, which makes our lives a little more difficult. It’s hard to know exactly why they chose not to support a project that delivers so much interaction, collaboration, visual impact, and fire in a theme-appropriate way. The community as a whole clearly likes the idea very much, as shown by the massive wave of support we’ve experienced in just three short weeks since we launched on Facebook, and since we like those people so much, we HAVE to move ahead, grant or no grant! We built Megatropolis without a grant, so we know it can be done, especially with so much support gathering around the project already.
It’s also important to note that Burning Man supports its artists in more ways than just via grants, and this non-monetary support can be just as – if not more – critical to making a project happen successfully. Now that we have been given a very clear mandate by the community itself to build their Control Tower, it will be interesting to see how the Burning Man Org supports the project as it evolves. The fact of the matter is that we love building awesome projects at Black Rock City, and Burning Man loves awesome projects too, so I’m very hopeful they will work with us closely to ensure the whole community gets to enjoy the full, ridiculous magnificence of the Control Tower.
Whatsblem the Pro: What’s the plan for actually getting it built, and when and where will everything happen?
Irish: Well, we hope to start building in early May at the Generator, a new art space in Sparks, NV. Matt Schultz of the Pier project has very generously offered us space there, and we’re hoping the space will be quite the hive of Burn-related activity for the summer. We’re way into the family vibe that comes from working side-by-side with other projects, and it allows us to share our experience and infrastructure with smaller or less experienced crews. Our actual start date – indeed whether we start at all – will depend a great deal on how fundraising goes over the coming four to six weeks.
Whatsblem the Pro: What does the project need in order to succeed?
Irish: Like any other project, we need to assemble a mixture of four key resources to make the whole thing come to life: materials, funding, people, and clever ideas. We think it’s important to list materials ahead of funding because in the end, funds get used to buy materials anyway, and we really try to find free/cheap/donated material, equipment, and tools rather than spending on new stuff. However, even being super-proactive about using second-hand gear, we still think we need to raise just under $50,000, and we’re going to try to raise at least half of that on Indiegogo.
Equally, if we can come up with clever ways to avoid spending money by finding unexpected solutions to technical or organizational challenges, this helps reduce the fundraising load too, and that’s where the whole community comes in; we are always open to volunteers and new ideas. Across a community as big as Burning Man, we know there are people who have already developed a lot of the solutions we need to make this project go, and we’d love to hear from anyone who wants to get involved!
Whatsblem the Pro: How do people contact you to get involved, and how do they donate?
Irish: The easiest and fastest way to support the project is via our Indiegogo campaign.
We are fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas, an umbrella 501(c)(3) that provides tax-deductible status to qualifying art projects. This means donations of money, materials or equipment to the project are all fully deductible to the extent permitted by law. A list of materials and equipment we need is available here, and we can pick stuff up in both Reno and the Bay Area. We will work with donors to determine a fair valuation of their donations for tax purposes.
To volunteer, collaborate, contribute ideas, or get more info about the project, just visit our Indiegogo page.
