by Whatsblem the Pro

The Temple of Whollyness – Rendering by Gregg Fleishman

With David Best out of the picture for 2013, there’s been a lot of anticipation over who will build the Temple this year. There’s even been talk of more than one Temple being built; one prominent industrial arts crew has been seriously considering building their own design without funding from the Org.

Today, the honorarium grant for the 2013 Temple was awarded to the Otic Oasis‘ triumvirate of Gregg Fleishman, Melissa ‘Syn’ Barron, and Lightning Clearwater III, who will build their “Temple of Whollyness” with labor courtesy of the Otic Oasis crew.

Syn, Gregg, and Lighting – Photo by Tedshots

USC-educated architect Gregg Fleishman has been exploring the possibilities of interlocking slotted plywood for many years. Working out of his studio in Culver City, California, he creates elegant decorative furniture, model vehicles and other sculptures, and full-sized structures, all with no metal fasteners or joints. Fleishman works miracles out of single sheets of plywood, crafting compound curves from flat-cut material. Some of his pieces even incorporate wooden springs and hinges. His “SCULPT C H A I R S” are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Yale University Art Gallery, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Not surprisingly, Fleishman expressed an interest in sacred geometry when we spoke. The concept goes back at least 3,000 years, to the time when King Solomon reportedly built his Temple on Mt. Zion to house the Ark of the Covenant. Solomon, so the story goes, received his blueprints directly from God, and his Temple was designed as a sort of architectural wave guide in which the God of the Hebrews would resonate harmonically, the way an untouched string on a guitar will vibrate when an adjacent string is plucked at the same note.

Photo by Gregg Fleishman

The 2013 Temple design is highly geometrical, and will be built using Fleishman’s patented connectors at each joint, capitalizing on the intrinsic strength of the arch at every opportunity in an interlocking jigsaw of triangles and pyramids. No nails, screws, or other metal connectors will be used at all. The gross form of the Temple will consist of a large central trussed pyramid, sixty-four feet tall and eighty-seven feet square, with four smaller satellite pyramids measuring twenty feet tall and twenty-nine feet at the base, intricately interlocked and ornamented in Fleishman’s signature style: Archimedes, Pythagoras, and R. Buckminster Fuller holding hands and enjoying some really good acid.

Birch Car – Photo by Gregg Fleishman

The Otic Oasis, a “wilderness outpost” intended to serve as Black Rock City’s equivalent of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, debuted in 2011 and returned in 2012, providing a much-needed respite from Black Rock City’s continuous sound. There won’t be an Otic Oasis this year, as the crew will be busy with the Temple of Whollyness, but look for the Oasis’ return in 2014. As the city grows and becomes noisier, Otic Oasis is an increasingly vital resource for the dazzled and overstimulated among us, or for those of us who just want to connect with the spartan beauty and enchanting ambience of the desert.

The group also built the ‘Pistil’ sculpture inside the Man base in 2012.

‘Pistil’ – Photo by Gregg Fleishman