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The urban planning of Burning Man

2017-08-30T16:55:00-04:00

In a moment when the powers at be can't even fund the country’s shambling roads and bridges, the 2,000 organizers and volunteers who run Burning Man put together—and then take apart—a 70,000-person city in the space of two months.

As Burning Man is taking it's 31st annual round, Wired takes a look at how the famed festival occupies the land of the Black Rock Desert. While temporary and free of the bounding presence of permanent residents and buildings, it nevertheless bares some resemblance to a city. Springing out of nothing-ness with no need for professional builders, the settlement still conforms to some rules—the Bureau of Land Management has had a firm hand in guiding Burning Man since the mid 90's, imposing the basic half-moon grid layout, developing plans to deal with sanitation, emergency services, security, camping, traffic, parking, water, food supplies, communication, lasers, and fire. In the event of bad weather or 'social' unrest the Bureau will step in again.

Image via commons.wikimedia.org

Black Rock City has essentially built up its own bureaucracy—the Nevada Department of Transportation helps the 70,000 attendees get in and out of the site and the Department of Public Works paints, welds, re-...

Patrik Schumacher lays out his dreams for 'Parametricism 2.0,' post-Zaha

2016-10-27T13:45:00-04:00

He calls critics “dismissive” and “disdainful.” He accuses architects of “misguided political correctness,” and says they are guilty of “confusing architecture and art.” Schumacher has turned his criticism on his own practice, rolling out plans for what he calls “Parametricism 2.0,” to better address the human factors like productivity, social interaction, culture, and well-being that detractors used to say Hadid ignored. “I have to step up,” Schumacher says. “I will build my own star power.”

Bjarke Ingels wants to "make the world of the future more like our dreams”

2015-05-13T10:21:00-04:00

Striking a balance between Steve Jobs’ product-launching gravitas and the bounding playfulness of a TED-talker, Bjarke Ingels presented a summary of his firm’s work on social infrastructure at the WIRED Business Conference in New York on Tuesday. Instead of displaying static plan sections and a PowerPoint from the last presidential administration, Ingels peppered his talk with creative imagery and a three minute, bass-groove laden video (replete with jaunty squiggle-style animations over live people) illustrating the underlying concepts of “The Dryline.”

The projects that Ingels briefly highlighted, including the Danish National Maritime Museum, the Hellerup Gymnasium, and the Vancouver House all explored how to integrate and amplify the social dynamics of a given space by encouraging greater connectivity among likely inhabitants. This was done in some places by innovatively inverting expectations of what a space should be (converting a dock into a museum, for example) or by creating...

Wired gets Snøhetta, SHoP and SOM to push the limits of LEGO

2013-10-31T12:33:00-04:00

After a freewheeling round of discussions, Snøhetta’s New York office settled on a unique challenge: building a Lego structure that captured the plastic bricks’ unique relationship to gravity. “A Lego building has a lightness that a real building doesn’t have to contend with,” says Craig Dykers, Snøhetta’s co-founder. “We thought wouldn’t it be interesting to capture the feeling of gravity in a Lego block, where gravity actually has very little influence in many ways on its structure...”

Snohetta found a delicate equilibrium with this boomerang-shaped tower. Photo: Gregory Reid

SOM froze its unique LEGO infrastructure in a solid block of ice. Photo: Zack Burris

Your One-Stop Shop for Hidden Stairways and Secret Crypts

2011-05-04T17:28:22-04:00

If you want to lace your house with cool hidden passages, you can’t simply add hinges to a bookcase and shout, “To the Batmobile!” You have to account for shelf sag, and you have to build something sturdy enough to work hundreds of thousands of times. “My history in robotics helps,” says Steve Humble, founder of Creative Home Engineering—the only company dedicated to making hidden rooms and secret doors.