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Most of the structure that has been added since [Burning Man's 1996 revival] feels invisible to the people who come: the streets that are surveyed to be exactly 40 feet wide, the plazas that steer people together without crowding them, the 430 fire extinguishers around town, each tracked by its own QR code.
The goal now, one planner explained to Mr. Romer, is to make Black Rock City just safe enough that people can joke about dying without actually dying.
— The New York Times
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer and The New York Times writer Emily Badger explore the urban economics of Burning Man's Black Rock City while envisioning the potential relevance of the instant-city planning model amid massive, worldwide urbanization. View full entry
Images from this year's Burning Man have emerged! According to the Burning Man official website, "Burning Man is not a festival! It's a city wherein almost everything that happens is created entirely by its citizens, who are active participants in the experience." Whether you plan on... View full entry
Can the relationship between architecture and politics ever be summarized by a well-organized diagram? San Francisco based writer Julia Galef recently offered a proposal on Twitter for distinguishing the four main political groups by their architectural preferences in a familiar format in the... View full entry
As the year comes to a close, the Burning Man Arts festival, one of the biggest events of the year, is already preparing for 2019. Designs for the temple, which is central to the black rock city experience, have been revealed. Picked from a host of submissions for its "elegant simplicity", the... View full entry
While Bjarke Ingels's 30-ton Orb installation–described by some as a giant disco ball—has transfixed many of the festival goers at Burning Man this year, the annual festival saw a slew of spectacular artworks worth checking out. Adhering to the theme of I, Robot, the playa was transformed by... View full entry
Now a global phenomenon, the annual Burning Man festival's biggest allure is the site's complete transformation into a temporary city filled with installations and large-scale constructions that are burned at the end of the week-long event. Grabbing media attention every year, one of 2018's most... View full entry
Bjarke Ingels, along with fellow BIG partner Jakob Lange, are heading to Burning Man this summer with the ORB, a giant reflective ball installation scaled to 1/500,000 of the earth’s surface. With a diameter of nearly 100 ft, the ORB will hover above The Playa, reflecting everything around it... View full entry
A 30m-tall Gothic cathedral built of branches and twigs that was set alight on Saturday (17 February) causing controversy in Russia. The burning took place at Nikola-Lenivets, a rural artists’ colony 200km south of Moscow, and was the culmination of pre-Lenten carnival festivities known as Maslenitsa. The event is often likened to the US Burning Man festival. — theartnewspaper.com
Artist Nikolay Polissky, founder of Nikola-Lenivets, creates impressive land art installations to burn for Russia's Maslenitsa festival each year. This Russian folk tradition is celebrated during the last week before Lent and traditionally ends with the burning of a scarecrow. This year, the... View full entry
Galaxia celebrates hope in the unknown, stars, planets, black holes, the movement uniting us in swirling galaxies of dreams. A superior form of Gaia in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Galaxia is the ultimate network, the fabric of the universe connecting living beings into one entity. — Burning Man Journal
Rejoice burners — the design for the 2018 Temple has been unveiled: 'Galaxia' by London-based French architect Arthur Mamou-Mani. "Galaxia is shaped of 20 timber trusses converging as a spiral towards one point in the sky," describes the Burning Man Journal. "The triangular trusses form... View full entry
Mamou-Mani, the French architect chosen to build the 2018 Burning Man Temple, believes that robots can only further the possibilities in his field, and he plans to enlist the help of a number of robotic tools this year in creating Burning Man's most sacred structure. — Reno Gazette Journal
Burning Man is known for its over-the-top installations and structures that pop up in the middle of the the Nevada desert for a week, one of the most important being the Burning Man Temple. Next year, the temporary structure will be built by the French architect Mamou-Mani along with the help of... View full entry
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. — Wired
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... View full entry
When a group of Burners describing themselves as the Black Rock City Ministry of Urban Planning announced a design competition last fall for a new urban plan for Burning Man, Phil Walker had never given the matter much thought.
“I’m actually not a Burner. I’ve never done it,” says Walker, the senior associate vice president for CallisonRTKL, an architecture firm and design consultancy. “Maybe a bit of vicarious living for a middle-aged suburban dad is what appealed to me.”
— citylab.com
"So Walker didn’t set about to change the orientation of Black Rock City [...] instead, he built out a “kit of parts” for simple streetscape interventions that he says can have a dramatic impact on urban flow and cultural space."Related Burning Man stories in the Archinect news:Rod Garrett... View full entry
For the past several years, tutors Arthur Mamou-Mani and Toby Burgess' University of Westminster design studio DS10 has helped students develop installation designs for Burning Man, many of which have gone on to be realized on the festival's grounds. This year, the parametrically-inspired... View full entry
November 5th marks the celebration of Guy Fawkes day in the U.K., in which bonfires are lit to celebrate the capture of the titular royal traitor and the subsequent preservation of the life of King James I in 1605. Of course, lighting things on fire to commemorate dates isn't limited to the... View full entry
While Burning Man really is a one-of-a-kind, temporary event, there are communities full of similarly minded radical folk across the globe. — ajc.com
Burners 'round the globe will soon make the pilgrimage to Black Rock City, a "temporary metropolis dedicated to art and community" in Nevada's desert. The psychedelic social experiment born of "radical self-reliance" known as Burning Man begins this Sunday, and in its nearly 30-year history has... View full entry
