Overview
It's not often you get a group of designers competing to have their work set alight. But then again, being chosen as the creator of that iconic Temple — or, The Man — at Nevada's legendary Burning Man festival is a very unique sort of honour.
This year, bragging rights go to Arthur Mamou-Mani from London's Mamou-Mani Architects, whose spiralled structure Galaxia beat out a swag of other entries to become the next edition of the festival's most famed installation. It was selected this week by the Burning Man Arts organisation.
The Temple has been a Burning Man tradition since 2000, picking a different large-scale art work each year. Towering over the festival's centre in the temporary locale of Black Rock City, it's inscribed with personal messages from festival-goers and then ritually burned to the ground on the final day.
Mamou-Mani's take on the project is an enormous, swirling design, made from twenty triangular timber trusses that form paths into the structure's centre, where there'll lie a huge 3D mandela. Word is, it's inspired by the fictional planet Gaia, from Isaac Asimov's Foundation's Edge series of sci-fi novels, with the architect saying it "celebrates hope in the unknown, stars, planets, black holes, the movement uniting us in swirling galaxies of dreams."