This Swirling Design Has Been Chosen as Burning Man's 2018 Temple

It'll preside over the festival for nine days before being set alight.
Libby Curran
January 05, 2018

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."

Published on January 05, 2018 by Libby Curran
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