We installed our first Pipe Dream at Burning Man
2011, where about 5000[1] happy monkeys
climbed all over it and made us proud. Some people did crazy acrobatic stunts,
dawn katas or poetic yoga poses, while others just hung around and enjoyed the
view. One woman told us it was the first thing she'd felt comfortable climbing
in twelve years at the festival. A dapper gentleman from the Necklace Factory
gave us an award proclaiming us "on the edge of now".
We had some accidents, but nobody got badly hurt. We made a bunch of mistakes, some of them pretty dumb in retrospect. And we also had a more stressful time organizing our camp than in past years. This was a complex project for a group of our size and (in)experience. Now that we've done it, though, future years will be easier.
I could write at great length about our Burning Man experience, and evidently I did. But here I've highlighted some especially salient parts. You may find less salient experiential tapas[2] below.
Construction. Modular design made the pipe dream easy to transport, build, and tear down. Not including the platforms, it packed flat onto four palettes, three for pipes and one for a 50-gallon drum full of fittings. Our four 4 ft. sq. lumber platforms needed an exact fit, so we built them ahead of time and transported them assembled. But somehow they ended up with our personal stuff, and consumed an implausible amount of volume for four theoretically flat objects.
Pre-measuring and marking tubes and attaching some fittings ahead of time sped things up a lot. Keeping track of parts on site was easy, because there were only two types of fittings through most of the structure and a few precut tube lengths to sort. We did have trouble understanding our own diagram, once we found it, even though it was a big glossy color printout. But we basically built what we were planning to.
The only tool we needed was a socket wrench, so we got eight. No build step required heavy machinery, and no guying was necessary; it balanced as it went up. We built using coordinated lifts with a rope, which most of the crew practiced during our test builds. Check out this timelapse build movie to see how this went.
Help from our friends. Some of our crew got sick or were unable to lift, but friends from other camps came to the rescue. Our neighbors at Fandango used their mighty homemade crane to lift three of our platforms, which was easier than hoisting them up with rope. Our friend, ranger and man of the west Matty G was indispensible.
Interaction. The 2 ft. staggered strut spacing fit climbers well, since it was reasonably open but made it hard to get stuck without a foothold. Our tower platforms were popular vista points. I'm also glad we put Pipe Dream on our doorstep, rather than somewhere out in the deep playa. We spent many an afternoon sitting in camping chairs watching people climb, and this brought a lot of amazing people in for friendly chats.
It was such a joy to see people play on our project. I thought we were bringing something complete on its own, an object we made to share. But I realized that it was unfinished, and did not come alive until people started moving around and through it. The interaction was the art.
Conditions. Playa conditions were ideal. We were placed on dry, level, hard pack soil instead of loose sand, and saw little rain. This was pure luck. We could easily have been stuck in a sand trap or a mire. And while we weren't the tallest thing around, the thought of pipe dream getting struck by lightning gave me goosebumps.
Feet. We bought some cheap 2 in. sq. metal plates from the hardware store which we spread out in a grid pattern, so that each column rested on one. This helped to keep our columns from digging into the ground.
Railings. The hand railings at the top of our towers made them feel safer to stand on. It's debatable whether they helped structurally, but they were a good call aesthetically.
Insurance. We did end up buying a liability policy from Heffernan Insurance Brokers, which is the same company that insures the event. Although we didn't have to use it, I'm glad that we had it, as there were enough problems that could have turned out worse than they did.
Tear down accident. One of our campmates got clocked by a falling pipe during tear down. This happened when we lowered a corner column with struts sticking out at right angles. Someone mistakenly loosened the fittings on the column, so the struts were free to fall out when the corner came down.
Fortunately, she was wearing a pith helmet, which took most of the blow. Also she was a neurologist and understood head injuries. She was unhurt, but the pith helmet had a sizeable impact crater. We got super lucky here.
Platforms. A platform fell through its diagonal after it got kicked up from beneath. Fortunately nobody was on it or under it, but this scared the crap out of us. We took the platforms down, and it took a while to recover enough to deal with the problem.
We made our tower platforms from 1× lumber nailed to two 2×4s, and installed them by resting them on some pipes at the perimeter of each tower. We knew that squares fall through their diagonals, but thought this couldn't happen in pipe dream.
This was especially jarring because we'd actually talked about tying the platforms down, and decided it was unnecessary. Someone had suggested the wind could pick them up, which would have been a similar type of failure. We should have erred on the side of caution.
Inspecting the platforms, I also noticed that one 2×4 joist had split from nailing. We repaired the platforms with scavenged and spare parts, put them back up, and lashed them down securely. That worked well enough to get us through the week but was not ideal.
Tightening. The entire structure was undertightened for the first few days it was up. No fittings slipped, but several were loose when we checked. This happened because eight different people tightened different sections without a clear idea of the right torque. After we went over the structure and systematically tightened each joint, it became viscerally more stable. It even made a more solid noise when tapped.
Shipping delays. Due to a backlog at
NIMBY, our load was three days late
getting to the playa. This sucked since the pipe dream load also had some tubes
for our habitat, so we were missing shade and were crunched into too little
space for a few stressful days. At least we planned for this contingency, and
took most of our living stuff separately, unlike one poor guy in another camp
who spent a week waiting for his toothbrush.
It worked out ok, and I'm still grateful we didn't have to drive a 24 ft. flatbed up a treacherous desert highway whose margins are strewn with the rusty carcases of errant U-Hauls. But it did suck having our project in an unknown state, waiting for pockets of clean cell phone reception to call in and ineffectually badger people in Oakland.
Slide. A friend of ours had a 20 ft. long, 4 ft. diameter corrugated plastic sewer pipe and wanted somewhere to mount it as a slide. Being friendly, we half-committed to attaching it to the side of pipe dream. The trouble was we'd never tried it, and had no idea how it would look or behave. When all the pieces were in place on the playa, I really just didn't want it. I thought it was ugly, and I wasn't sure it'd work.
There was a little on-playa drama about this, but my veto stuck. The slide went up at a nearby dome instead. Actually someone ended up breaking their ankle because the landing wasn't padded enough, so maybe it was for the best we said no. Saying no is always hard for me, but I could've been more graceful about it. I felt bad about the personal dynamics of how this worked out.
The chandelier. Pipe dream was lit by a custom 4 ft. LED chandelier we designed at the last minute. It ended up looking beautiful, and held up fine in some non-trivial winds. But I was unhappy about how it came together in thirty hectic hours the weekend before we left, and how that resulted in some personal drama between my campmates.
It got put off for too long. The working design involved a bunch of
clear plastic takeout containers that were to be epoxied together. I think that
would have looked good had it come together, but the pieces weren't sticking
properly. The artist in charge of the project was busy and Igor and I
substituted to be sure it got done. With tensions running high, this resulted
in some nasty arguments I wish we hadn't had.
General tensions. Tensions and tempers were running high. We were all sleep-deprived and haggard leading up to early arrival. And after pipe dream was up, I was so terrified that someone was going to get hurt that I had trouble sleeping. One night I thought I heard screaming, so I jumped out of my hammock and ran to the structure convinced that someone must've fallen. But it was just some random yelling from across the playa.
For me, having so little time to get to trust this thing that thousands of people were crawling around on was emotionally draining. A spreadsheet and a couple parking lot tests did not ease my anxiety much. I guess now that we've done it and understand how it behaves, it'll be less stressful next time.
Hard hats. After the pith helmet incident at burning man 2011, we ordered a dozen lovely pink hard hats.
Better platforms. Our platforms needed a rethink; we've redesigned them.
Safety checks. We needed to be a lot more disciplined about safety during construction. We now check tightness before a lift or drop, and always secure a rope before doing it. Someone always has the job to stay on the ground and pay attention to what's being done or undone.
We also make a point of going over the structure and tightening it before we walk away from construction. No brainers, really.
Keep calm and carry on. The fact is, there will always be problems, and you need level-headed people to stay calm, be creative and fix them. Given all the stuff that goes on at burning man, that's no small feat.
I mean, nothing makes arranging large pieces of steel easier and safer than being sleep-deprived, variously intoxicated with raging hormones in a place that's actively trying to kill you. Actual sleep, exercise, meditation, water and non junk-food might help, or failing that, maybe like a cat nap and some Yani. That's right, Yani. You have to stay in the Yani tent until you calm the f down. There might be some Geneva convention issues but we can work on that. I don't know, this is a hard problem.
We decided to build basically the same design for burning man 2012, modulo some fixes. We might also do some other installations. After all one of the main goals was to design something we could reuse and expand on in future years.
I am really glad I did this. We will surely design different sculptures and installations in the future, but this first one was charming.
Welcotar was supposed to sit around with a clicker and count, but he's a lazy drunk so instead I have to do hand-wavy math. Pipe dream was up for 7 days which is 168 hours. At peak it held about 20 people at a time for 15 minutes each, so about 80 per busy hour. Off-peak it was more like 10 or 20 per hour. The only dead time was early morning, about four hours. So let's say 168 × (10/24 × 80 + 10/24 × 10 + 0) = 6300.
However there were a lot of repeat visitors. Our friends hung around a lot, and many people came back, except for that exceptionally hot guy who was totally into me who I will never see again. My god I can't believe what an idiot I am, I should so have flaked on my friends and run off with him to his friend's fish car.
