After a successful installation at Burning Man 2011, our friends from Langton labs asked us to bring pipe dream to their Halloween party. We had a great time building out a new design there with a lot of help from the creative Langtonians, and it was a big hit, as you can see in this timelapse video of the party.
The venue was the Langton labs garage. The space looked big at first, with plenty of floor space and tall ceilings. They even had a roll down door with convenient access to an alley for loading.
When we measured it though, we found the roof was under 16 ft. in most places over the dance floor. Since our burning man design was 21 ft. tall at the corners, we needed to do something different. And actually, with shelves, furniture, fixed lumber platforms and loose storage to work around in the garage, we had a fairly tight fit. Working indoors gave us a new sense of pipe dream's scale.
One thing we worried about was how people would interact with the structure indoors. On the playa, pipe dream was self-limiting. People tended to spread out, or if it seemed crowded, fewer would climb on. In an enclosed space with nowhere else to go, hundreds of people were going to hang around on it wherever they could fit. That would create a very different dynamic load. Also, I worried that random drunk partygoers in costumes with a lot of loose fabric would be at more falling risk than self-reliant half-naked burners.
So we needed shorter columns, a wider base of support, and more connected flat areas. We also needed an improved platform design, and wanted to try out some alternative spacing ideas. And we wanted to work mostly with the parts we had around from burning man.
At first I was worried about load balancing and crowd control and thought we should just make an elevated floor with some climbing towers, but Igor and the Langtonians thought that was too boring. They really wanted to fill the space and have a three-dimensional party. So instead, I started thinking about pyramids, which are a pretty stable shape.
As I played with pyramidal designs, I was inspired by the Fantasia Night on Bald Mountain rendition, and got to thinking about volcanos with irregular, sometimes stark slopes. We actually put a dry ice machine on top of the structure, but it overheated before the party, which was probably for the best.
The perimeter columns of the volcano were 7 ft. tubes from our burning man shade structure, which was just high enough for walkways connecting with the fixed platforms in the garage. Transitioning to the interior, we stacked 7 ft. and 4 ft. tubes (instead of using solid 11 ft. pipes), then stepped up to solid 16 ft. lengths in the center.
We also experimented with 5 ft. vertical gaps between struts at some places. Predictably, this made the structure harder to climb than our burning man design, but it also provided more access and clearance beneath platforms, provided an interesting challenge to compensate for less height, and directed climbers toward the center.
On the playa, we built out and up from the center of pipe dream. We marked out a reasonable boundary square with 21' tubes, then made an X between the corners with taut string and marked the center point. We made sure the center of our center tower ended up at that point. It wasn't the end of the world if we were off by ten degrees or a foot.
At Langton, we had a tight 20'×20' area to fit and all kinds of clearance issues. The final structure came within an inch of a couple obstacles. Also the center was now the tallest part, rather than a seed, which made it hard to build up as the first tower. And where we easily had a 20 ft. margin to lay things down and lift straight up on the playa, we had to do a lot of manuevering and rotation at Langton.
We contemplated a different build pattern, but decided working out from the center was still best for balance and access. Igor and I spent about two hours measuring, re-measuring, marking with tape, and checking, and I still think we got lucky that the final alignment fit so perfectly. Like, we were an inch from an electrical outlet on the ceiling at one point.
The floor was totally uneven, sloping and undulating maybe five degrees. We shimmed some of the columns with scrap steel, which helped a bit, but mostly we just lived with the sag. The fittings had enough give that the struts did not need to be perfectly parallel, and the appearance was not too bad. The planted columns still bore the load just fine.
Marking the pipes and attaching all the fittings was slow and tedious as usual. Since this was a new design, we needed to re-mark many of our burning man pipes. Now they are all rulers with sharpie marks every foot, which should be general enough for anything we want to do with them in the future, except maybe making a 20 ft. articulated Strandbeest.
The Langtonians were really awesome about installing platforms and rope netting all over the place on the structure, so there was no tower you could fall from without getting caught by something. Although it was less open for climbing than the BM design, this also looked and felt really good for hanging out. The rope netting in particular was a nice touch, though not as comfy as a platform for chilling.
Probably the biggest improvement was the platforms. We just used U-bolts to strap thick planks to our struts in places where we wanted people to be able to stand. This meant we didn't have to cover entire 4 ft. sq. columns, and could easily leave holes for climbing up and down.
I was a little worried at first that the U-bolts we got weren't deep enough, but actually it worked out great having ones that didn't completely clear the surface of the planks. That way we were able to drill and sink the bolt heads inside the planks, so nobody got cut on those.
Construction and tear down went really smoothly thanks to a lot of hands on deck. Here's a timelapse of the tear down, which you can watch backwards to see approximately how we put it up.
It was a lot of fun to bring this stuff back to San Francisco and share it with more of our friends. Burning man experience doesn't always translate to the real world. Actually it usually doesn't, in my experience anyway. But this was really great, and opened some doors in my mind about doing this kind of art in more general settings.