Archimedes Design Burning Man Trip 2014, Prt 1
All photographs by Toby Vann.
Alright, so it's about time I got my act in gear and talked about what I did with my summer, which was a HUGE adventure, and I'm still processing even now.
I had an internship with this AMAZING company called
, a new startup that has developed a revolutionary new way to build simple and easily installed domes for festivals and events.
This company totally has my heart. As a long time member of the festival culture, I have installed MORE than my fair share of geodesic domes, and normally they are HORRIBLE to put together. These guys however, have developed a new and easy way for these domes to go up. Instead of bolting all the pieces together, this dome is held together through a harness system, making these domes, even the largest models, go up in under an hour. Genius.
"Toby Vann and Michael Gates have been building temporary and permanent structures for over ten years.
In 2012 they accepted a challenge to build a better mouse trap: long time participants of the Burning Man festival, they wanted to eliminate many of the hassles associated with traditional methods of dome construction.
During the winter of 2013, they developed the Hub & Harness Network. Borrowing from Buckminster Fuller, they used elements of geodesic and tensegrity principles to create their unique, truncated icosahedral domes.
In August 2013, they premiered the prototype dome, named the Archimedes Basket, at Burning Man to test their theories. This crowd-funded project was wildly successful, and paved the way for Archimedes Design, portable dome systems.
In September 2013, they received an Editor's Choice award at Maker Faire NYC. In May 2014, at Maker Faire San Mateo, they launched their company Archimedes Design ."
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Last summer, I was invited to work with this company during their product launch year. Not only did I get to help build and create these amazingly designed products, I was also invited to join them on an incredible cross-country journey from New York to Nevada, to ship and install domes for clients at the Burning Man festival. It was truly a mind-blowing journey.
In June of last year, a team of us was assembled in Brooklyn to begin manufacturing client orders to be delivered in August.
We spent our time cutting down pipes, pressing them, drilling and assembling hubs, sewing up star shades and shade tents, working out some design kinks and producing domes domes domes!
More on that process
.
By the first week of August we were ready to start our great dome adventure! We packed up all our gear, assembled all the orders, and braced ourselves to spend 24 hours a day with each other for over a month.
We loaded the beautiful sparkly new trailer, and the five of us packed ourselves into the truck for the long drive from New York to Nevada.