Burning Man 2012 has come and gone, but one structure from that year’s Black Rock City still gets passed around more than almost anything else the festival has produced: the Temple of Juno. Since 2000, a new temple has risen in the same spot on the playa every year and burned to the ground on the festival’s final night — a tradition that has become one of the most affecting pieces of temporary architecture anywhere in the world, precisely because it isn’t built to last. The 2012 structure was designed by sculptor David Best, the artist most responsible for the Temple’s existence in the first place, and named for the Roman goddess of protection and the state — an odd, fitting title for a building whose entire purpose is to hold a week’s worth of grief and then let it go up in smoke.
Reminiscent of a pagoda, the temple wasn’t especially large, but the eye-warping detail and craftsmanship were extraordinary — built from a reported few hundred thousand individually cut wooden pieces, laser- and CNC-machined into lace-like screens and stacked into tiered rooflines that peaked in a single needle-thin spire. Lit at night, it glowed like a piece of honeycomb rising out of the dark desert. It’s the sort of place photographs will never fully capture, but the images below — gathered from Flickr by various, excellent photographers — get closer than most. Click through for a better look at the detail.
David Best built his first temple almost by accident. In 2000, a member of his crew, Michael Hefflin, died in a motorcycle accident days before the event, and the half-finished structure became an impromptu shrine to him rather than simply a sculpture. What happened next surprised even Best: strangers who had never met Hefflin began leaving their own notes, photographs, and small offerings inside it. That accidental function — a place to grieve in public, anonymously, among strangers — has defined every Temple since. While the rest of Black Rock City is loud, costumed, and celebratory, the Temple is the one place on the playa where the mood turns hushed. People write the names of the dead directly onto the wooden walls, tape up photographs, leave letters they were never able to send. For one week a year, it becomes one of the most sincere structures ever built.
And then, at the close of the week, it all burns. Unlike the raucous bonfire that consumes the festival’s namesake Man a night earlier, the Temple burn is nearly silent — tens of thousands of people standing in the dark, watching a year’s worth of grief go up in flame and settle back onto the desert floor as ash. By the next morning, the spot where the Temple of Juno stood is simply open playa again, waiting for whatever gets built there next.
Burning Man 2012, Aerial, overview from ZM Interactive on Vimeo.
