Top Shelter, function, requirements, types

Shelter should protect you from the weather: sun, radiant heat, wind, dust and maybe even rain. Shelter also provides privacy, security and storage for your belongings.

Shelter creates functional space for your playa activities: food preparation and storage, dining, socializing, sleeping, clothes changing, and showering.

It’s easy to ‘get carried away’ with ideas for building shelter. Remember that you *do* have some constraints about how large and how complex a shelter you can build.

To some extent, the size of your shelter is limited by your ability to transport the pieces to the playa. A fairly large shelter can be made with lightweight, easy-to-transport parts, but be careful not to overload your vehicle.

Keep your shelter simple. Don’t overestimate your level of interest in ‘shelter building’. The playa has many distractions: you may not want to spend days erecting a large, complex structure. You want to have time to play, eh? Plan your shelter so that it does not exceed the time, effort, and skills of the humans who will build it.

You’ve heard the warnings about the weather. They are *not* exaggerated. Anchor your shelter well. Here is ‘the word’ from the official Burning Man site:
http://www.burningman.com/preparation/event_survival/securing.html

Playa shelters come in a myriad of sizes and shapes. From ‘ready-to-go’ commercial shade structures and canopies to homemade domes, yurts, fabric tension structures, and endless tarp-and-poles arrangements, the playa has it all.

Whether you buy a commercially made shelter or build your own ‘from scratch’, set it up once at home! A trial run is essential. If there are parts missing or problems with your structure, it will be difficult to fix it on the playa.

There are many, many web sites about how to build playa shelters.https:

On a funny note, if you do a Google search on ‘desert shelter’, you will turn up two main types of links:

1. Links to sites that explain how to build a shelter for Burning Man
2. Links to sites that explain how to survive in the desert after you are forced to camp there by accident such as a plane crash or shipwreck!

Apparently most people don’t camp in the desert ‘on purpose’! What can we learn from this? Most people are missing the experience of a lifetime!

<<< Gunnar built this nice bucky ball dome. The southern side is covered with reflective fabric. Believe it or not, his vehicle is parked *inside* the dome!