FABRICATION

Fabrication lead Michelangelo Passalalpi describes the process behind Sanctuary this way: “It’s like building a house that’s not just made of wood, but steel. For example, every screw had to be threaded through the steel and capped. There were no freebies — we had to make everything.”

Luckily, Passalalpi has both an individual history with projects like this, and a family history. He comes from a family of Italian architects; his father is a home designer and builder who’s been in the Burning Man community since 1997, and his dad is also one of the past superintendents for Burning Man’s Department of Public Works. Passalalpi has been doing custom DJ booths, stages, and backdrops for many years, such as those for Galactic Jungle Camp. He calls Sanctuary “an engineering marvel.”

Building An Engineering Marvel

Like all team leads on Sanctuary, Passalalpi is quick to thank his crew. The Fabrication team pulled unusually long shifts: “We were the only people there literally every day from 9am to 6, 7, or 8pm over the course of two years. In fact, there was a month when I made my build crew work ten-hour days, twenty-one days straight. Everyone had to be one million percent in.”

“We knew this wasn’t a run-of-the-mill project. We all pushed ourselves to do the best we could. If something was a flub, we didn’t just go with it; we remade it, because we wanted everything to be as perfect as we could make it.”  

Everything in Sanctuary’s construction had to integrate with everything else: the façade had to integrate with the speakers, the LEDs, and so on.

“It was such a long process, with so much detail and so much nerve-wracking tedium, there was no way to mail it in,” Passalalpi says. “It was a slow juggernaut. Every day I would walk around the vehicle and go through my mental checklist of: this got done today; this still needs to get done; this part needs to come off so the sound can get built in next week. It was a massive jigsaw puzzle of timing and coordination.”

Yet even with all the effort, Passalalpi also talks about how exhilarating and beautiful the final results were. “It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, but it all hit home and was worth it to me on Sunday at the event, in line at the Department of Mutant Vehicles” — the day Sanctuary got its license to drive at Burning Man.