STRUCTURAL

Sanctuary’s construction lead, Chase Putnam, is a mechanical engineer who spent over a year overseeing the project. As Putnam puts it, “Sanctuary is a 48-foot long, 27-foot tall, thirty-thousand-pound cathedral built on an F750 long-frame truck. It doesn’t spend all its time that size, though…”

Putnam and the rest of the Sanctuary team defeated a lot of logistical hurdles to make it happen, ranging from safety to storage to legal concerns.

Challenges of a Cathedral On Wheels

“When we first began the design phase of the project,” says Putnam, “the F750 truck had already been purchased. So we started by basing all of the mechanical design around integrating to the existing chassis.”

In order to legally drive to Burning Man, Putnam knew it had to be possible to break down the whole project to fit road-legal dimensions. Specifically, Sanctuary had to be able to become 40′ long, 14′ tall, and 102″ wide. Otherwise, it would have needed wide load permits to get from the Bay Area to the playa.

In the first few months of the project, a tube steel and sheet metal modular frame was modeled to meet that size. Then the team had to ensure that all major components — from the speakers, to the pyro system that spat fire, to the lights and lasers, to the generator that powered it all — fit inside the frame, so that the outside could be covered in art.

For safety’s sake, the weight of all combined components had to stay within the payload capacity of the truck. The number of people allowed on board was capped at 30, and exits had to be designed such that everyone could get off easily in case of emergency.

And finally, Putnam says, he wanted to be sure that Sanctuary “wouldn’t break… ever.”

Each part of Sanctuary’s system is detailed further on this website, with each page listing the top-quality components and careful labor that made it possible.