by Alexander Rose

Officially selected design for Burning Man 2026. The post below has been adapted from my original proposal. It follows our 2025 Burning Man installation, the Clarisse McClellan Manual for Civilization Library.

The Axis Mundi is the place where worlds meet: root and crown, earth and sky, body and spirit. It is not a monument imposed from above, or a pedestal for a hero, but a living alignment revealed through participation. The Cryptomeria Man Base becomes this meeting point. An unfinished gesture. A structure that asks to be completed by many hands. Its roots invite the city to kneel, gather, and build outward together; its spiraling stairways draw bodies upward and inward, tracing the ancient helix that binds our genetic material, the past to future, and self to collective.

This design is inspired by one of the oldest and most mysterious trees on Earth: the Jōmon Sugi Cryptomeria of Japan. Visitors will arrive through a pathway of meandering roots, ascend an outer helical staircase nearly sixty feet to the base of the Man, while a second spiral descends down the center, forming the double helix of DNA, and providing a continuous flow of travel. Together, these paths establish a vertical maypole, an axis around which the city symbolically turns.

When the structure burns, fire will both consume and reveal. The visible form will collapse, exposing the invisible center that we have been orbiting all along. Through flame, dust, and intention every participant will stand aligned at the heart of the world we have all created together.

Materials and Considerations:

Materials: As I know the Man Base team aspires to use as much reclaimed wood as possible, this too would be my hope. However the design is such that it could be made from a mix of new dimensional lumber (especially for the critical structural elements) with the outer cladding and root structure made from as much used, reclaimed and donated lumber as feasible.

Double Staircases: I think it is critical for flow that there are separate ways up and down. There are a number of ways to achieve this, and there are several great double helical staircase designs that range in difficulty of execution that I am happy to discuss with the design team.

Community Build Consideration: I realize that the option of having the community extend the ground based root structure will have management, material and methodological challenges. But just about every camp at the Burn brings some kind of tools and lumber. This effort could be as simple as creating a known perimeter and asking people to bring their own excess lumber and screw it in place based on some simple organic principles. But as an event that asks that everyone be a participant, what could create more ownership than to have at least had the option to help build the man himself?

The Burn: The burn is not an afterthought to this work. Cryptomeria is conceived as a piece of fire art as much as it is a sculptural and experiential work. Fire art remains one of Burning Man’s most distinctive cultural contributions: engineered, intentional, elemental, and inseparable from our unique community.

The Cryptomeria “Red Cedar” of Japan may be the oldest living non-clonal tree on the planet, as one particular tree Jōmon Sugi has an estimated age of over 7,000 years (almost two millennia older than the oldest Bristlecone Pine). It gets its name from the Latin meaning “hidden parts” (as the male and female parts of the tree are obscured). It also hides its age as the center hollows out over time, creating an inner temple space, but erasing the rings that allow for accurate dating. Japanese Shinto belief holds that all things have a spirit, and this is especially true of their ancient trees.

Artist Biography: Alexander Rose (Zander)

Alexander Rose has been finding ways to merge art, engineering and culture for most of his life. Alexander grew up in a junkyard on the Sausalito waterfront where he began building and designing at a young age. He went through design school at Carnegie Mellon and Art Center, and attended his first Burning Man event shortly after in 1996. Alexander has worked on or led projects at Burning Man that include the Manual For Civilization library at the Man Base in 2025, the Shackleton theme camp in 2019 and 2022, and the ICP “Fire Symphony” with Jim Mason and Dave X from 1999-2001. He was interviewed by Stuart Mangrum in 2025 for the Burning Man Live podcast, and also interviewed Larry Harvey for his 2014 Long Now talk.

Alexander and the team at Long Now have built micro-etched language archives to last thousands of years that have landed on a comet and the moon. He and his team have built combat robots that have won over six world championship titles appearing in the hit TV show BattleBots.

Professionally Zander was the founding director of The Long Now Foundation from 1997-2023, and he continues to complete The Clock of the Long Now with Danny Hillis, a 10,000 Year monument scale Clock designed as an icon to long-term thinking. He is currently researching the stories and lessons behind the world’s longest-lived organizations for his up-coming book Forever Inc. (working title). Alexander Rose is now the Director of Long-term Futures at Automattic where he recently developed the 100 Year Plan and Domain. More about Alexander can be found at https://rosefutures.com/.

This proposal was done with my mother Annette Rose while she was in the last month of her life. It was a welcome distraction for us both during this time and I am ever grateful for her creativity and tenacity.  My wife Jessica Rose also helped greatly with this proposal, especially in the final edit of the text.  She creates magic with everything she touches.