Hexayurt Project at Burning Man 2007

Welcome to the Hexayurt Project at Burning Man 2007.

What is a Hexayurt

A [Hexayurt_Project hexayurt] is a shelter I designed for refugees and other people with a small housing budget.

The design is a child of Burning Man experience. Burning Man is what gave me the insight into how important good shelter is. In 2003 I was sick and I wanted to go to Burning Man anyway, because I'm an idiot. I decided to try this crazy little shelter I'd designed for myself and got organized and went. (That's an old site) Since then, the Hexayurt Project has grown leaps and bounds. I've been to the Pentagon, worked with the military, presented to the Red Cross. People love the design because it offers hope for really good long term solutions to global problems without having to sacrifice anything. It's a system that is free/libre - anybody can use it - without patent, without charge. This means you.

Why?

Millions and millions of people do not have proper housing. Designing like you give a damn can help.

Oh, you meant why would you build a hexayurt yourself, for Burning Man? [grin]

That's simple. You get two or even three hours a night more sleep.

That uninhabitable, hostile early morning? 8AM and the tent is heading for solar cooker territory? Gone. You lie blissfully asleep in perfect darkness or lie contemplating how much fun you had last night, and you rest. And then, sometime around noon, maybe you wake up, mist the hexayurt down to cool it off and doze for another fifteen minutes, then get up. Your gear is dust free, and you feel great. And you didn't lug an RV with air conditioning to the Playa. You did it yourself by using smart design and your own two hands to solve the problems, rather than renting a system that you do not control, own or contribute to. RV camping is basically non-participatory.

How?

The basic instructions are super simple.

1. Buy 12 sheets of a suitable 4' x 8' building material, like Thermax
2. Cut six of those sheets in half along the diagonal, three from right to left, three from left to right.
3. Tape the building together by forming the roof from the triangles, and the walls from the six boards you did not cut.

You know the devil's in the details, now don't you?

Hexayurt building is a skill. It is like making a fire or even putting up a tent for the first time. Worse, it is a skill you did not see on TV or in the Spiral Scouts. It is a new skill and not that many people have it.

Certainly it is easier, by far, than making a tent for yourself. You try it once, you understand how it works, off you go. Of all the people who have build Hexayurts, I have not heard of once case of failure to get a decent building out of the process. But how much frustration you have first, and whether you need to go back to the building supply store varies. Choosing the right materials is key.

Building Resources

First thing, watch the videos.

Youtube Hexayurt videos are the place to start.

Let's start with the Constructing a Stretch Hexayurt video. This is nine minutes, a single take, showing me assembling a simple hexayurt. I do not go through every single step but this is a good place to begin to get the general idea of what the construction process looks like. I recommend skipping forward through the slow bits.

People have built hexayurts from this video and not much else and done very nicely. Now we have better instructional materials, but this is a pretty good place to familiarize yourself with the basic approach and concepts.

So now you know what you're getting yourself into. You have to cut some panels, and you have to assemble them on the playa, and the resulting structure has to not blow away.

The Panels

You can see that they are very light, very strong, and very easy to work with. The walls are whole and half 4' x 8' sheets of Tuff-R. Note that the edges of each panel are taped. Tuff-R is dusty, nasty, and at no point to be cut on the playa for it is sacred to the gods of moop, shedding copious amounts of nearly playa colored crap all over the place. This is bad. It is also hairy with fiberglass, dozens of threads per inch of board. You can cut it with a craft knife, or you can cut it with a saw that has an excellent dust collector, but in either case, be aware and take care of your lungs. N95 dust masks and goggles are fine.

Anyway, on the panels, you will see the edges are fully taped. No moop gets out, and no fiberglass makes your fingers itch on the playa after handling the boards. You must do this. This is not something you can skip like you might skip wearing a mask when cutting panels - you'll really be sorry on the playa building one of these things with bare-edges boards grinding fiberglass strands into your skin.

There are two right materials to make Hexayurt panels for Burning Man.

The Dow Route

The first is a Dow insulation product. You can pick Thermax, Tuff-R, Super-Tuff-R os anything else they have at your supply store. They all work more-or-less the same, just some have a thicker, more protective foil surface. You want 1" or thicker, although 1" is just fine.

Pros

Cheap ($15 a sheet approx.) Easy to find. Easy to cut, easy to work with, insulating and robust. A perfect material for the job you want to do in the Black Rock Desert.

Cons

It's basically polystyrene with fiberglass added.

Make no mistake, this stuff is environmentally nasty unless you treat it responsibly and reuse it many, many times.

Now, an aside here. Plastic is, when respected, capable of being a very environmentally friendly material. Tupperware, for instance, does a job that no non-plastic material I'm aware of can: it stores food in a robust, reliable, reusable and sanitary way. Glass breaks in your bag, a thermos is expensive and usually full of something already and is bulky and costs 20 times as much. This is a Good use of plastic, as far as I can tell. A yoghurt container, used once and abandoned, is a bad use of plastic.

So if you're going down the plastic route, be sure that you take good care of your hexayurt, and use it for many years, or pass it on to somebody who will. You can also reuse the insulation board in home construction projects becaue the design specifically tries to keep the buiding materials relatively whole. This is the correct way to bury your hexayurt - in the walls of a building, keeping other people (or yourself) warm and dry in a permanent dwellings.

The Hexacomb Route

Hexacomb is what the first hexayurt ever built was made out of. Hexacomb for the structure, and R+Heatshield as the insulating layer.

This is a pretty damn good solution.

Hexacomb cardboard is a miracle product. It's an inch or more thick and looks a bit like corrugated cardboard, but it is stronger and lighter because instread of little ridges, the interior is filled with hexagonal honeycomb cells. It looks like a bee hive inside. It can be recycled and, for playa use, burned (if you must!.)

It can, however, be tricky to find distributors, and you'll need to coat the hexacomb with something to keep the sunlight and, sometimes, rain off. This route is for engineers. I really like this material, but it's just not as easy to find. My expectation, however, is that if and when we go to mass production of hexayurts, it will be a hexacomb-based board we use to make them. Great stuff.

The Tape

The other material involved in constructing hexayurts is tape. Specifically, 6" wide bidirectional filament tape. In English, that's a six inch wide tape with re-enforcing strands running in both directions, so that it will not break or tear under almost any imaginable circumstance, including howling playa dust storms.

The One True Hexayurt Tape is 3M 8959 at 6" wide.

You will note that 3M does not give you the option to buy it in that width on the web site. I do not know why. I buy the tape from Tapes Unlimited, 1245 Hartrey Ave, Evanston, IL. (847) 866-6060. These very nice people have a warehouse full of tape of all kinds, and excellent prices. They do not have a web site. But they do sell tape and they do know all about hexayurt tape because they've been our primary supplier of the stuff for quite some time. We like them. Buy your tape here if you can.

No, I'm not getting a kick back, they just helped me out on several occasions when I needed to know about tape.

Which Hexayurt?

There are four basic hexayurt sizes [Google SketchUp models] which cover a variety of needs. In 2006 the models we recommended that people build were the smaller two. You can see the somewhat basic instructions we provided last year on Appropedia.

Given that the smaller buildings went up quite nicely, and the experimental large hexayurts we built at Burning Man last year were a roaring success, this year it's time to build the One True Hexayurt - the 8'.

Why is the 8' hexayurt the One True Hexayurt?

The answer is simple. It has by far the best ratio of strength to price of materials and utility of the final building. It's the best hexayurt I know how to build. Elegant, stable, cheap per square foot and requiring no ladders or other trickery to erect. The 6' Hexayurt is good for one person, and very cramped for two. The 6' Stretch is cosy for two, but provides little storage or room for people to socialize in your cool, dust-free place. The 12' hexayurt is pushing the envelope on 1" Tuff-R rather further than I am comfortable advising for Playa use. Therefore, this year, the Hexayurt To Build is the 8'.

There are two ways of bulding the 8' hexayurt - the standard form, and the Anwar Door (names after its creator) form. The Anwar Door is nice in that it gives you a full head-height walk-in hexayurt and more space to stand up at full height inside, but it is also quite difficult to get right under Playa conditions. Unfortunately, I do not have a good picture of a regular 8' hexayurt because all the stills were taken at demonstrations where we built the Anwar Door model so that people could walk in and out without stooping. So what we'll be building is hexayurts just like the ones in that picture but with a door cut in the side.

Global Impact

More than a billion people do not really have good housing. It not that they do not want a good place to live but they often simply cannot find one they can afford. They do not have access to modern buliding materials, and local materials are often really unsuited for building. Europeans used to thatch their roofs and now we mostly use tiles and shingles because we prefer the results.

Indiginous people are much like us. Yes, there are cultural differences, but for the most part, they like to be warm, dry and well-fed. If you go to Burning Man and the hexayurt is a good shelter for you, consider helping us develop and test the hexayurt until it is polished and ready to be made available globally.

[mailto:hexayurt@gmail.com>Vinay Gupta</a>

Additional Resources

If you want to know more about the long term strategy for solving
global problems including poverty and global warming, you might want
to read <a href= The Unplugged.]