Doug Ruuska – Cosmic Praise – 2014

Cosmic Praise is a climbable tower 50′ tower designed in the style of a minaret, covered in scientific iconography and containing a spark chamber.

Doug Ruuska received a grant from Burning Man to build the tower and bring it to the festival in 2014.

The spark chamber is a particle detector that was used in physics research during the 1940s-1960s to detect muons from space.

I worked on a number of parts of the tower, including purchasing orders for custom sizes of LEDs and some light steel work, but mostly I worked on CNC machining some of the wood panels on the tower and machining the aluminum for the spark chamber, which included designing custom jigs and machining operations on milling machines and lathes.