Project Summary
Chris Chalmers of Fabripod collaborated with BJ Scherrer of Mandala Domes in July 2025 to produce a set of illuminated sculptural installations for the Cascadia NW Arts & Music Festival in Darrington Washington. The installations took the form of a hanging canopy and a DJ booth backdrop and were installed in the main stage dome at the festival.
Approach
The design for the installation pieces was adapted from a traditional mandala pattern that was intended to be used for a 2D decorative wall hanging. We modified that design first, to fit onto wedge shaped pieces of CNC cut plywood, and second to incorporate an infill lattice that was taken from toroidal flower of life geometry (deep dive into this below). The wedges were then taken to the festival, assembled and installed in the main stage dome, a 40' geodesic dome that was to house the primary acts of the event. The plywood wedges were lined on the back side with white fabric to diffuse the light of color changing LEDs and were suspended from the dome structure in two places: First as a canopy at the top of the dome and second, as a backdrop for the DJ booth at the main stage.
Construction
The mandala patten we originally obtained was intended to be laser or CNC cut from thin plywood and then sandwiched in several layers to make a 2D wall hanging decoration. (example)
example layered wall hanging mandala
We modified the design to allow it to be fabricated at much larger scale and also transformed it into a series of repeating wedge shaped sections that could be arranged into self-supporting cone shapes. We attached the cone wedges to each other with re-used door hinges. They could be easily separated and rejoined to each other by inserting the pins into the barrels of the hinges.
Chris overseeing the CNC cutting and also sanding the resulting wedge pieces.
Because of the original layered intent of the mandala design, it had several large open areas that needed to be filled in with some kind of pattern. The pieces of our new installation were to be cut out of 1/2" plywood, would be 8' long in most cases and would be hung or stood up against the inside of the dome. Some of the filigreed detail of the mandala pattern was too thin to support its own weight without the other pieces sandwiched around it.
For the infill lattice we chose a 2D projection of the toroidal flower of life. This pattern has significance beyond just a structurally stable infill, but represents a mathematical description of many of the spiritual concepts and themes present at the Cascadia Northwest Music and Art Festival.
Once the areas of the design were filled in with the flower of life lattice, we did our best to simplify the design so it could be fabricated easily. We did this by modeling the cones in 3D using Rhino and then projecting the 2D geometry of the mandala pattern onto the wedges in 3D. The result was a number of repeating triangular shapes that could be laid out onto 4'x8' sheets of plywood. We dimplified the design slightly more to reduce the number of repeating shapes: only three total.
One of the shapes was repeated and also mirrored around the circle of the cone. The other was placed only every three wedges: alternating with the two mirrored shapes. The repetition and mirroring of these few shapes produces a pattern that looks as if it were much more complex than it really is.
