The Steampunk Treehouse Comes to Delaware

Steampunk Treehouse
Originally uploaded by Mickipedia

The fine (but delightfully twisted) folks at Dogfish Head Brewery have arranged to give a home to the Steampunk Treehouse. The Treehouse was created in 2007 for the Burning Man Festival and has been erected for a few other festivals since, but has not had a permanent home -- until now.

Mariah Calagione explains on the Dogfish Head blog how the brewers reached out to Treehouse builders Sean Orlando and the 5-Ton Crane Arts Group last year:

We quickly realized that we were on the same page of a pretty off-centered book as Sean and his crew. We enthusiastically agreed to make a permanent home for the Steampunk Treehouse at our Milton, Delaware brewery.

I saw this blog post yesterday and found the idea fascinating. My nephew Magpie Killjoy spent some years publishing a steampunk magazine and has a good understanding of that world. I sent him a note asking what he knew about the Treehouse. He was excited at the news:

These people put a huge amount of energy into creating this entirely weird thing. And one thing that is beautiful about it is that it was built before steampunk got really codified and snobby, So it's the kind of thing that people now might say "oh that's not steampunk enough" or some such crap. I haven't seen it in person, but I was corresponding with one of the makers while they were working on it.

Cool that it's in Delaware. I was sad that it didn't have a permanent home.

One more reason to go spend more time with my off-centered friends at Dogfish Head.