GERLACH, Nev. — How many city planners get to see their ideas take shape all around them?

The short list includes Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who bulldozed much of Paris in the mid-19th century, and Robert Moses, who remade New York during the 20th.

And Rod Garrett, who, beginning in 1997, laid out Burning Man, the annual festival of self-expression in the parched northern Nevada desert.

Mr. Garrett died last week at 74, just short of the 25th anniversary of Burning Man’s founding.

But his handiwork will be on display to thousands as the yearly festival begins Monday. Mr. Garrett arranged the grounds, called Black Rock City, in a series of concentric semicircles. At their center is the Man, a giant effigy meant to be immolated on the last night of the weeklong gathering.

Until then the Man is to Black Rock City what the Empire State Building is to Manhattan: a locating device and a reassuring beacon.