I was pretty excited to go, then saw this at the end of the article:
> Visitors will also need to get themselves to Alamo, Nev., a nearish town. They’ll then be picked up, allowed to roam “City” for a few hours and, because there are no lights on the road and no cellphone service, they will be driven back before dark, meaning they won’t get to see the sun rise and set, prime hours.
The "no lights" thing is a pretty lame excuse. It sounds like an exercise in minimum compliance with the order to open it to the public.
It reminds of a (somewhat recent) article and discussion here on the design parameters for long-term nuclear waste storage facilities. One of the points was that to deter interference from pesky curious humans across the time scales considered, pictographic or lexical warnings may get degraded or lose meaning: the structure and area itself must convey a message of menace, drabness or inhospitability.
I'd have bet this was a test site for such a project. Which given the name of the installation might be the goal. If anyone remembers the paper in question, my algolia-fu is failing me.
If the “not” somehow got effaced, that message would suddenly have the opposite effect, so… This kind of thing is difficult. Hopefully, there would be some redundancy to the message.
> “This place is not a place of honor,” reads the text. “No highly esteemed dead is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.”
> The plan calls for huge 25ft (7.6m) tall granite columns marking the four-sq-mile (10 sq km) outer boundary of the entire site. Inside this perimeter, there is an earth berm 33ft (10m) tall and 100ft (30m) wide marking the repository’s actual footprint. Then inside the berm will be another square of granite columns.
"If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”
Yeah; I'd want to visit every one of these proposals on vacation.
The only exception is the one from Emil Kowalski. That proposal would make it so difficult to excavate the site that the civilization performing the excavation would likely have radiation detectors.
Step one in that is probably burying it sufficiently deep that it can't be found without advanced seismology.
You might be interested in the Michael Madsen documentary "Into eternity" about the Onkalo waste repository in Finland, that should supposedly last 100 thousands years. It's mostly about the difficulties of conveying a message of danger to future generations (or civilizations)
A very interesting topic is that they hope that the repo is forgotten, nobody will remember about it and nobody will go looking for it or become curious about it and what's inside of it, as it is described "a place we have to remember to forget".
Development of a small yachting community was underway full steam in the early 1970's when The Bahamas gained independence from the UK, after that those not born there were no longer allowed to own property, only able to lease it for a period of 99 years at most.
Hope someone spends an afternoon to building this in Unreal Engine. I know art world gets indulgent, but this project always seemed very extra. Looks like fun counterstrike map though.
What if in order to get city dwellers (who were already able to get food, albeit having to wait 5 more minutes for it) food the app makes unreasonable demands on delivery workers (who probably won’t be employees but “associates” instead) to the point that it becomes a high-risk job, except it’s not a job so they’re on their own when they have an accident, and if they don’t, they barely make ends meet anyway? Honestly, my moral framework prefers the art.
While I agree there's a lot of value in wider distribution of arts funding, I suspect the people giving $30mm to this are also giving immeasurably more to other artists than the VCs funding the next cycle of food delivery startups are. More likely the rest of their portfolio is full of straight-up negative value stuff like more payday loan companies.
I'm genuinely unsure. The photos are alienating. Usually, I don't like that kind of art, but sometimes its interesting and being in something massive, created, somebody else's vision, is occasionally great. Nazca. Different. I saw Richard Serrra's work in Bilbao, it was amazing. Andy Goldsworthy did giant pieces in the forests of the UK and also tiny ones. Art in nature can be fantastic, there are metal figures set into the Nullarbor plain thousands of kilometres from anyone by Anthony Gormley I'd love to see.
Frank Lloyd wrights place in Phoenix AZ would have been monumental if he could have afforded it.
Arcosanti? Christo and the curtain across the valley?
What's not to love? What does it mean? I have no idea.
They'll be fine. Evidence will point out that people traveled long distances to be there, supposedly to participate in some kind of ritual. Which is all true.
Separately, Salvation Mountain in California is worth a look too.
I've always wanted to see people do something similar to Wavefield in a desertscape. I'm travelling from the other side of the planet to be reasonably close to City in a month or so, and even "reasonably close" makes it a 4-5+ hour detour. :(
I liked the Crawick Multiverse by Charles Jencks, located south of Glasgow. Sort of like this City thing, but smaller, more varied, much more accessible, and most importantly, cool, green and inviting.
It’s like he designed it for humans, not despite them.
Storm king is great fun. The one Near me when I lived in white plains NY was the PepsiCo headquarters sculpture gardens. Smaller and the hours are limited to weekends and you can’t go inside the offices, but free!
Dia Beacon is modern art in a old cracker factory that is huge and fun to explore. I have a love/hate relationship with modern art, but in the context of this giant building it was fun.
What a waste. He could have made it livable and relatively self-sustaining.
Instead of "hey look at this" it could have been "hey look at this and real people live here and maintain it".
> The foundation has built a $30 million endowment to care for City. Moving forward, it will be under the custodianship of a coalition of major U.S. institutions: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, Arkansas), Glenstone Museum (Potomac, Maryland), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, California), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York).
Thanks very much for posting, I get a much better appreciation for the potential impact of the work at scale than I did just looking at the individual pics in the article. I think it's really cool.
Ok. I would kind of like it, but environmental impact of that needs to be insane. I guess 50 years ago people were not that concerned about it. And then how much energy they will have to spend just removing sand. Seems like a pretty pointless job for someone.
I'd guess this is one of the least environmentally disruptive constructions in the Nevada desert. The green fields across the street look infinitely worse.
Well, it looks like an art object, definitely - idea, style, composition. But it will only look good in a desert.
Real cities should be green.
In Barcelona, we have a place called “Parc del Fòrum” - a huge area covered by asphalt (14 acres, 5.7 ha), with just a few buildings. Looks great, for sure (you can ride a bike/scooter here with a wind). Mostly being used for music festivals.
But before every festival, organizers put artificial grass to create the areas in front of the stages. And the rest of the time you can find just a few young souls riding here (2-5 persons). There is only one place in Forum Park where you can always find a lot of people - the children's playground. Because it has trees, grass, and shadow.
What might look great and stylish isn’t always comfortable. I love Parc del Forum because I like to ride and it has spectacular sea views, but I think it was a great experiment to highlight the importance of trees in a city design.
Yeah, some guy jacking off in the desert for 50 years. Good luck with that mate. Not really my cup of tea, and frankly a bit of a shame you couldn't have done something a little more productive with your 50 years, than move a bit of sand around...
This obsession on here with 'productivity' is depressing. I thought the HN crowd was beyond all that. Frankly, to suggest that this man should have given up on his dream so he could.. what? be an office drone for 50 years?... is lame.
99% of us will live un-noteworthy lives and then die. This man has built something that will be inviting thought and discussion for potentially hundreds of years.
Humans have always built monuments. Should the Hopewell peoples have not built their burial mounds because there were more productive things for them to do?
If you don't understand this piece (and I sure don't), that's fine. I just think it's a pretty callous thing to dismiss someone's life passion as "jacking off in the desert."
One of the most pointless wastes of money I’ve ever seen. I consider myself an artist and understand it’s value, but a 30M fund for what, some blocks of concrete in a desert??? That money could go to far more useful applications, and instead it’s dedicated to a monument to hubris. ‘Magnum opus’ my ass.
Agreed. I love art that challenges our perceptions of reality, society, even that which questions urbanism as a form of aesthetic pursuit. But this is just absolutely poo. A self-indulgent stain of hubris.
Fact is, up until recently, monuments were dismantled and their materials used for other purposes both by subsequent rulers and by the population at large. If this art installation were to become the basis of an actual settlement in 100 years I'd say the money wasn't wasted. Unfortunatly we have so much unjustified reverence towards art that doing so would probably be forbidden and these structures will simply rot and disintegrate
Culture is created therefore by literal dirt on the bottom of my shoe. By the very nature of being. Well, that's great. But eventually the word loses all meaning. It becomes a filler for "this thing exists at least ephemerally in the world we inhabit... how... monumental."
If anything is art, then all judgement is moot. It's pointless for any of us to even engage. Agree. Agree. Disagree. Blah. I may as well throw my mooty mud into the mix of debate. To me, there is not a singular emotion this piece evokes other than a self-indulgent egotistic lump of cement articulated with, (reviews await), likely, essays of arbitrarily cloying fascination. It's fine as a thing that exists. Whatever. But it is equally a sinkhole of value.
Monuments need to be visible to normal people in order to have any cultural value. If the Tour Eiffel or Statue of Liberty were in a secluded forest, they wouldn't have had any real impact on culture.
Everyone agrees the new design will be unsafe for bicyclists, and slow down taxi service.
It's replacing a decade-old bus lane that was previously used as a poster child for overpriced SF construction projects. I can't find an article about the previous boondoggle bus lane, but remember it costing at least $10M's, but only covering one city block.
> Visitors will also need to get themselves to Alamo, Nev., a nearish town. They’ll then be picked up, allowed to roam “City” for a few hours and, because there are no lights on the road and no cellphone service, they will be driven back before dark, meaning they won’t get to see the sun rise and set, prime hours.
I feel this is such a bad decision, hope they reconsider.
99% of them hate that you just like it or not. Sometimes the analysis is pointless. Stick to your guns. In the best possible sense and with no intended patronising notes: "you do you"
There is a lot of art whose major criteria is “does it make the uninitiated feel that way”. Anything that makes you want to say “My kid could do this!” probably falls into this category, and it is probably attached to an absurdly large price tag that makes you start wondering how much of its value is simply as a tax dodge for some obscenely rich person.
Scale is important. Artists used to try and represent things, the invention of perspective was mind blowing, Skill up to hyperrealism stage. But the camera did away with a lot of that endeavour and artists began trying to explore emotion, sensation, paint for paint's sake, the ACT of painting and mark making itself. Jackson Pollock is a great example of a road marker along the way. The act of the brush, the removal of 'the artist', the canvas size growing. In 1970 the year this was started Robert Smithson created 'spiral jetty' - artists making statements more grandiose and more timeless. In some ways there's similarities with the more ancient works like the Nazca lines, but I think this work is best described by the term Magnus Opus in the article - The greatest single work of an artist, writer, or composer. It's an endeavour, a feat, and literally great in scale.
I think it is something you can only really experience in place. The scale, the desolation and the absence of anything commercial while being in a human-built landscape I think would be an unusual experience.
have you ever experienced positive feelings after visiting a landscape ? this artist is able to synthesize these feelings. And it's not trivial, it requires large scale logistics
You mean if they have a plan ? Or you mean any golf course architect can create a landscape that touches the soul ? because obviously golf landscapes don't provoke emotions
On the contrary contrary, some of the best most thought-provoking course designs are in the desert. Check out red rock golf trail. But yes, it probably invokes rage as well :).
Clearly you haven't played a nice golf course. Or if you have, you haven't stopped to appreciate it the same way you would landscape art. If you did you would think otherwise. Some of the nicest golf courses in the world provoke far more emotion than you would imagine. Look at some photos of bandon dunes; those holes were designed by master artists.
But this doesn't? Where every tree, every mound and turn of the landscape was an intentional alteration of the landscape serving the purposes of both provoking emotions and enabling the game of golf : https://imgur.com/a/E2jwz2x
Sorry but you would have to be delusional to think that. There is a reason people come from all over the world to enjoy bandon dunes. Michael Heizer spent 50 years making a junkyard and you fell for it.
Finally a quote:
“Most of their projects were on beautiful rolling parcels of land, and the geometric shapes which they created contrasted with the rolling topography...This yin and yang would draw the golfers’ attention to the target and create a very interesting or thrilling space to hit to. Raynor’s Fishers Island is a very good example of using geometric shapes to draw one’s attention to the target, while highlighting the beautiful surrounds. The shapes of the targets, putting surfaces, are very similar but the grading of the surrounds and the surfaces themselves varies from hole to hole. The grading conforms to the site and space and the lines draw one’s eye in a very subtle way to the powerful landscape surrounds.
Golfers enjoy beautiful natural surrounds but also are very stimulated when their target is well defined. Geometric features create these types of situation. This is why I believe most golfers respond favorably to this. Pete Dye used hard and straight lines on several of his designs. While some felt that at times he went too far and did not harmoniously blend his design with nature, his targets were well defined and created stimulation and thought.”
One of the reasons 'City' is notable, is because it is just so big.
The first time I heard about was in a video "Monumentality" [1], which explores why humans throughout history have tried to make monuments; big things, skyscrapers, pyramids etc.
Michael Heizer will die one day, as will we all. But by its nature of being a huge complex made of rocks and dirt, 'City' will continue to stand for thousands of years probably.
it's a largely flat construction in the desert. it might "stand" for thousands of years, but it'll be covered in sand or other blown debris to the point where it's unrecognizable in ten without constant maintenance. the article quotes $1.3mm annual budget, and i'd guess most of that goes to sweeping.
the average mid-rise building in a real city is much more of a lasting monument than this is.
I don’t know. For me personally if I were building something like this for 50 years, I’d be thinking about its fate in 1000 years. Someone will dig this up long after it’s forgotten, and that person/group will experience this art anew, in a completely different way people experience it today. Perhaps that’s part of the intention?
We see how much delight people take in speculating about Nazca lines. As an artist creating a work like this, I might intend to cause that speculative delight for future generations. Maybe in 1000 years people will flock from around the world to see it because of how mysterious it is.
Look up Roden Crater by Turell, which is a similarly insane project, but maybe easier “to get”.
These artists are both obsessed with shape, size and light. The art is partly environmental. It is exploring how the desert light (harsh bright white at noon, dark violet/orange at sunset) affects the simple shapes.
374 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadhttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/19/arts/design/m...
They made the valley it’s in a national monument to prevent the yuca mountain nuclear storage from being readable:
So:’ “City,” because it was now part of the national monument, would have to admit public visitors.’
Here is a “gifted article” link for those without a subscription:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/19/arts/design/m...
> Visitors will also need to get themselves to Alamo, Nev., a nearish town. They’ll then be picked up, allowed to roam “City” for a few hours and, because there are no lights on the road and no cellphone service, they will be driven back before dark, meaning they won’t get to see the sun rise and set, prime hours.
The "no lights" thing is a pretty lame excuse. It sounds like an exercise in minimum compliance with the order to open it to the public.
I'd have bet this was a test site for such a project. Which given the name of the installation might be the goal. If anyone remembers the paper in question, my algolia-fu is failing me.
> The plan calls for huge 25ft (7.6m) tall granite columns marking the four-sq-mile (10 sq km) outer boundary of the entire site. Inside this perimeter, there is an earth berm 33ft (10m) tall and 100ft (30m) wide marking the repository’s actual footprint. Then inside the berm will be another square of granite columns.
— https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-n...
― Thief Of Time, Terry Pratchett
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warn...
Better to make it highly deadly or entirely hidden (with the warnings to be uncovered if you start excavating).
The only exception is the one from Emil Kowalski. That proposal would make it so difficult to excavate the site that the civilization performing the excavation would likely have radiation detectors.
Step one in that is probably burying it sufficiently deep that it can't be found without advanced seismology.
A very interesting topic is that they hope that the repo is forgotten, nobody will remember about it and nobody will go looking for it or become curious about it and what's inside of it, as it is described "a place we have to remember to forget".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Eternity_(film)
https://www.google.com/maps/@26.5978301,-78.6086813,2987m/da...
This one is 50 years old now too.
Development of a small yachting community was underway full steam in the early 1970's when The Bahamas gained independence from the UK, after that those not born there were no longer allowed to own property, only able to lease it for a period of 99 years at most.
So never mind.
https://documentation.beamng.com/official_content/levels/gri...
Frank Lloyd wrights place in Phoenix AZ would have been monumental if he could have afforded it.
Arcosanti? Christo and the curtain across the valley?
What's not to love? What does it mean? I have no idea.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://collections.stormking.org/Browse/objects
Separately, Salvation Mountain in California is worth a look too.
I've always wanted to see people do something similar to Wavefield in a desertscape. I'm travelling from the other side of the planet to be reasonably close to City in a month or so, and even "reasonably close" makes it a 4-5+ hour detour. :(
It’s like he designed it for humans, not despite them.
https://www.crawickmultiverse.co.uk/
https://www.pepsico.com/sculpture-gardens.
Dia Beacon is modern art in a old cracker factory that is huge and fun to explore. I have a love/hate relationship with modern art, but in the context of this giant building it was fun.
https://www.diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites/dia-b...
Instead of "hey look at this" it could have been "hey look at this and real people live here and maintain it".
> The foundation has built a $30 million endowment to care for City. Moving forward, it will be under the custodianship of a coalition of major U.S. institutions: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, Arkansas), Glenstone Museum (Potomac, Maryland), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, California), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York).
https://preview.redd.it/3bnqb0cali771.jpg?width=640&crop=sma...
Well, small trees and large bushes, but still.
It's about waist high, and smells wonderful, being dominated by mesquite and sage.
Not sure when they started making skateparks but that would have been extremely forward thinking.
Plus, personally I just love skateparks... hahaha
Please excuse me while I go age in a corner
https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Hanson-...
They often have quite interesting shapes, too.
I tried to find a nice pit mine pictures, but I think lots are pretty (if you like big holes in the ground): https://www.google.com/search?q=open-pit+mine&tbm=isch
I wonder how it manages with flooding if it rains.
Real cities should be green. In Barcelona, we have a place called “Parc del Fòrum” - a huge area covered by asphalt (14 acres, 5.7 ha), with just a few buildings. Looks great, for sure (you can ride a bike/scooter here with a wind). Mostly being used for music festivals.
But before every festival, organizers put artificial grass to create the areas in front of the stages. And the rest of the time you can find just a few young souls riding here (2-5 persons). There is only one place in Forum Park where you can always find a lot of people - the children's playground. Because it has trees, grass, and shadow.
What might look great and stylish isn’t always comfortable. I love Parc del Forum because I like to ride and it has spectacular sea views, but I think it was a great experiment to highlight the importance of trees in a city design.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parc_del_Fòrum
I am not familiar with this artist or what this is intended to evoke, but I don’t think I’m the intended… audience?
If you don't regularly buy paintings for 100k+, I don't think this is for us :)
99% of us will live un-noteworthy lives and then die. This man has built something that will be inviting thought and discussion for potentially hundreds of years.
Humans have always built monuments. Should the Hopewell peoples have not built their burial mounds because there were more productive things for them to do?
If you don't understand this piece (and I sure don't), that's fine. I just think it's a pretty callous thing to dismiss someone's life passion as "jacking off in the desert."
You jack off machines and they don't even give you a reach-around.
LOL, agree with the sentiment.
If anything is art, then all judgement is moot. It's pointless for any of us to even engage. Agree. Agree. Disagree. Blah. I may as well throw my mooty mud into the mix of debate. To me, there is not a singular emotion this piece evokes other than a self-indulgent egotistic lump of cement articulated with, (reviews await), likely, essays of arbitrarily cloying fascination. It's fine as a thing that exists. Whatever. But it is equally a sinkhole of value.
https://sfbayca.com/2021/01/21/__trashed-3/
Everyone agrees the new design will be unsafe for bicyclists, and slow down taxi service.
It's replacing a decade-old bus lane that was previously used as a poster child for overpriced SF construction projects. I can't find an article about the previous boondoggle bus lane, but remember it costing at least $10M's, but only covering one city block.
> Visitors will also need to get themselves to Alamo, Nev., a nearish town. They’ll then be picked up, allowed to roam “City” for a few hours and, because there are no lights on the road and no cellphone service, they will be driven back before dark, meaning they won’t get to see the sun rise and set, prime hours.
I feel this is such a bad decision, hope they reconsider.
I never felt like I just "didn't get art" until reading the quotes in this article.
There’s a thread about running Diablo in a browser that has positive remarks. But if you think about that a bit it’s also ridiculous.
Same with launch articles about any other content—movies, games, whatever.
you could maybe do an offroad skateboard though
If you're trying to tell me that this somehow "invokes emotion": https://imgur.com/a/GahY00u
But this does not "invoke emotion", where every tree, every piece of grass and turn of the landscape was intentional: https://imgur.com/a/3EY3A99
I'd say bologna.
You trying to tell me this "touches the soul": https://imgur.com/a/GahY00u
But this doesn't? Where every tree, every mound and turn of the landscape was an intentional alteration of the landscape serving the purposes of both provoking emotions and enabling the game of golf : https://imgur.com/a/E2jwz2x
Sorry but you would have to be delusional to think that. There is a reason people come from all over the world to enjoy bandon dunes. Michael Heizer spent 50 years making a junkyard and you fell for it.
Finally a quote:
“Most of their projects were on beautiful rolling parcels of land, and the geometric shapes which they created contrasted with the rolling topography...This yin and yang would draw the golfers’ attention to the target and create a very interesting or thrilling space to hit to. Raynor’s Fishers Island is a very good example of using geometric shapes to draw one’s attention to the target, while highlighting the beautiful surrounds. The shapes of the targets, putting surfaces, are very similar but the grading of the surrounds and the surfaces themselves varies from hole to hole. The grading conforms to the site and space and the lines draw one’s eye in a very subtle way to the powerful landscape surrounds.
Golfers enjoy beautiful natural surrounds but also are very stimulated when their target is well defined. Geometric features create these types of situation. This is why I believe most golfers respond favorably to this. Pete Dye used hard and straight lines on several of his designs. While some felt that at times he went too far and did not harmoniously blend his design with nature, his targets were well defined and created stimulation and thought.”
Sound somewhat familiar?
The first time I heard about was in a video "Monumentality" [1], which explores why humans throughout history have tried to make monuments; big things, skyscrapers, pyramids etc.
Michael Heizer will die one day, as will we all. But by its nature of being a huge complex made of rocks and dirt, 'City' will continue to stand for thousands of years probably.
[1]https://youtu.be/bwGKqiOyIAM&t=46m43s
the average mid-rise building in a real city is much more of a lasting monument than this is.
We see how much delight people take in speculating about Nazca lines. As an artist creating a work like this, I might intend to cause that speculative delight for future generations. Maybe in 1000 years people will flock from around the world to see it because of how mysterious it is.
These artists are both obsessed with shape, size and light. The art is partly environmental. It is exploring how the desert light (harsh bright white at noon, dark violet/orange at sunset) affects the simple shapes.