City by Michael Heizer

Michael HeizerARCHITECTURE / Work

Heizer’s City turns the desert into a monument to a civilization that never existed, showing how architecture can evoke history, power, and permanence without an inhabited past.

Rows of tall concrete wedge forms throw hard shadows across a pale concrete floor, with long earth berms and desert mountains behind. — Heizer, a pioneer of the earthworks movement, began “City” in 1972. A mile and a half long and inspired by ancient ritual cities, it is made from rocks, sand, and concrete mined and mixed on site.
PHOTOGRAPH Jamie Hawkesworth / newyorker.comReferenced from its source. Rights not established by SIMULACRA.

Plates 4

Selected works

City
1970–2022 · Compacted dirt, rock and concrete (TAF: 'shaped mounds and depressions made of compacted dirt, rock, and concrete') · About 1.5 miles long and 0.5 mile wide · Owned and operated by the Triple Aught Foundation; Garden Valley, Lincoln County, Nevada

Connections

Formal resemblance

mass in an empty landscape ↔ with
Bunker Archeology, Paul Virilio
Concrete forms set alone in sand and open ground, read as monuments to a power that has left. A visual likeness only; no source connects them.
architecture without a use ↔ with
Carceri d'invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Both present monumental architecture for an institution that never existed. Piranesi's exists only on the plate, Heizer's is built in the desert.

Sources and further exploration

Source of this recordtripleaughtfoundation.org

Plates 4

Selected works

Connections

Formal resemblance

Sources and further exploration

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