1970
Proposal “Floating Island” around Manhattan
In 1970 Smithson makes a series of drawings for “Floating Island: To Travel around Manhattan Island”: a barge containing broken concrete or glass is to be pulled by a tugboat; in other versions the barge is filled with earth and planted with trees and other vegetation. The project remained unrealised.
1971
Drawing “Cinema Cavern” for spelunkers
In 1971 Smithson draws “Towards the Development of a ‘Cinema Cavern’” — a design for a theatre to be built inside a cave, with spelunkers as the intended audience. Like his other proposals, it remained unrealised.
30 de junio de 1972 – 8 de octubre de 1972
Exhibition: Documenta 5
1973
Essay on Olmsted and the dialectical landscape
In 1973, having seen the exhibition “Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York” at the Whitney Museum (curated by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers), Smithson writes the essay “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape”: in photographs of the land set aside for Central Park he sees a wasteland degraded by humans before Olmsted, and he challenges the view of the park as an outdated nineteenth-century picturesque. His proposal to make process art out of the dredging of The Pond in Central Park belongs to the same ideas.
1973
Bingham Canyon Reclamation Project
In 1973 Smithson designs the Bingham Canyon Reclamation Project, a visionary proposal for the three-mile-wide (4.8 km) copper pit mine in Utah owned by the Kennecott Copper Corporation. The mining company responded negatively and the project was never built.
20 July 1973
Dies inspecting the site of “Amarillo Ramp”
On 20 July 1973 Smithson dies, along with a photographer and the pilot, in the crash of a light aircraft, a Beechcraft Baron E55, while inspecting the site of “Amarillo Ramp” on the ranch of Stanley Marsh 3 near Amarillo, Texas; the National Transportation Safety Board attributed the accident to the pilot’s failure to maintain airspeed, with distraction a contributing factor. The work was later completed by his widow Nancy Holt, Richard Serra and Tony Shafrazi.