Granite Crystal

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 juni 1972 – 8 oktober 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for Central Park he sees a wasteland degraded by humans before Olmsted, and he challenges the view of the park as an outdated nineteenth-century picturesque.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.