Design heritage: A Utah land art journey
The design team at WOLA pushes themselves to give clients high quality, imaginative design work. We draw inspiration from designers and artists who create provocative works, and in order to remain inspired, we take time to see as much as we can. The Great Salt Lake area in Utah is the home of two masterworks: Sun Tunnels by Nancy Holt, and Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson. This past January, WOLA principal Kathryn Ostermier took a road trip through Utah to visit these monumental works.
It was cold, snowy, and inspiring. When Spiral Jetty was first created by Smithson in the 1970s, the water level of the Great Salt Lake nearly submerged the boulders he placed one by one to form the jetty. Sometimes the change of land over time is not as apparent: Spiral Jetty is an identifiable benchmark for the change in water level at the Great Salt Lake and speaks to the larger effects that change in climate and precipitation patterns has on the natural and built environments.
Sun Tunnels has been deliberately designed and placed to incorporate the light of the sun on the solstice. Core drilled holes in the tunnels themselves reference the constellation of stars on the solstice. On a cloudy day, it could be argued that the piece does not ‘function’ as Nancy Holt intended: we found that the tunnels framed the surrounding mountains and cows in a way that was quite wonderful, despite the lack of precise shadow.
