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Smithson

Recently I saw a really interesting piece of work by the artist Smithson, of Spiral Jetty fame. He had documented an isolated hotel somewhere in Mexico. The structure was undergoing decay and renovation at the same time; therefore it was in a state of flux. The work was a slide show given to architecture students in the 70's. The projected images of the hotel were accompanied by the original soundtrack of Smithson speaking to the students about his observations on each of the images. Essentially he was reading the building as being in a state of entropy and using his images to do so. I had always thought that Smithson made formal interventions into landscapes to talk about these issues.