When tasked with designing a marker to communicate danger across ten millennia – outlasting civilizations, languages, and perhaps humanity itself – I drew inspiration from the monumental works of land artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer. The challenge was unprecedented: how do you warn future beings about invisible threats buried beneath New Mexico’s salt beds?
My proposal, MYRIAD, creates a monumental clock that speaks through material transformation rather than words. Eight concentric rings of dark basalt, alien to the desert landscape, stretch across the salt beds. Rising from these rings, ninety-four salt and sandstone composite pillars vary dramatically in height, from 8.5 metres at the outer edge to 48.4 metres toward the centre. At the heart stands a wall of ninety-four basalt monoliths, 54 metres high, their outer faces clad in the same weathering composite, their inner-facing surfaces carved with warnings in multiple languages and symbols. Together, a pattern visible only from above is formed mirroring the atomic structure of plutonium-239, the very element creating the danger below.
The genius lies in the materials themselves. The salt-rock composite is designed to weather progressively over exactly 10,000 years. The outer ring of pillars disappears in under 900 years, the penultimate ring lasts 7,500 years, while the inner wall endures the full timeline. As millennia pass, the monument grows smaller, counting down to safety. When the danger finally passes, only the dark basalt rings and monoliths remain – a permanent reminder of what once lay beneath.
The design earned its way to the final round and received a commendation, proving that architecture can operate on timescales beyond human comprehension while solving problems that conventional design never contemplates.
“Wind whips up the sand around her feet as she walks, stirring up the dust. She has passed the first three intermittent strips of dark rock embedded in the ground. The rock is alien to here, its composition placing it from lands nearly four hundred kilometres to the west.
Pausing on the rock, it’s impossible to tell it is a series of vast concentric rings several kilometres in diameter – to see that you needed to view them from above, or, as she along with many others preferred, to walk along them.
She approaches the fourth ring. Only twenty-eight of its sentinel rocks still stand, though they are no longer the pure cuboid shapes they were when originally constructed. Over the millennia wind and rain, freeze and thaw had taken their toll. There were meant to be four more along this ring but these had fallen, the salt washed away and the rock broken up and spread by the winds. The pillars on the outer rings had disappeared many years before, marking off milestones on the course of ten thousand years.
The scale of the rings, and the pillars on them, is large. It enforces meditation on timescales beyond those we can easily grasp. She can picture at most a couple of lifetimes, a few hundred years, but even during that span there has been so much change. The world is different now to when the giant clock was built. Humans are different. But it had remained reasonably stable up on the salt beds. The upheavals in weather and geology had not affected the area as much it had elsewhere. The only constant had been the slow ticking away of salt and rock. Her grandmother had told her stories passed down from when she was young, when the pillars had been taller and there were more of them. Back then most of the openings in the inner ring were still filled in.
She passes through the openings. The dark monoliths stand as she remembers them with their stark warnings repeated in multiple languages. Some day these monoliths and the rings in the ground will be all that remains, and then what is beneath will no longer pose a threat. There had been talk of conservation, to restore and preserve the giant clock built three thousand years ago. But to do so was to negate the very point of its existence. If the warnings are correct, there is still a need for this keep counting down for the next seven millennia.”