Atlas Project:
Lifting the Cosmos at Roden Crater


Gabriella T. Moreno





From above the horizon of Arizona’s Painted Desert一a stretch of land unfurling eastward from the Grand Canyon in a display of dust, amber, and lavender hues一may be spotted a piece of scorched and wise earth. Wise in age, because it has witnessed over four hundred thousand years and their attendant seasons, a lifespan typical for an extinct volcano of its kind. Wise also for its discernment一the distance it keeps from the sensing body and its cognitive apparatus, which at every turn declares the falsehood of organically manifest architectures and kaleidoscopic epistemologies. Simply put, this mineral dwelling seeks no place in a mind devoid of earthen intuition. Its shifting architectonics, composed of the sediment of geological time, disorients steady footing, shifting perception toward the inner-driven vitality of volcanic ash and pyroclastic rock.



What, then, is this fissured landmass, this monolith of incredible dimension? We have chanced upon an ancient crater metamorphosed into an open-eye observatory, designed by the earth itself to accommodate the crystalline pulse of planetary illumination. Just as much a living body as those it houses, human and stellular, Roden Crater is a work of “celestial land art”一or so here declared一an empty theatre fit to project the flickering of heavenly
phenomena.



Light from the sun, stars, moon and planets, channeled through slit apertures and cameras obscura, shifts prismatically before darkened walls of earth. One might dream millions of stars melted into the structure, made to whirl and echo, to rebound through voided vessels dug deep into the ground.



In truth, this account is oneiric: that is, of or relating to dreams. For the twenty-plus tunnels chambers and subterranean corridors twisting miles deep into the crater’s cinder cone一known variously by names such as Crater’s Eye, Sun | Moon Chamber, and Alpha (East)一have offered entrance to only a single collaborator: a contemporary artist of light and space by the name of James Turrell. In this case the contemporary is by way of its material existence, part and parcel with the residuum of deep and ever deepening time. Consider the scene set: a volcanic field spanning 1,800 square miles of desert, the eldest of its 600 sibling-volcanoes having reached 6 million years of age. From one amongst many maternal cinder cones scattered across this terra firma was birthed, and is birthing still, a palatial basin for light in the American West.



The nowness of Turrell’s intervention is thus but a brief moment in the long act of earthen memory. Be there no mistake, it is a moment ambitious in scope and material tendrilation, for it must feel through the earth, touching time to manifest its finished form. Years have yet to pass until this day arrives... In its current state, Roden Crater is not an architecture alread in existence, but a geological body always already in the process of unfolding. It is a space of the not-yet and not-quite, a constellation of the architectural imaginary.



In this powdery interstice between an architect’s momentary intercession and the infinitude of geological time arises a new and inspirited evocation of the “material gesture”; our desire to touch and be touched by the substance with which we build. The artist/architect sets out to lay open the earth, to study its gestures over time, how its soil, sand, minerals and ash have responded to physical contact. And yet, he responds to something else too: that is, the earth’s gesturing toward a geometry of supernal lightness, its proclivity to grow upwards and outward providing a dwelling for the expansion of mind.



But what of the weight of the heavens? For one does not simply move stone in accordance with anthropomorphic whim. The force exerted by celestial bodies on marmoreal anatomy results in a structure far more durable than bone, flesh, or sinew could ever dream to be. An artist seeking to cast shadows with the cosmos, to make a place for them on earth must be conversant in the language and lightness of stars; they must come to know rock’s effervescent companions so as to achieve a bit of their weightlessness. This is the only way forward with “lifting” stubborn earth.



The imaginative act at hand, lifting the cosmos at Roden Crater, suggests to us in parting that the contemporary is birthed also from the rubble of myth. When faced with something heavy, we are moved with spirit or by moralistic pathos to lift it, its weight on our shoulders all the more reason to rise. It is not mere metaphor to suggest that the artist is capable of placing the cosmos aloft, of bringing the stars to earth and returning them again to their proper sky-enshrouded place. The vertical axis of both architecture and the imagination constitute a striving upwards. In our labors we are like the crouching figure of Atlas of whom Hesiod writes, “he bore heaven with his head and hands.”



Gabriella Teresa Moreno is an art historian and writer. She holds a B.A. from Stanford University and a M.A from the Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown Massachusetts.


Images Credits: 
1.The Roden Crater (View from the Southwest), 2001/2002. Photograph: Florian Holzherr 2-4.  Taken from the James Turrell Studio Archive via https://rodencrater.com/ 5. Crouching Figure of Atlas, Baldassare Tommaso Peruzzi.