Archinect - News

The New Yorker dissects the immersive potential of Sphere and City

2023-11-14T08:00:00-05:00

The differences between “City” and the Sphere are deep, true, yet narrower than you might suppose—the works are trying for the same things but in opposite ways. Both are big, expensive, geometric structures in the desert that offer visitors a vivid encounter with the natural world—one with exquisite footage of jellyfish and the like, the other with deftly roughened rock and concrete.

The New Yorker’s art critic Jackson Arn takes on two of the most recent (and spectacular) cultural offerings of the Silver State — "One with a deluge of images and the other with a tantalizing lack of them," as he writes.

Related on Archinect: Take a look at photos of Michael Heizer's 'City' ahead of its debut (45°, 90°, 180°, City. © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Joe Rome)

Take a look at photos of Michael Heizer's 'City' ahead of its debut

2022-08-26T17:51:00-04:00

The long-awaited public opening of land artist Michael Heizer’s monumental earthwork City is just around the corner, and the Triple Aught Foundation, the group which manages its remote Lincoln County, Nevada site, has shared some amazing new photos that offer a sense of the scale and stasis of the massive sculpture which has taken 52 years and another $40 million to finish.

City © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Joe Rome

Complex One and Complex Two, City. © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Joe Rome

Complex Two, City. © Michael Heizer. Courtesy Triple Aught Foundation. Photo: Joe Rome

Critic Dave Hickey recently described it as "a gracious intervention in the desert...composed and complete."

LACMA Director Michael Govan reflected on its realization, stating: "Over the years I would sometimes compare Michael Heizer's City project to some of the most important ancient monuments and cities. But now I only compare it to itself. It's an artwor...

Michael Heizer’s land art masterpiece 'City' finally sets an opening date

2022-08-22T10:00:00-04:00

City, a vast complex of outdoor structures and landmasses the Land artist Michael Heizer began constructing in the desert of Nevada in 1970, will finally begin welcoming public visitors next month. The site’s opening on 2 September, more than 50 years after work at the site began, marks the fulfillment of Heizer’s most ambitious and career-defining project.

Get ready to weep (assuming you are among the select art tourists willing to travel to the site-specific installation, as Heizer intended): The 50-year saga surrounding the National Mall-sized sculpture is over, and the Triple Aught Foundation, which manages the site, will begin accepting up to six visitors a day in an outcome that has at times seemed impossible.

Heizer's masterpiece has been the subject of an Obama-era protective designation (a measure first proposed by the late Senator Harry Reid) and later the failed Trump Administration attempt to open up the 740,000-acre tract to mining and development. Plans were originally for the earthwork to be made public in 2020. LACMA director Michael Govan says it is "an artwork aware of our primal impulses to build and organize space."

As the artist, who began the piece in 1970, told the Los Angeles Times in 2012: "The size thing is not some gimmick or attention-getting trick but a genuine undercurrent of the work. Frank Gehry for ins...

Nevada dedicates $300 million towards new affordable housing projects

2022-02-21T17:04:00-05:00

The Nevada Housing Division announced Wednesday that $300.7 million will go to the development of affordable housing projects in the state. The money makes up 87% of Nevada’s 2021 tax-exempt bonding authority and is the highest amount earmarked for state-led affordable housing developments since the inception of the state’s tax-exempt private activity bond (PAB) program, according to Department of Business and Industry Director Terry Reynolds.

The program aims to facilitate public and private sector collaboration in financing eligible affordable housing projects. There are currently 14 below-market-rate projects under construction located in Reno, Las Vegas, and North Las Vegas that will bring 2,898 residences by early 2024, with nine set for completion in 2022 and early 2023. The developments will remain at below-market rates for a minimum of 30 years.

Virgin Hyperloop: first human passenger test in BIG-designed XP-2 pod

2020-11-09T14:52:00-05:00

While Nevada's slow election vote counting has inspired countless memes over the weekend, a new speed milestone was reached in the state when humans successfully traveled in a hyperloop pod for the first time.

Promotional video of the first hyperloop passenger test. Video via Virgin Hyperloop on YouTube.

After running over 400 unoccupied tests at its 500-meter DevLoop test site in Las Vegas, Virgin Hyperloop now catapulted the company's Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Josh Giegel, and Director of Passenger Experience, Sara Luchian, for a thrilling ride through the very short test tunnel.

Image: Virgin Hyperloop.

"The occupants made their maiden voyage on the newly-unveiled XP-2
vehicle, designed by BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group and Kilo Design, which was custom-built with occupant safety and comfort in mind," explains a statement released by Virgin Hyperloop. Back in 2016, BIG had announced a joint venture with Aecom and Hyperloop to "transform the future of public infrastruct...

Cryptocurrency mogul wants to turn Nevada into the next center of Blockchain Technology

2018-11-07T14:44:00-05:00

He imagines a sort of experimental community spread over about a hundred square miles, where houses, schools, commercial districts and production studios will be built. The centerpiece of this giant project will be the blockchain, a new kind of database that was introduced by Bitcoin.

Jeffrey Berns, who owns the cryptocurrency company Blockchains L.L.C., has bought 68,000 acres of land in Nevada that he hopes to transform into a community based around blockchain technology. His utopian vision, which would be the first 'smart city' based on the technology, involves the creation of a new town along the Truckee river, with homes, apartments, schools, and a drone delivery system.

The first step will be constructing an 1,000 acre campus that will host startups and companies working on applications such as AI and 3D printing to help bring about the high-tech city. LA firms Tom Wiscombe Architecture and Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects have been hired to assist in this vision, designing the architecture and masterplan for the future city.

Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects + Tom Wiscombe Architecture.

Called Innovation Park, the designers contend the city will be 'human-centric,' while also planned around autonomous, electric vehicles. Housing types will range fro...

Land surrounding Michael Heizer’s "City" could lose national monument protection under Trump Administration

2017-07-31T14:55:00-04:00

As City—Michael Heizer’s vast Land Art installation in the Nevada desert—nears completion, the fate of the federally protected land surrounding it could soon be decided. Ryan Zinke, the US Interior Secretary, visited the state on Sunday, 30 July, as part of a review of 27 national monuments ordered by President Donald Trump, which could result in some of these lands being reopened to development.

"A number of museums banded together to call for the site’s preservation," The Art Newspaper explains the background of City's current surroundings (previously also on Archinect), "and in 2015, Obama created the Basin and Range National Monument, which covers 704,000 acres in southern Nevada’s Lincoln and Nye counties, including the land surrounding City and several Native American rock art sites. The next year, he created the Gold Butte National Monument, which covers 300,000 acres in Clark county."

Faraday Future's $1 Billion electric car factory in Nevada stopped in its tracks

2017-07-11T13:25:00-04:00

This is the second and likely final time construction will be halted on the one million square foot plant, which according to The Verge, was going to be Faraday Future's way of competing with fellow electric car manufacturer Tesla.

Faraday Future's "FFZero1 Concept Prototype." Image: Wikipedia

As the article notes:

It was just five months ago that FF was claiming that it was finally restarting construction of its proposed factory in North Las Vegas, almost 11 months after construction was first halted amid the company’s ongoing financial woes. Now it looks like that factory will never be built, as FF is reportedly looking into pursuing less ambitious (re: cheaper) options.

AECOM halts work on Faraday Future's $1-Billion Nevada factory

2016-11-22T15:05:00-05:00

Faraday Future’s future is looking bleaker. After the electric car start-up failed to pay millions of dollars in bills, its contractor Monday halted work on Faraday’s $1-billion North Las Vegas, Nev., car factory. [...] The contractor is Aecom, the Los Angeles-based engineering giant. [...] Faraday failed to pay $21 million due to Aecom in September and owed $25 million in October and $12 million in November, according to Aecom.

Faraday Future previously in the Archinect news:

AECOM to build $1B electric vehicle plant in Vegas

2016-10-19T19:08:00-04:00

Aecom, America’s largest design engineer, will have its skills tested with a contract to build a high-tech factory for Chinese electric vehicle start-up Faraday Future (FF) in Las Vegas. The work will have a construction value of $500m, signed on a guaranteed maximum price basis, but FF has said in the past it wants the factory built in half the normal time. In all, FF is reported to be investing $1bn in its new plant.

Revisiting the urban plan of Burning Man

2016-08-30T14:41:00-04:00

When a group of Burners describing themselves as the Black Rock City Ministry of Urban Planning announced a design competition last fall for a new urban plan for Burning Man, Phil Walker had never given the matter much thought. “I’m actually not a Burner. I’ve never done it,” says Walker, the senior associate vice president for CallisonRTKL, an architecture firm and design consultancy. “Maybe a bit of vicarious living for a middle-aged suburban dad is what appealed to me.”

"So Walker didn’t set about to change the orientation of Black Rock City [...] instead, he built out a “kit of parts” for simple streetscape interventions that he says can have a dramatic impact on urban flow and cultural space."

Related Burning Man stories in the Archinect news:

Tesla's 5.8 million square foot "Gigafactory" to open in 2017

2016-07-27T13:38:00-04:00

Sixty-five hundred people and a sizable compliment of robots will work in the enormous, solar-panel topped, rail-adjacent Gigafactory when it opens in 2017, a structure which is described as a "joint venture" between Tesla, Panasonic and other supply partners. In this case, the drive to inexpensively produce lithium-ion batteries has created the need for the colossal structure.

As Wired notes:

The assembly lines will do everything from make the individual cells—cylinders a bit bigger than an AA battery—to assembling the immense packs that power a Model S or store energy in someone’s garage. Tesla doesn’t disclose its costs, but says doing it all in-house will drive down the cost of a battery by 30 percent.

Tesla in the news:

'Hyperloop as transportation’s new girlfriend: mysterious, unencumbered, exciting, expensive.'

2016-05-24T13:12:00-04:00

“What we’re seeing right now is what I saw in 1996,” said Mr. Lloyd, a former president of sales and development at Cisco. “We all had I.P. routers and everything was done a certain way. At Cisco, we said, ‘You can carry that over the Internet,’ and everyone said, ‘No.’ But those high-speed networks made the Internet possible.” Hyperloop, he said, “will do to the physical world what the Internet did to the digital one.”

Allison Arieff (editorial director at SPUR and former Dry Futures judge) has some questions for Hyperloop One (formerly Hyperloop Technologies) after a propulsion test demonstration in the Nevada desert. While the company has managed remarkably fast developments in its tube technology for such high-speeds as the Hyperloop demands, it's nowhere near reality – and Arieff clearly articulates the (many) remaining concerns of such technology, after mere feasibility.

Related on Archinect:

Looking to buy a small town? This Nevada desert gem could be yours for $8 Million

2016-04-27T13:58:00-04:00

An hour south from the bright lights of the Las Vegas strip, a tiny town in Nevada is up for sale. Cal-Nev-Ari, Nev. (pronounced Cal-Nev-Air) is off a lonely stretch of Highway 95, surrounded by distant mountains and endless desert. The town isn't far from the California and Arizona borders [...]. If you can afford the $8 million asking price, you'll get the airstrip, the diner and the town's only casino. That includes a dozen old slot machines and a smokey bar. This place has character.

Faraday Future holds groundbreaking ceremony for $1B Nevada factory

2016-04-14T12:27:00-04:00

Electric car company Faraday Future held a groundbreaking ceremony for its $1 billion manufacturing facility outside Las Vegas this afternoon, attended by Nevada governor Brian Sandoval, North Las Vegas mayor John Lee, and a host of other officials. There wasn't any actual "ground" broken, though, really — Faraday still needs to grade the land, which it says it will do "soon."

[...]

"Faraday's VP of Global Manufacturing Dag Reckhorn says that they are "moving extremely quickly for a project of this size" — a 3 million square-foot factory on 900 acres that the company claims will bring 4,300 jobs to the region over a decade — with plans to build in just two years instead of the normal four."

Watch the cached livestream here (video starts at 32:59):

Listen to our recent One-to-One conversation with Richard Kim of Faraday Future:

For more on the future of self-driving automobiles, check out these links:

New Nevada solar plant can store heat from the sun for up to 10 hours – with molten salt

2016-04-05T13:50:00-04:00

Renewable energy like solar and wind is booming across the country as the costs of production have come down. But the sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't blow when we need it to. [...] A company called SolarReserve may have found a solution: It built a large solar plant in the Nevada desert that can store heat from the sun and generate electricity for up to 10 hours even after sundown.

A look inside Tesla's growing Gigafactory: "It will blow your mind."

2015-11-19T13:24:00-05:00

Musk had warned me that the scale of the place would be overwhelming. "It will blow your mind. You see it in person and then realize, Fuck, this is big." He was right. It was impossible not to feel awestruck by the sprawling, 71-foot-tall structure stretched out, miragelike, before me as I drove into a shallow canyon. [...] When the Gigafactory is finished, it will be only slightly smaller than Boeing’s Everett, Washington, plant, which is the world’s largest building by volume.

#ProtectCity campaign launched in support of Michael Heizer's "City"

2015-03-19T19:00:00-04:00

Located in Garden Valley, Nevada, Michael Heizer’s City is one of the most significant works of art in the United States. Begun by Heizer in 1972, the project is now in its final stage of completion. It will, in the future, be accessible by the public. [...] To see the land developed into a site for military, energy, or waste purposes, would ruin it forever. After 43 years of work, can it really be destroyed like this?

Notable American museums publicly expressed their support on Twitter via #protectCITY. The LACMA petition to protect Michael Heizer's City and the Basin and Range can be reached here.

Previously on Archinect: Michael Heizer's massive desert sculpture, "City", will make you cry

Michael Heizer's massive desert sculpture, "City", will make you cry

2014-11-04T17:37:00-05:00

“He didn’t like people coming into the studio and seeing the paintings before they were finished,” he said. “This is one of the most ambitious artworks ever envisioned, certainly in the United States.” Heizer's mammoth masterpiece in the desert is called "City." “It was in 1994 when I first saw it, unfinished,” Govan said. “You do cry. You think, what an incredibly beautiful ambition.”

Get Lectured: UNLV School of Architecture Fall '13

2013-09-19T10:52:00-04:00

Archinect's Architecture School Lecture Guide for Fall 2013

Here on Archinect we recently launched "Get Lectured", where we'll feature a school's lecture series--along with their snazzy posters--for the current season. Check back regularly to stay up-to-date and mark your calendars for any upcoming lectures you don't want to miss.

We're featuring another Fall '13 + Spring '14 list, this time from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Architecture.

Want to share your school's lecture series? Send us your school's lecture series poster and details to connect@archinect.com.

All lectures are free and open to the public. Lectures will be held at 6:00 pm at the UNLV Downtown Design Center at the Historic Fifth Street School in the Auditorium: 401 South 4th Street - Las Vegas, NV

SEPTEMBER

September 9
Dan Sesil / Partner at LERA
The Structure of Things

September 23
Rick Joy / Principal at Rick Joy Architects
Taking the Time

OCTOBER

October 14
Mark Jarzombek / Associate Dean of th...

Google Lobbies Nevada To Allow Self-Driving Cars

2011-05-11T11:06:00-04:00

Google’s self-driving cars might soon become more than a pet project. The company is quietly lobbying legislators to make Nevada the first state to allow autonomous vehicles on public roads. Google has created a line of self-driving hybrids, including six Toyota Priuses and an Audi TT. The vehicles have been tested on more than 140,000 miles of California roads, at least 1,000 of which were driven fully autonomously.