Requiem for The Hoover Dam
By Catherine Sulpizio · 15 October 2024
Note from the Editors: This essay is contained in our fifth print edition, Futurism Reloaded.
Could we build the Hoover Dam today?
In a scene in Goethe’s Faust, the central character recounts to Mephistopheles the experience of surveying a vast expanse of ocean. For the Romantics, the ocean was a living symbol of Nature’s sublimity. Faust’s blood is of a different spirit. He displays no such reverence for the tide’s repetitive ebb and flow, only annoyance at the ocean’s impudent breach of man’s ancestral dominion, the land. The inborn German drive for technical mastery has received few sharper presentations than Faust in this episode: so dissatisfied by Nature, he resolves to build a dam…
Flowing 1,400 miles, the Colorado River, the great antagonist of American engineers in the 20th century, was originally christened Rio del Tizon – Firebrand River – by Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century. Later maps designated it Rio Colorado de los Martyrs – Red River of the Martyrs – a moniker later shortened to its current name. In 1857, Lieutenant Joseph C. Ives led the first expedition of those fierce red torrents. Ives made it four hundred miles upstream of Yuma before his steamboat foundered on a rock. Forced to continue in a skiff to the place now known as “Black Canyon,” Ives later reported, “Ours was the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by Nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed.”
He was wrong on at least one of these counts. Eight years before Ives’ expedition the physician Oliver Meredith Wozencraf had found himself stranded on the bank of the dry ravine just northwest of Yuma, the Alamo Barranca, while making a perilous leg of his journey west to California. Having crossed the dunes, Wozencraf overlooked the Salton Sink, a brine-encrusted depression formed by the accretions of silt carried by the Colorado River into a natural dam. Dehydration and sunstroke from the scorching May heat must have lent Wozencraf what William Blake called prophecy: a hallucination of a paradise regained from the alluvial soil, springing from channels of water diverted from the Colorado River through the barranca.
By 1901, that “profitless” stretch of the Colorado Basin was inspiring bold efforts to reshape the alien terrain in service of civilization. Proving Blake’s proto-futurist maxim “where Man is not, Nature is barren,” the California Development Company redirected the Red River with 50 miles of canals, feeder channels, and ditches to the Sink’s northwestern slope, where gravity pulled the water down to birth the Salton Sea. Wozencraf’s desert vision was realized: in three years, the aptly named Imperial Valley was transformed into a booming agricultural hub whose production outpaced all estimates.
Careful readers of John Milton’s intricate account of paradise will find a foreshadowing of the Fall hidden in the detail of a “mazie error” that ornaments the currents of Eden’s four rivers. So too did danger lurk in California’s artificial Eden. By 1905, the life-imparting silt, gradually built up through heavy rainfall, dammed up the channels and put immense pressure on the intakes – Paradise giving way to a Great Flood. Only after two years, and immense cost, was the Rockwood’s Gate intake finally cleared, with a chain of protective levees constructed in 1910 to prevent further ruptures.
It would be over two decades before a more permanent solution would emerge to manage the Colorado River’s anarchic currents, which by now were regularly threatening to depose the (once) Imperial Valley. But such a solution could not be achieved in the conflicting patchwork of state, and regional authorities that had hitherto managed the River among themselves. Only the Federal Reclamation Service was capable of operating at the necessary scale. What followed was a labyrinthine process of politicking, bureaucratic maneuvering, and lobbying, that, by 1922, resulted in the Boulder Canyon Project Act, a piece of legislation proposing what would be the largest civil engineering project in American history, and which reflected a significant transfer in political influence to the American West.
It is fitting that the ferocious genius loci of the Wild West would inspire its own distinctive technological Colossus, the hydroelectric dam. In Man and Technics, Oswald Spengler defines the Faustian spirit as a will to transform the world “by the force of its practical energy and the gigantic power of its technical processes.” Dynamism is the essence of Western technics, which is concerned “not with stuffs, but with forces,” and with the practical conversion of force to ends, and the multiplication of man’s ends.
Frank Crowe, the General Construction Superintendent of the Hoover Dam, was one of those brilliant men Spengler approvingly called a “director” rather than an “executant” – an obsessive engineering virtuoso who despised desk work, preferring instead to be directly involved in the construction sites, where he commanded loyalty and respect among his workers. A veteran of the Reclamation Service who had long harbored an insatiable desire to build the Dam, Crowe spearheaded the Six Companies consortium of West Coast firms that won the bid and broke ground in July 1930.
“Hurry Up Crowe” was recognized by colleagues for his ingenious methods, instinctive frugality, and organizational elegance. He was also infamous for his stringency towards deadlines, a tendency borne out in ruthless calculations that often traded worker safety for efficiency. The brutal cost of human life, which saw 112 recorded deaths and countless unrecorded ones in the construction of the Hoover Dam, reflected the significance of the project as a symbol of American heroism. Anticipating the massive public works projects of the New Deal Era, and the shift from the old liberal order to a new, federally-planned economy, the Hoover Dam employed 21,000 workers toiling for 12-hour, seven-day shifts. Work carried on in temperatures that reached 115 degrees, while housing was shared with tarantulas and snakes.
Engineers had selected the same Black Canyon that ended Ives’ expedition, with its narrow pass of rust-hued metamorphic rock, to frame the dam. Twelve miles of diversion tunnels were necessary to redirect the river during construction. Famed “Highscalers” rappelled up and down the canyon walls placing the dynamite that would blast open the solid mountain rock. With the riverbed drained, construction of the power plant, four intake towers, and the dam itself could start.
In 1932, workers began pouring 3,250,000 cubic yards of concrete into the distinctive “arch-gravity dam” shape, designed to absorb the downstream pressure of the water across its convex back and distribute the force through its wider foundation. The process necessitated continuous cement mixing, transfer, and pouring, and a novel cooling plant which allowed construction to minimize time loss from cement curing. The final result in 1936, finished two years ahead of schedule, was a starkly imperial concrete behemoth that protruded out of the irregular Martian rock, the bulk of its 726-feet height and 1,244-feet curved crest marshaling the Colorado into a tamed cyan band that placidly flowed downstream.
Hoover Dam workers apply a coat of paint to one of the dam's spillways (1936)
Hoover Dam
Wolfgang Schivelbusch observed that “all political systems have showcased projects through which they present themselves to the world and expect their aims, methods, and ideals to be judged.” For its part, the Hoover Dam was immediately interpreted by one art critic as “a kind of giant symbol. It is the symbol of the new man, a new world, a new way of life.” The dam, as a multipurpose machine, converted the chaos of nature into an engine of civilization: preventing floods, irrigating almost a million acres of Southwest land, storing water, creating new recreation in the manmade Lake Mead, and last but not least, generating hydroelectric energy.
The style of the Hoover Dam expressed the futuristic machine-consciousness that produced it. At the zenith of America’s rapid technological growth of the 1930s, the correlative pattern language that emerged was Art Deco. The style itself was first codified during the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. While America was invited to participate, the Chamber of Commerce Secretary, a certain Herbert Hoover, declined on the grounds that there was no modern design in America. Nonetheless, Hoover sent as an emissary to the Paris Exposition, the Director of the American Association of Museums, Charles Richards, who recognized its cultural significance. Eager to modernize an immature American design sector still indebted to Neoclassicism and Colonialism, Richards organized a traveling exhibition through the United States in the following year that inspired a spate of independent exhibits. This style fused classical references drawn from archaeological discoveries with a modern machine sensibility that emphasized the verticality of the skyscraper, the dynamic geometry of the machine, and the speed of the engine. Unadorned elements conveyed the simple efficiency of an episteme that combined scientific ingenuity with the industrial development crucial to regularize the national economy.
Recognizing the dam’s significance as a monument to the American technical spirit, the Bureau of Reclamation hired the British architect Gordan Kaufmann to work with the engineers to give the structure a unified style. Kaufmann proved a talented adopter of the precepts of modernism: the dam was “the result of pure engineering,” he wrote, and, accordingly, “[its] architecture followed the structural design.” Kaufmann’s aesthetic functionalism echoed Antonio Sant’Elia’s “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture”: “We must find our inspiration in the new mechanical world we have created, and our architecture must be its most beautiful expression.” Kaufmann decisively excised Neoclassical elements originally proposed. In the place of a pair of eagles, an overhanging balcony, and decorative motifs, Kaufmann chose instead to emphasize the stark oblique and elliptical lines of the dam, the very elements that Sant’Elia celebrated for their expression of force.
Gazing on the dam from the visitor center perched on the southwestern flank of the canyon, the eye naturally glides up the massive, convex face, its lengthy track arrested only by four rectilinear observation towers fitted with gleaming aluminum fins and a series of buttresses below the parapet that cast knifelike shadows. A curving row of four intake towers protrudes from the northern side, styled with the same rectilinear motif in their concrete columns and narrow blue-stained windows. At night, their domed lights give forth a spectral orange glow. The unused massive curved spillways designed to efficiently channel water spilling from vaulted gates could be found in a de Chirico painting. Altogether, the effect is of an austere fortress that has colonized an alien landscape.
Kaufmann also included more ornamental Art Deco elements. Two elevator houses display bas-relief sandstone carvings, beneath which gleam the opulent wrought brass doors of the lift. Some five hundred feet below the crest in the hydroelectric plant itself, visitors find terrazzo floors inlaid with Indio designs that are less a homage to the site’s Southwestern cultures than a Faustian reinterpretation of them: an abstract design composed of a series of concentric geometric patterns is not an indigenous solar deity, but a Francis turbine. If there is American animism it is centrifugal force.
However, the most evocative expression of this Art Deco style is a mysterious pair of sculptures, “Winged Figures of the Republic,” constructed by the Polish sculptor Oskar Hansen. Perched on rectilinear bases of highly polished jet-black diorite in front of a craggy red rock canyon face, the figures sit perfectly erect, their arms drawn upwards and their feet pointed downwards – a striking position that creates maximum verticality, Augmenting the steep lines of the dam’s enigmatic ambassadors are wings that extend from each side of their rib cages and run parallel with the raised arms until they almost completely subsume the appendages altogether. The expressions of the faces remain inscrutable, beyond a somberness that only accentuates their patrician features.
As Hansen explains in an essay, these faces are of the American type, that is, “a virile type of man, inured through constant adjustments into quickness of wit and beaten by privations and the strong winds of mountain and plain.” Hansen was keenly aware of the monumental function of his project, that is, its capacity to “[give] meaning to man’s other works by interpreting man to other men in terms of man itself.” By rendering into sculpture the historically specific determination of American genius, its “mental timbre,” such a work would display “the very best within the reach of the aspirations and endowment of the race.”
Those who know how to distill spiritual and historical forces of their age into their artwork don’t do so as a self-conscious reference, but because they are aware that future ages will view their work as a sort of time capsule, discerning from it arcs of destiny only latent during its creation. In crystallizing the spirit of the age, Hansen’s eye looked forward to the diminishing horizon of the future, where his message would be transmitted. Between the twin messengers, just below the flagpole a celestial map lies embedded in the terrazzo, diagramming the exact configuration of the stars during the dam’s dedication, “a split second petrified on the face of the universal clock.” No ordinary horoscope, Hansen’s chart traces the 26,000-year cycle of the “Platonic Year,” the time it takes for the earth’s wobbling axis to complete a full circle, during which our North Pole star will change six times, and our seasons will invert and revert.
It is obvious Hansen chose a method for timekeeping that would be legible to civilizations alien to ours – a symbolic message in a bottle as durable as the dam itself, which, as its tour guides inform visitors, will last a thousand years without any maintenance. For this very reason, Hansen’s star chart underscores the fragility of our endeavor. Humanity’s triumphant march out of shadowy prehistory occupies not even a quarter of the ecliptic of time. In the vast counterclockwise cycle, Hansen marks the apexes of civilization: the Pyramids of Giza at around 7 PM, Christ’s Nativity at just before 6. At 5 PM, we find the Hoover Dam.
“Our huge watch is running down,” Hansen wrote. Hansen predicted that Earth’s nemesis, “the silvery moon,” would continue to warp the Earth’s midsection, slowing her rotation into an endless day until tension between the two spinning spheres would slacken altogether, and repulsion would give way to irresistible attraction. Dubious speculative cosmology aside, Hansen’s statement is a reminder of the perennial appeal of apocalypticism. Whether global warming or Armageddon or the Singularity, apocalypse is seductive because of how gamely it lays waste to superstitions of progress we know we should know better than to harbor.
Seeing the dam in 1967, Joan Didion was haunted by an Ozymandias-like vision of “a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.” Writing at the high noon of American greatness, Didion nonetheless detected the twilight of the empire haunting that Southwestern colossus.
When I first visited the dam in March of this year, I was surprised by how its grandeur perturbed me, much like how the ocean reminded Faust of man’s impotence. This sublime American monument struck me as a relic belonging to both a distant past and an unfamiliar future. What I realized was that the dam’s affective force resided not in its ability to relay an arc of historical continuity between itself and visitors, but in this very disjunction. To look upon the Hoover Dam is to experience an inverted nostalgia – a strange anticipatory feeling that the future has already fled from us. Does anyone believe we could build the Hoover Dam today?
