Qualla: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill

Broken Circle/Spiral Hill: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerardus, Public domain. "This is a major work, I want to have good reproductions in magazines. I want the piece to remain forever. Please help!" Robert Smithson wrote that to Wim Beeren, the Dutch curator of the 1971 Sonsbeek exhibition, after finishing the only large-scale earthwork he ever made outside the United States. It sits in a former sand quarry on the edge of Emmen, in the province of Drenthe: a 140-foot circle cut by a canal of yellow and white sand jutting into a flooded pit, and beside it a 75-foot hill spiraling upward in black topsoil and pale sand. He built it the summer after completing Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake, which Smithson had finished in April 1970. Two years later he was dead, killed in a plane crash at thirty-five while surveying another piece in Texas. The Dutch still have his piece. They are still figuring out how to keep it.

Image: Gerardus | Public domain

Broken Circle/Spiral Hill: Why Emmen

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Niels Elgaard Larsen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Smithson was fascinated by what he called the constructed landscape of the Netherlands - a country argued out of the sea by dikes and pumps and centuries of stubborn engineering. He was drawn to landscapes that suggested deep time and to landscapes scarred by industry, and he wan...

Image: Niels Elgaard Larsen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Broken Circle/Spiral Hill: The Accidental Center

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gouwenaar, Public domain. When the construction crews started excavating the bed of the Broken Circle canal, they uncovered a glacial erratic - a single huge boulder, dropped by the same ice that built the moraine. It sat exactly where Smithson did not want it. Moving it proved impractical. Removing it wo...

Image: Gouwenaar | Public domain

Broken Circle/Spiral Hill: Centrifugal and Centripetal

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerardus, Public domain. Smithson described his two forms as opposites in motion. The Broken Circle in the water, with its straight inner canal slicing the disc and a small jetty extending outward, he called centrifugal - flying apart. The Spiral Hill beside it, climbing inward in a tight curl, was centr...

Image: Gerardus | Public domain

Broken Circle/Spiral Hill: A Gift, Without Instructions

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hay Kranen, CC BY 4.0. Smithson meant the piece to last. In a 1972 letter he described it as a gift to the Netherlands or the Dutch people. But the practical details - who would mow the slopes, who would pay to dredge the canal, who would replace the sand when the lake water ate it away - he never quit...

Image: Hay Kranen | CC BY 4.0