Shot of the Day - # 54 - Hoover Dam Art

Winged Figures of the Republic, by Oskar Hansen [1935]

Hoover Dam (11 May 2009)

In 2009, I went to Las Vegas to stink up another tournament and see some of the nearby sights. The burgeoning Vegas metropolis could not exist without the ready source of fresh water in nearby Lake Mead. And Lake Mead would not exist without Hoover Dam.

Hoover Dam is one of those great Depression-era projects that many believe we are incapable of producing anymore. By 1936, a consortium of companies completed the job two years ahead of schedule…all after figuring out how to build a dam on a scale never attempted before.

Then, like the cherry on the sundae, they added some artwork. The dam straddles the Nevada-Arizona border and on the Nevada side, you will find two bronze giants.

Shiney Toes

Winged Figures of the Republic, by Oskar Hansen [1935]

Hoover Dam (11 May 2009)

Since the toes are the only part within reach,

visitors have (of course) rubbed them to a full shine.

I’m drawn to the heroic scale, the balance and the stark depiction of this classic art deco style…and then there’s this special abstract background of the jagged canyon rock wall that anchors the dam.

The winged figures are thirty feet high. As you can see, if you want to take a top-to-bottom, all-in picture, it becomes a stick figure. Sadly, I didn’t have enough sense then to get close and shoot just the torso and head but there’s always the miracle of cropping.

Winged Figures of the Republic, by Oskar Hansen [1935]

Hoover Dam (11 May 2009)

With the bronze figure more than a half inch thick, each statue contains more than four tons of metal. The figure rests on large blocks of polished igneous diorite. The clever way the blocks and statue were placed without any damage is noteworthy. Each was first positioned on a block of ice and slowly and precisely guided into place as the ice melted.

The sculptor, a Norwegian immigrant waxed poetic that the figures represent the triumph of the American spirit. They express "the immutable calm of intellectual resolution, and the enormous power of trained physical strength, equally enthroned in placid triumph of scientific accomplishment." [emphasis added]

Maybe someone at MAGA Central can confirm that was when America was great.

One day, we will return to Lake Mead because it presents a vivid illustration of the challenges of populating the arid west. While the dam is a marvel of twentieth-century engineering, the dwindling reservoir behind it portends something far more serious.