Final Project: The Improbable Monument

For my improbable monument, I was inspired by the Nazca lines of the Peruvian high plains. The lines are hundreds of meters long and can really only be seen at an elevation of 300 feet or more overhead. These lines are over 1,500 years old and were basically unknown to the rest of the world until they were discovered by western researchers in South America while flying overhead in airplanes during the 1930‘s.

My idea is to create modern versions of these lines in an urban setting. The lines in Peru are primarily simplistic geometric representations of the natural world that surrounded the people who created them. Birds, monkeys, plants, reptiles, spiders. These were largely universal elements in these people’s daily life 1,500 years ago. Today, mankind has gone on to discover so much more within the same world, and I want to update this concept with universal symbolic language that can potentially last another 1,500 years (or more).

The creative difficulty mostly came from deciding what kind of images to choose for my project. I was able to collaborate with my classmates Jerry and Stephanie to brainstorm and refine my current idea. I threw out a bunch of ideas and they helped me decide which were more universal, relevant, and comprehendible to the greatest potential number of people. I decided that I wanted to show progression in human development from the primitive times of the creation of the original lines. The people who made those lines were very much more in tune with the natural world that surrounded them. Their entire understanding of their daily world was likely reflected in those line drawings on the ground. So I wanted to display something that speaks to people in our world, in our time. These new designs are not meant merely to complement and reference the old lines- but to contrast and push beyond them. The most basic elements that I decided to touch on were: Technology, Science, and Music.

Technology is one of the foundations of human evolution. We measure the early progression of our own race by the technologies we were governed by. Stone age, Bronze age, Iron age. The middle ages and beyond have abandoned this naming structure, but are no less reliant on their technology as their defining characteristics. The enlightenment ignited with the printing press and lead to advancements in the areas of philosophy, mathematics, government, etc. The industrial revolution practically speaks for itself. Humans have largely progressed through technological advancements made in agriculture, in weapons, and in transportation. From domestication of animals, to the wheel, to combustion engines and beyond. I decided that an airplane would be an appropriate modern design that is understandable, representative of technology (the shrinking of our modern world), and represented a major advancement in technology through the use of many technological innovations leading up to its initial creation and how it’s continued to change the course of human history and has enabled the world to be brought together in so many new ways.

The idea of science is kind of all encompassing, and it’s something that largely hadn’t been developed and explored by many cultures 1,500 years ago (or maybe had been- but had been all but forgotten by the collapse of these cultures). Our world today is built upon a foundation of gradually amassed scientific understanding and I wanted to do something that encompassed newer scientific arenas such as medicine and chemistry. I chose to go with a simple image of an atom. The atom is widely understood to be one of the most foundational building blocks of all matter and it’s something that our human culture has learned to harness in the time since the ancient people of Peru.

I chose Music as the final image. I wanted to do something with art- but since the original Nazca lines are already pretty advanced, representational 2D images, I wasn’t sure exactly how to properly illustrate advancements in the arts. It’s a complex and aesthetical concern, so I thought of more universal kinds of art and realized that music has grown and advanced so much as a universal art form in the time since the original Nazca lines were created. Music back then was largely rhythmic/percussive and they likely hadn’t developed instruments with complex note scales. Today, almost every country (including Peru) has traditional music made with string instruments. It’s a beautiful kind of expression that can cross all language barriers and has the power to unite us all as human beings. I went with a flying V guitar just because it has an iconic shape and a pretty, geometric design that is very much in tune with my other two illustrations.


I chose to place these giant lines around our fair city, and after much consideration, I chose my own neighborhood: the Sunset. There are a number of reasons for this: first of all- it’s the largest, and most level portion of the city. It also doesn’t have any high rise buildings or structures which might obstruct the view or the construction of this project. The flat grid would be probably the easiest place to create these monuments, and would make the mapping and advanced planning much easier. Each block is about 80 meters wide by about 270 meters long so that should give you a pretty good idea of how large these images will be. I figure that using reflective road paint would be the most reasonable way to make these markings. Some of them would take up the entire width of some streets, and these lines would naturally have to cover some houses from the roofs to the sides and all around.

This is probably what makes the project so improbable, of course. The cost alone would be a massive undertaking. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of reflective road paint can’t be cheap- and likewise, the city would probably insist on overseeing the construction, so there would be a lot of labor involved. There are also legal ramifications in the form of property owners rights and inevitable resistance from people who resent having their streets and homes painted over. It would almost certainly cost hundreds of millions of dollars- if not over a billion dollars to clear this project through to completion since it would be created amidst the citizens of this city. I think when it’s completed, though- it could be something truly spectacular. Visible by flying overhead in airplanes (or perhaps someday in flying cars!) this could be a permanent and unique monument to our times and could last into the future of all humanity.