Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) Reopens

Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room, 1977. © Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: John Cliett

By Hannah Gompertz
Director of Communications & Marketing

Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) fills an entire apartment in a tucked-away SoHo loft at 141 Wooster Street, New York. Maintained by Dia, this permanent site is the third and largest version of the work to be constructed. Previous Earth Rooms were executed at the Munich gallery of Heiner Friedrich (one of Dia’s three founders) in 1968 and the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1974.

Like those prior iterations, The New York Earth Room was originally conceived as an ephemeral installation. Presented in Friedrich’s commercial gallery, it was available for sale and scheduled to run for three months from October 1, 1977, to January 31, 1978. However, once the work was installed, Friedrich and his partners at Dia decided to transform the space into a permanent home for the work. Between 1978 and 1979 the gallery was closed to the public as it underwent renovations, after which the work’s ownership was transferred to Dia Art Foundation. The New York Earth Room reopened as a permanent installation that is free to the public in 1980.

The original press release deliberately and matter-of-factly describes the elements of the work according to De Maria’s style: 220 cubic yards of earth (consisting of 180 cubic yards of earth mix [peat and bark] and 42 cubic yards of earth); 3,600 square feet of floor space; a 21-inch depth of materials; and a total weight of 220,000 lbs. Despite these specific declarations concerning measurement, the artist developed a level of flexibility around the work’s components. Initially, the work’s cubic yardage of material had to remain the same, while the depth or square footage covered and number of access points could vary according to the architecture of the space. When The New York Earth Room opened permanently to the public, De Maria increased the cubic yards of earth to 250, increasing the total weight to 280,000 lbs, and ultimately raising the depth to 22 inches. Although De Maria created one singular viewing position at the entry to the 141 Wooster Street site, he stipulated that future installations realized in other spaces could have multiple, so long as the earth itself was able to flow continuously throughout the area that it inhabited.

Today, the 3,600-square-foot SoHo space remains filled with earth to a depth of 22 inches, offering a monumental-but-muted encounter with the work. The sounds of the city are filtered and distant, the air feels moist, and the scent of earth is overwhelming. Now more than forty-three years old, the installation appears timeless and unchanged, a silent witness to an evolving city. De Maria’s preoccupation with material, natural environment, scale, and time is evident.

Following its closure due to COVID-19, The New York Earth Room reopens for timed visitation on October 10, 2020. Booking is available here. In addition to The New York Earth Room, Dia maintains a number of other permanent sites including De Maria’s The Broken Kilometer (1979) in New York City, The Lightning Field (1977) in western New Mexico, and The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany.

Press release, Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room, 1977. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation Archives.