BY ZACH MORTICE
A basin and spillway near Las Vegas. Image courtesy of the Center for Land Use Interpretation Photo Archive.
On the outskirts of the parched city of Las Vegas are dozens of basins dug into the earth, connected to hundreds of miles of arterial concrete channels that weave through the city to Lake Mead, some 30 miles to the east. Begun in the mid-1980s, this $2 billion land works infrastructure project is now 80 percent complete. The full plan calls for 121 basins and 800 miles of channel.
What?s the purpose of all this megascaled trench work" Las Vegas, plopped arbitrarily in the Mojave Desert with no permanent source of surface water and annual average rainfall of four inches, is prone to flash floods. These basins, spillways, and channels collect rainwater and whisk it away just every so often. This paradox is the subject of Desert Ramparts: Defending Las Vegas from the Flood, at the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles. Up through mid-September, its eerily steady gaze highlights this surreal and mostly unused infrastructure.
From its position in a riverless valley, Las Vegas can be flooded by heavy rainfall from all sides, hence its patchwork of detention basins and channels. It?s a perfect fit for the CLUI, which specializes in documenting the drama and curiosity of land use, broadly defined?fixed locations that work as ?cultural inscriptions, either incidentally or intently,? says CLUI program manager and exhibit curator Matthew ...