The island of Manhattan in the US was formed over the course of
more than 500 million years, shaped by metamorphic pressure,
continental drift, glacial deposits, erosion, and rampant real
estate development. The island of Robert Smithson was formed
over about a week, in a ragged-looking barge yard on Staten
Island, shaped by a public art group, a landscape architect, a
contractor, an engineer, a project manager and various other
dedicated conceptual art workers using a 9m to 27m flat-decked
barge, 10 trees, 3 huge rocks, a bunch of shrubs, rolls of sod,
a whole lot of dirt and even more ingenuity. The result, which
will begin daily travels today along Manhattan's shores, is much
more than just a week's work. It is the culmination of more than
30 years of sporadic efforts to build the ambitious floating
artwork that Smithson sketched out in a rough drawing three
years before he died in a plane crash in 1973, an image that
showed a tiny, forested, man-made island being towed by tugboat
with the city's skyline i