Qualla: The Vertical Earth Kilometer

The Vertical Earth Kilometer: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Everything you can see of it is a brass circle five centimetres across, set flush into a square of red sandstone in a Kassel park. Step on that circle and you have stood on the entire visible surface of a sculpture that continues, straight down, for one kilometre. Walter De Maria's The Vertical Earth Kilometer has been in the ground on Friedrichsplatz since 1977, when it was installed for documenta 6, and it is not coming out. Eighteen tons of solid brass, driven through six geological layers beneath a city square, of which the public is shown roughly the area of a coin. It is an artwork you have to take on trust, and it knows exactly what it is asking.

The Vertical Earth Kilometer: Seventy-Nine Days of Drilling

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The borehole went down a thousand metres, cutting through six distinct geological layers, and the drilling took seventy-nine days. Kassel had to listen to every one of them. Into the finished shaft went 167 brass rods, screwed together end to end to form a single continuous rod f...

The Vertical Earth Kilometer: Three-Quarters of a Million Marks for a Disc

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The people of Kassel were not charmed. The bill came to 750,000 Deutsche Marks, something on the order of two million US dollars in 2016 values, and what the city got for it could not be seen. Weeks of drilling noise, and then a small brass circle in the pavement. The objection i...

The Vertical Earth Kilometer: Minimal, Conceptual, Land

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Documenta describes the piece as sitting inside all three of the significant artistic strategies of its period at once. It has the stripped geometry of Minimal art, the primacy of idea over object that defines Conceptual art, and the literal engagement with the earth that made La...

The Vertical Earth Kilometer: The Companion Piece

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two years later, in 1979, De Maria built the counterpart in a street-level storefront in SoHo, New York. The Broken Kilometer uses the same brass, the same diameter and the same total length, but cut into 500 rods of two metres each and laid out on the floor in five rows of a hun...

The Vertical Earth Kilometer: Taking It on Faith

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Dia Art Foundation maintains The Vertical Earth Kilometer as one of the twelve locations and sites in its care, and it has been on permanent view - a phrase that asks for some generosity - since 1977. No visitor can verify any of it. You cannot see the rod, measure it, or wat...