Hoover Dam
— a wall of concrete holding back a desert sea.
Not only on a wall.
“Hoover Dam blocks the Colorado River in Black Canyon between Nevada and Arizona, holding back Lake Mead. It is a concrete arch-gravity dam more than 220 metres high, finished in 1936 two years ahead of schedule. The Art Deco intake towers and the original brass relief work by Oskar Hansen still face the morning sun. Below the dam the river runs cold and green toward the Grand Canyon.
Hoover Dam, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Hoover Dam sits in Black Canyon on the Colorado River about 50 kilometres southeast of Las Vegas, on the border between Clark County, Nevada and Mohave County, Arizona. The structure is 221 metres tall and 379 metres along the crest, holding back Lake Mead, the largest reservoir by capacity in the United States. Construction ran from 1931 to 1936 under the Bureau of Reclamation; the contracting consortium was Six Companies, Inc. The dam carries U.S. Route 93 traffic only locally now, since the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge opened downstream in 2010.
The dam is monolithic concrete poured in interlocking blocks, cooled by more than 950 kilometres of one-inch steel pipe running river water through the curing mass. Without it the concrete would still be setting today. The exterior is Art Deco throughout: the architect Gordon B. Kaufmann simplified the original engineering design into the dark intake towers, the terrazzo floors, and the winged figures and star map of Oskar J. W. Hansen's plaza, oriented to the date of dedication, September 30, 1935.
Lake Mead extends roughly 180 kilometres upriver behind the dam when full, with a maximum depth around 160 metres. It has not been full since 1983. Two decades of drought across the Colorado Basin have pulled the surface down more than 50 metres from its high mark; the white mineral 'bathtub ring' on the canyon walls measures that loss. The reservoir supplies water and hydroelectric power to Nevada, Arizona, and southern California, and is managed by the Bureau of Reclamation under the Colorado River Compact of 1922.