inside the spiral
Before I visited Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in 2017, I thought I knew it well. The earthworks has been photographed from above for more than half a century, its 1,500-foot coil of basalt and earth strewn across Utah’s Great Salt Flats.
That familiar image disappeared as soon as I stepped into the open air maze. I was surrounded by an endless expanse of land and uninterrupted sky, and every curve was followed by another ray of pale salt. The trail had a single track, which kept turning as the landscape kept repeating itself.
Spiral Jetty’s only destination is its own center (or exit), and until then you’ll lose all sense of direction or scale. Smithson wrote that the scale in Spiral Jetty works through uncertainty, something that can only really be felt by walking. The center offers no view, just the same expanse of emptiness, before the trail beckons you to turn around and do the whole thing again in reverse.
Within this work of his land artthe visitor really moves away from reality, he takes his time to experience absolute nothingness, only mud, salt crystals, stones, water.
Spiral jettyGreat Salt Lake, Utah, 2017 | image © designboom
the joy of unnecessary travel
While the corridor’s job is to transport us efficiently between rooms, the labyrinth reverses this logic of enhanced connection. It extends the movement until the movement itself becomes the program. What could be a short distance is drawn into a meandering network, with the destination becoming secondary to the walk.
This is where the maze becomes a play space: it is a place to spend time freely, to remove yourself from serious work. It is a temporary world where ordinary progress is irrelevant and asks the visitor to enter without any promise of utility. The play comes through the indirect path itself, through the strange freedom of moving toward a destination that offers little beyond the chance to eventually reverse course and get out.
Longleat Hedge MazeWiltshire, England, the world’s largest hedge maze | image © Jason Hawkes/PA
a maze is a puzzle, a maze is free time
What many do not realize is that the terms maze and labyrinth have two very different meanings. A maze branches and offers choices and dead ends along the way. His game comes through uncertainty. You make decisions, take wrong turns, retrace your steps, and keep testing the plan against your memory of where you’ve been. Getting lost is part of the thrill, and finding your way out brings the satisfaction of solving the space.
Meanwhile, a classic maze follows a continuous path to the center and back again. There are no decisions to be made and no wrong turns to correct. The 19th century Austrian painter Hermann Kern described it as a choreographed movement pattern.
After all decision-making is removed, the walker should move loosely and without strategy. The experience becomes rhythmic and meditative, allowing the gradual suspension of ordinary time. The maze invites play through choice, while the maze invites it through delivery.
The BIG mazeBjarke Ingels Group, National Building Museum, Washington DC, 2014 | image courtesy BIG
from sacred geometry to modern art
The labyrinth reaches back thousands of years, from the Ancient Egyptians to the myth of the Minotaur, and reappears on ancient coins and Roman mosaics. During the Middle Ages, spiral geometries were placed on cathedral floors and walked as a form of ritual, before branching labyrinth hedges turned the idea into aristocratic garden fun.
In the early 1970s, Alice Aycock and Robert Morris brought the labyrinth into modern art. Aycock and Morris, pioneers of post-minimalism and land art, took the labyrinth out of the flatness of the diagram and built it around the visitor’s body.
by Aycock Labyrinth of 1972 formed five concentric wooden rings in a Pennsylvania field. With this work, he really hoped to create a moment of panic where escape became the walker’s sole concern. Two years later, Morris erected a modified Chartres labyrinth into eight-foot walls for Untitled (Labyrinth), replacing the gallery’s open circulation with a meandering path experienced step by step and in real time.
In both works, sculpture is no longer encountered all at once, as art becomes the meandering journey itself, along with sensations of movement and loss of perspective. Their version of the game retains an edge of unease, but still hinges on a voluntary decision to enter a temporary world where ordinary progress has been suspended.
Philadelphia Labyrinth, Robert Morris, 1974 | image via Wikiart
Borges: a new labyrinth is completed in Venice
This brings us to today where, in Venice, the Borges Labyrinth has reopened after an extensive restoration. This slippage between maze and labyrinth continues here, for despite its name, Randoll Coate’s Boxwood Garden is technically a labyrinth (a distinction Borges himself may have enjoyed).
From above, the design reads like an open book, with the author’s name woven through a larger pattern of symbols and branching lines. Once inside, this complete picture disappears into more than a kilometer of green corridors. The visitor can only see the route immediately ahead, trading the certainty of the plan for the pleasure of moving through it.
Borges Labyrinth, Venice, Italy, 2026 | Image courtesy of the Giorgio Cini Foundation
Masonic Labyrinth
More than a decade before his restoration, Borges helped inspire Franco Maria Ricci Masonic Labyrinth near Fontanellato, where around 300,000 bamboo plants rise between three and fifteen meters around a star-shaped pattern. Ritchie promised Borges in 1977 that he would build a huge labyrinth in the surrounding fields, and the cultural park finally opened in May 2015.
Crossroads and dead ends make this a veritable maze, while a pyramid chapel occupies its heart. Ricci’s 2014 book Labyrinths: The Art of the Maze documented the project as it took shape, turning the dense bamboo corridors into a series of dark photographs before visitors could walk down them. (Read designboom’s 2001 interview with Franco Maria Ricci here.)
