The American architectural firm of Sparano + Mooney in Salt Lake City, Utah and Los Angeles, CA, stands for sustainable and innovative buildings that are harmoniously embedded in spectacular mountain landscapes. In this volume, architectural critic Michael Webb presents ten projects with the aid of photographs, drawings, sketches and texts, visualizing the process by which architectural ideas are conceived and realized. The architects respond in their plans to the overwhelming natural surroundings with restrained forms and the innovative detailing of materials. The firm's models, sketches, conceptual drafts and fully executed buildings offer thoughtful perspective on developing architecture that thrives on the relationship between concept and place. Accompanying essays relate the buildings to their regional contexts and also highlight analogies to Land Art.

Robert Smithson's earthwork, Spiral Jetty (1970), an icon of the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, is located on the northern shores of Utah's Great Salt Lake. Smithson built a masterpiece from local materials, one that spirals counterclockwise into the lake and appears or is submerged with fluctuations in the lake's locally red, saline water. The Spiral Jetty Encyclo draws on Smithson's writings for encyclopedic entries that bring to light the context of the earthwork and Smithson's many points of reference in creating it. Visitors and armchair travelers, too, will discover how much significance Smithson placed on regional considerations, his immersion in natural history, his passion for travel, and his ability to use diverse mediums to create a cohesive and lasting work of art. Containing some 220 images, most of themin color, with some historical black and whites, The Spiral Jetty Encyclo lets readers explore the construction, connections, and significance of Smithson's 1,500-footlong curl into Great Salt Lake, created, in Smithson's words, of "mud, salt crystals, rocks, water."