Drawing upon the tradition of 18th - century travel books, Smithson here presented «anti-monuments,» tributes to suburban
sprawl and
urban growth that exemplified the decay and deterioration of all things: «One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of
gritty reason.»