Advice on building your own monolith
Stuck inside, looking at social media on your phone, bored with what’s on streaming, it could start to seem like a good idea. A monolith, you might reason, could add a glimmer of mystery to your local wilderness, might make people laugh, or at least distract them with a shiny object.
They’ve appeared in Utah, California and Romania. There’s a 3-foot one in downtown Fayetteville, N.C., and one on a beach of England’s Isle of Wight.
Of course, there are plenty of reasons not to build a monolith. Like legality: Trespassing on private land aside, it’s also illegal to install structures without authorization in many places, including on Utah’s millions of acres of federally managed public land, where a 10-foot stainless steel object was found last month, inspiring copycats around the world. Metalwork can be dangerous without training, and a large, unstable metal object could pose a danger to the people around it — and the environment. Still, people are making monoliths. And your own property is your own property. So if your front lawn’s holiday decorations are crying out for one, here are some things to think about.
The Utah monolith had stainless steel pieces fastened with rivets, officials said. Its interior, exposed in a video of four men carting it away in the dead of night, appeared to show a plywood frame.
“They’re pretty straightforward in construction and design,” said Anita La Scala, a founder of ARDA Studio, a theater and event design company in New York. Sheet metal is available in many sizes, said another ARDA founder and designer, Rob Bissinger, and the metal could be either fastened, welded or bent around a frame to form a monolith shape.
An interior frame can be made of plywood or a similar material cut into a triangular shape with a simple handsaw or a circle saw.
Special-effects artist Jamie Hyneman, who was a longtime host of the show Mythbusters, said a builder could coat the wood framing with epoxy to hold the sheet metal, and place another board on top with weights for a few hours to secure the construction.
He also outlined another, sturdier version of monolith that would use thick pieces of metal, cast into the corners of the triangular shape, to hold the three panels together. This might take more work in order to bevel the edges and create the corner fasteners, but a monolith could still be ready in a day or two.