Robert Smithson's "Hotel Palenque"

A thread of comments on an earlier post got me thinking about Robert Smithson. Here's his Hotel Palenque (1969) lecture. I first heard the lecture when it was recreated by one of my professors in grad school. We had a bit of a disagreement about the lecture's intent--the professor seemed to think that Smithson was completely earnest whereas I felt that the lecture (which was originally given to architecture graduate students) was a little tongue-in-cheek (but also sincere).

Video courtesy of UbuWeb. Visit their site to download the video, read a critical essay on the lecture, and/or download an Acrobat file of the lecture's text.