COMPLETED
2023

LOCATION
American University Washington, DC

PRIMARY MATERIALS
Concrete paving
Natural cleft and polished granite boulders
Water
Adjacent landscaping

CONSULTANTS
Lee & Associates Landscape Architects
Davis Construction
Rugo Stone
Fountain Craft

PHOTOS
All photos from the second down
by Alan Karchmer

Sudama’s reveal on AU’s campus completes a journey that began in downtown Washington, DC. The work, originally titled Marabar, was commissioned for the plaza outside the National Geographic Society’s downtown headquarters in 1981 with the one caveat from the NGS that the plaza design was to feature rocks and water. Inspiration came from the rock cut caves of India following travel there in 1977, and in reading E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924). Forster describes the fictional Marabar Caves which were actually based on the real, ancient Barabar Caves in northeast India. The most prominent of these caves is named Sudama and was created over 3000 years ago.

“The Caves, with their rough natural exteriors and highly polished interiors, became my solution to the project—not as caves but as massive rough granite rocks with one, sometimes two, mirror-polished sides—to look as if a gigantic geode had been cracked open to straddle the 60-foot-long pool of water,” Zimmerman says. From its completion in 1984, the work remained an iconic fixture in front of the National Geographic Society’s headquarters until 2022 when it was reinvented for the American University site.

The AU site is totally different from the National Geographic headquarters. Instead of a rectangular narrow granite plaza between buildings, the new location is a large oval space with grass and trees. "I responded to the difference by making the pool longer and crescent shaped and adjusting the relationships of the large rocks to the changed form of the pool”. - from American University Newsletter