A Bigger Grand Canyon

How BIG is it?

“Leave it as it is.
The ages have been at work on it,
and man can only mar it.”
— Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt (1858–1919), 26th President of the United States, speaking in defence of the canyon against commercial exploitation.

In one of our recent Insights, “All this I have seen…” inspired by Gerald Durrell’s love letter to his future wife, we asked: can buildings and architecture move us as deeply as nature does?
We offered it not as an answer, but as a signpost, an invitation for reflection.

This Insight continues that exploration, but here, the protagonist is nature itself, specifically, the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

On a recent business trip to California and Arizona, the route north from Lake Havasu City took us through the high desert, then looped south via Sedona to Scottsdale, stopping at Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s desert laboratory. In reflection, this sequence felt fitting: after all, Wright’s work honoured the wonders of nature. Taliesin West itself will be shared in a future Insight.

Entering the national park, you pass through ancient forests, drawn forward by an unseen force. The approach is carefully choreographed: the road funnels you toward the visitor centre, heightening anticipation. Countless films, photographs, and drone shots have etched expectations into the mind, but memory is never the same as reality, and attachment to imagined outcomes is always fragile.

The heat is intense; the sky a vast canvas of blue, punctuated by a single drifting cloud. Trees thin out until, quite suddenly, the land ahead seems to vanish. The horizon breaks and the earth opens up.
It’s a moment that resists words, slipping easily into cliché. But it’s hard to overstate the impact: a physical, almost dizzying encounter with immensity.

Grand Canyon from the south rim. photograph, GM Architects.

Images and film don’t come close. As David Hockney once observed, the Grand Canyon is “unphotographable.” Photographs flatten; they capture surfaces, not volumes. Standing at the rim, our usual sense of scale is upended. You search for reference points: a cluster of tourists on a ledge look tiny, 200 metres away; a mile below, the Colorado River appears as a narrow ribbon; midway down, faint footpaths hint at human presence.

The question arises, almost unbidden: how could something this colossal come to be? Was it some cataclysmic event? Recent debates, including those sparked by writers like Graham Hancock, who writes about global catastrophe in Magicians of the Gods offers a chilling counter argument to main stream geological history.

Beyond curiosity, the canyon evokes a profound sense of time and space, a humbling moment of recognition that the forces shaping our planet far exceed us. One feels small, fragile… and then grateful, privileged simply to stand at the edge of this immense geological event. It becomes an experiential handshake with time. Here, time is manifested in space. A very big space. They are inseparable.

Hockney, born 1937, offers further insight here. His lifelong exploration of how to represent three dimensions on a flat surface feels especially relevant. In his wonderful series of Grand Canyon paintings he explores an interpretation of this reality not replication. After our visit, we reviewed over sixty photographs taken with a Leica M9 and a fixed 50mm lens. None did justice to what we had seen. Hockney was right: photographs don’t “kick it.”

A Closer Grand Canyon, David Hockney 1998, from A Bigger Message

This frustration sparked an idea: a visual dimensional comparison, a collage to help convey scale. Architects have long used drawings, plans, and sections to express “bigness” an approach now less fashionable, as it’s often seen to conflict with contemporary ecological sensibilities. Yet this method occasionally re-emerges in map comparisons that correct the distortions of the Mercator projection.

So we turned to scaled drawings and sections, asking: how big is the Grand Canyon, really?

Grand Canyon figures:

• Length: 277 miles (446 km)

• Width: 4–18 miles (6–29 km)

• Average depth: ~1 mile (1.6 km)

For context, some of the world’s iconic structures:

• Eiffel Tower: 324 m

• The Shard: 310 m

• Empire State Building: 381 m

• Burj Khalifa: 828 m

Scale exploration graphic , plan and section. GM Architects

Scale exploration graphic, Grand Canyon (rims) superimposed on London. GM Architects

Against the canyon’s scale, these familiar giants suddenly seem modest, insignificant, when placed in a bigger context.

To keep adding words would contradict the point. Instead, we offer this collection of drawings and comparisons as our answer to the question:

How big is the Grand Canyon?