About This Piece

The Hyatt Regency Denver is adorned with a poem by John Ruskin, “O Truth of Earth,” using stainless steel set into the black granite of the perimeter of the building. The piece was installed during construction of the hotel in 2005. The poem reads:

Mountains are the bones of the earth, their highest peaks are invariably those parts of its anatomy which in the plains lie buried under five and twenty thousand feet of solid thickness of superincumbent soil, and which spring up in the mountain ranges in vast pyramids or wedges, flinging their garment of earth away from them on each side. The masses of the lower hills are laid over and against their sides, like the masses of lateral masonry against the skeleton arch of an unfinished bridge, except that they slope up to and lean against the central ridge: and, finally upon the slopes of these lower hills are strewed the level beds of sprinkled gravel, sand and clay; which form the extent of the champaign. Here then is another grand principle of the truth of earth, that the mountains must come from under all, and be the support of all; and that everything else must be laid in their arms, heap above heap, the plains being the uppermost.