Engineering buried LA's river. Artist Lauren Bon is engineering a plan to free it

For more than a dozen years, Lauren Bon has been creating an artwork so vast, it has required moving many tons of earth. Yet when the first phase of her project wraps up this week, it will be largely invisible. In fact, the clearest evidence of "Bending the River," as the piece is called, will be a small grate in the concrete bed of the Los Angeles River in downtown. She and her team at Metabolic Studio, the not-for-profit art and research hub she founded and directs, have dubbed it "The great grate."

Moving the earth for "Bending the River" wasn't nearly as difficult as moving often intractable bureaucracies — more than two dozen of them — including federal, state and municipal agencies such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the California State Water Resources Control Board and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. That's because Bon's project is no simple art installation. Instead, once complete, it will do something unprecedented: draw water from the Los Angeles River and channel it to a well on a property owned by Metabolic Studio on the western banks of the river. From there, it will be filtered, cleaned and delivered to Los Angeles State Historic Park, across the street, for irrigation.

In the process of making it happen," — in this case, irrigating the park. (In other words, she can't turn around and water her lawn with it.)