Nancy Holt made drawings for several large-scale public art projects that remain unrealized and exist only on the page. In 1979 she developed Brattle Square Project: Auriga for a small triangular site in Brattle Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of Arts on the Line, a public art initiative accompanying the development of four new subway stations. Holt titled the work Auriga, the Latin name for the Charioteer, a constellation visible in the Northern Hemisphere during the winter months.

Comprising pools, spheres, and rounded openings in wrought-iron fencing, Auriga draws on a sculptural vocabulary also seen in Holt’s realized works Dark Star Park (1979–84) and Annual Ring (1980–81). The pools were to be positioned according to the Auriga constellation. Holt planned to select a specific day on which the shadows cast by the concrete spheres would be marked in black concrete on the ground, with the date engraved into the concrete surface.