vanishing monumentality

studio _ Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) was a Scottish biologist and an avid observer of the expositions of his time, which he saw as unique vehicles for educating the public about the interconnectedness of natural, cultural and technological systems. His interest in civic education led him to engage in a number of planning exercises. One of the educational devices he realized was the Outlook Tower. Geddes purchased an existing building on a hilltop in Edinburgh and converted it into an apparatus for civic education in urban and regional planning. A visit to the Outlook Tower would begin with the existing rooftop camera obscura and its surrounding balcony, which together provide a view of the city and its natural context. For Geddes the Outlook Tower was not just a display of information, it was a didactic apparatus that brought together disparate scales of information in a systematic way. Project Objective: The Outlook Tower building is the result of numerous additions and remodellings by various owners, including the original promoter of the camera obscura. Its suitability to Geddes’ concept derived only from its location and the fact that the rooftop was accessible. The challenge for this project was to propose a built form that supports—or even amplifies and extends—the basic program of the “Outlook Tower”.

project _ “vanishing monumentality” looks to appropriate ideas from Geddes’s idea of the outlook tower as “the found” and “the obscured”, and create a new contextual relationship between the “Palace of Roman Civilization” from the unfinished world’s fair of 1942 and contemporary ideas about material, visual image and the ethereal. The new tower contains two didactic forms; the not-quite “there” shell of the exterior, and the “ethereal” materiality of its inner core. In opposition to the Palace which acted as an oppressive object when viewed from its exterior, “vanishing monumentality” looks to invite the guest to explore the “vanishing” qualities of its exterior and the constantly changing ethereal qualities of the interior core. The adaption to modern contemporary image-making ideas and materiality expands on Geddes’s goals of civic engagement and exemplifies modern-day technology. In doing so, the tower becomes a central point for engagement in its context, yet also one of a distorted urban context, due to its situation above the ground plane allowing for its surroundings to be reflected onto the surfaces of the tower; in essence vanishing.