Vanishing Monumentality, Runit Island, Marshall Islands
Kent State University CAED + Buildner “Last Nuclear Bomb Memorial” Entry
Critic: Steven Rugare
Studio Nobody
Spring 2022
// In creating a memorial to the last nuclear bomb, “vanishing monumentality” looks to appropriate ideas from Geddes’s tower of “the found” and “the obscured”. In his original, the building became a permanent exhibition space where the inner world which constructs knowledge is in a continuous exchange with the exterior world through methods of analysis and direct observation of reality. Conceived as a vertical sequence of spatial experiences of contrasting nature, the exchange between interior and exterior insight the user with knowledge both found and obscured. Entering into a new post-anthropocentric contextual relationship in light of digital culture’s prolific abundance; found and obscured qualities are inverted. The found is emblematic of a similarly politically oppressive time, the Palace of Roman Civilization from the unfinished 1942 World’s Fair. Rematerialized as an ethereal “almost” clear structure, this new scenographic and sensual object elates a sense of intrigue and caution. The obscured is now not the reality that surrounds, but the history of knowledge contained within, protected by the tower’s reflective core. This sublime secluded object transcends worldly affect as it flickers between the found and the obscured.
