ART
2020 chinatown
2020 h to j baldessari
2019 h to r whiteread
2019 h to a martin
2006 social
2005 chinatown III
2004 chinatown II
2004 h to w benjamin
2004 sod
ARCHITECTURE
2020 gravity project
2020 sculpture park
2020 lookout
2019 pavilion
2019 pool
2018 bridge
2018 nature center
DESIGN
2020 superfab
2020 cyrilla mozenter
2019 childroots
2010 eleek
lookout | 2020
The Witness is a lookout, monument and memorial to de-monumentalized monumental land. It testifies to the ongoing effort by the Trump administration to reduce the sizes of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, stripping federal protection and making more land available to mining interests.
Located at a disused airport in Halls Crossing, midway between the two National Monuments, The Witness rises up the edge of a cliff and overlooks Lake Powell in the southeastern corner of Utah. Open to the elements the modular and regular steel frame and earthen facade are built incrementally from the ground up and together emerge from the land as if by the land itself, just as the surrounding mesas were formed by the elements stripping it away.
The material is the soil removed by the mining process. Called ‘tailings’ the unwanted soil from Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears is relocated to the site and is subsequently formed by visitors into the rammed earth blocks that compose the facade, and which mirror the brick forms of the ruins scattered throughout the area.
Visitors become participants and The Witness thus becomes a collective embodiment and political statement of dissent, reclamation, reparation and repatriation. It bears witness to the acts of violence perpetrated upon it in the name of human progress and in so doing proposes an architecture of healing.