View Finder is a permanent architectural installation at the new 21c Museum Hotel in downtown St. Louis. The project acts a vision machine by visually amplifying the interaction of the visitors of the arts-focused venue with the surrounding environment through a series of enhanced framed views. Seemingly precariously perched atop a ten-foot tall retaining wall at the edge of an elevated plaza, the large mass disrupts the view to the surrounding city and is punctured by a series of four voids lined with polished stainless steel.
Each void is aligned to a specific view and its geometry is tuned to reflect certain elements in the environment, juxtaposing reflected flipped views with clear views that creates a kaleidoscopic effect. The project is conceived around promoting curiosity, discovery and reframing how we perceive the world. The lenses in our eyes flip the view of the world, but our brain has learned to perceive the world right-side up. We are so accustomed to the way the world “is” and rarely do we stop to think about it.
The reflection angles of the four mirrored stainless steel view-tubes have been calculated to juxtapose the clear view (as we normally see the world) with a series of reflected views that flip the image. For example, one of the tubes frames a view to the historic ‘Weatherball’ sculpture on the roof of a neighboring building, but when you look toward the top of the tube, you see the lobby of the same building upside down and if you look down you see the sky. View Finder requires us to think about the images our eyes are receiving to understand the world around us and our position in it.