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.

The small, but intense project is 11’x7’x12’ high and is composed of 16 unique prefabricated steel panels, 4 mirror polished stainless-steel view tubes and 6 brushed stainless-steel panels. The parts were lasercut from 16ga mild steel or stainless-steel sheets, bent to precise angles and either bolted or welded together as a prefabricated panel hung on a rail system attached to a tube steel frame.

Client: 21c Museum Hotel St. Louis
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
Design: 2022
Construction: 2023

Architect: OSA / Chandler Ahrens
Structural Engineering: DreamRunners LTD
Fabrication: OS Fabrication, LLC
Lasercutting: Sauer Machining
Rigging: HWP Rigging
Materials: Stainless Steel, Painted steel