ABSTRACT
The Invisible Monument is a proposal for a public space that instead of design defines strategies of public participation. The monument consists of an apparatus that literally remains subterranean until it is called for. The oxymoron of the invisible monument acknowledges architecture's depleted capacity for public representation today. Architectural monuments once carried the burden of collective meaning and memory. This representational capacity eroded in the twentieth century with the abstraction of modern architecture and urbanism. Three-quarters of a century later, the monumental has declined further, either signifying sheer bigness or else degenerating into mere spectacle. Visibility is now a marketing strategy, integral to an economy based on the consumption of images. The invisible monument is a response to this negation of citizenship practices under late capitalism; the absent architectural object is an emblem of the absent political subject. This representational capacity eroded in the twentieth century with the abstraction of modern architecture and urbanism.
