Taking To Kickstarter, A Major Architect Wants To Fund Activist Public Art

The Kickstarter campaign is as much about activism as it is about funding—an increasingly popular tactic in the architecture world. “You could say the whole idea of the project is an exercise in radical transparency. What the project does is make blatantly legible a carbon footprint that is invisible, and only exists in the form of numbers and specifics and news.” The point of the tower is to raise environmental awareness. By asking the public to contribute, the firm is putting it to the people to decide if they want a visual representation of pollution on the skyline. It also detaches the project from any corporate influence.