Flower Tower
A six-foot public monument was designed to disappear into 800+ flowers, seed packets, notes, and drawings over one weekend.
The competition-selected installation treated dismantling as participation: the public took resources away and authored what remained.
Role
Grant writerConceptConstructionInstallation
Outcome
A competition-selected installation dismantled by the public and recycled after the festival.
The participation model
The monument worked by disappearing.
Flower Tower was a six-foot cardboard structure carrying more than eight hundred flowers and seed packets. Visitors could take either, then write or draw on the chalkboard surface revealed as the object emptied. By Monday it had been depleted and recycled. That disappearance was the work: instead of preserving a finished monument, the public redistributed its material and completed its visual record. The roughly $400 structure used subtraction (not permanence) as its measure of participation.
At a glance
800+ stems and seed packets · 6-foot cardboard structure · ~$400 material budget
In the record
Grant and competition submission · Perforation / assembly logic · Time-lapse of public depletion · Flower and seed-packet inventory · Writable community surface · De-installation and reuse plan
Reverse permanence
The object began with its end: every component anticipated removal, reuse, marking, or recycling.
Give something away
Flowers and locally useful seed turned a monument from an image of civic value into a small distribution system.
Leave authorship open
As the flowers disappeared, a writable surface emerged and the public completed the visual record.