Montello Foundation is a foundation dedicated to support artists who foster
our understanding of nature, its fragility and our need to protect it.

“In my walks, I discovered an emptiness and an amplitude – hidden pathways and an internal pace that required me to remain at once observing and observant of the natural realm. My solitude illuminated the world around and a world within - infusing each action with stillness, silence, surface and sky. ” 
- Sara Morawetz, artist in resident 2017

The winners of the design competition for a
Desert Waypoint for Contemplation and Exhibition

The Montello Foundation intends to build a waypoint, so artists’ interpretations of nature and our interactions with nature may be the starting point for travelers’ contemplations.

So a call for designs went out in December of 2017 to colleges around the world and we received in total 50 entries. We are quite humbled about the amount of work the students poured into this project.

When we travel, it is in our nature to seek points of rest, to reorient ourselves. We want to understand the place we are traversing; but we also want to focus our mind on the original purpose of our journey rather than just on the logistics and technicalities of our transportation. Historically these waypoints were of course often created in a spiritual or religious context, recognizing the need to provide a focus for hope. This waypoint will center around the focus on nature, both the wide vistas as well as delicate details.

The waypoint will have a critical relation with the exterior environment, engaging one both physically and intellectually towards the sagebrush and the mountains. Here, as elsewhere in the structure, visitors are engaged in the conceptual theme of nature’s fragility.

Although relatively small in comparison to the expanse of land and sky, the structure will address the relationship of the individual to this landscape, as well as with other visitors. The architecture will attempt to engage the individual with these spaces (both interior and exterior) and as a meeting point in fostering exchanges that may be self-conscious or quite incidental, with other people (present or not) in the thematic concept of nature’s fragility.

The jury members were:

- Benjamin Aranda of Aranda\Lasch

- Ali Hocek of ACHA New York

- Susanne Wagner of Bauereignis Sütterlin Wagner Berlin

- members of the local community and members of the board of the Montello Foundation.

First Place:

Jungmin Kim, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA and Yunseon Cho, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan, South Korea

Second Place:

Naoki Ono, Tokyo University of the Arts, Taitoku, Japan and Tinca Decuseara, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

Honorable Mention:

Anthony Modyman, Adam Zanzucchi and Isabelle Borie, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

Honorable Mention:

Julia Phillips, Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA

Honorable Mention:

Victoria Graziano and Michail Pikos, The City College of New York, Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, New York, NY, USA

The complete listing of the entries can be downloaded here.

The competition and construction was funded in part by the Union Pacific Foundation.