Nakao Lookout
5’ x 4’ x 9’
Marine-grade recycled HDPE, cedar, weathering steel, concrete
2021
2021 Mid-Career Fellows
Artist Statement
We, Austin and Koto, are designers and partners living in the Twin Cities. We are interested in the moments tied to memory and the everyday. Skeptical of terms like vernacular and traditional, we aim towards a design of subsistence. This we consider a loving pursuit of design: motivated by what has been tested and that which has been found pleasing.
Nakao Lookout borrows its formal language from a project by the Japanese Architect Hiroshi Nakao (1979 -) titled Coups de Sonde. The sculpture lends itself to multiple readings: an industrial storage tank, a water tower, or grain silo. Our goal in adapting the form was to reinvigorate the study with an inhabitable scale which might provide a novel and personal way of looking at the landscape of Franconia. Ultimately we would hope to create similar sculptures elsewhere to provide similar experiences linked by the same form. In the words of Osamu Sato, “The work of past ages accumulates, and is remade again.”
The Lookout resides on Dakota lands of the Wahpekute.
Visitors are welcome to climb up into the seat to look out.
Austin + Kotono Watanabe
Born: 1993, Madison, WI + 1994, Ibigawa, Japan
Resides: Minneapolis, MN
Education: M. Arch (Masters in Architecture University of Minnesota) 2019 + Bachelor’s degree in Interior Design (2020)