Fall (2024) transforms a quintessential domestic tool—the kitchen grater—into an architectural form through a distinctly vertical language, interrogating the lingering phallic symbolism embedded in modern civic architecture. As metropolitan centers compete to erect ever-taller landmarks as expressions of economic power, the imperative to go “higher, faster, stronger” binds capital, efficiency, and patriarchal structures of power to the vertical monument.

By enlarging the grater to an architectural scale, however, the work introduces a very different set of associations. Its familiar domestic function evokes visceral memories of friction, abrasion, repetitive labor, and the confined realities of domestic life. These associations unsettle the triumphant language of monumentality and urban expansion, allowing an ordinary household object to challenge the systems of power that vertical architecture has historically been used to embody.