a sublime monument
In the Autogrill Monument blue-cloud event, a beautiful event becomes sublime through it's association with something else: the immaterial quality of the information which makes it horrible and therefore sublime. (see Edmund Burke¹s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757))

The admiration of horrifying events typical of Neoclassical art and architecture such as the eruption of volcanos was emblematic of its time. Similarly, the horrifying images of war and terrorism, culminating in the colossal WTC disaster, has become a part of our everyday life--must-see, must-know information beamed to us in real-time becomes a cultural paradigm. Distant voyeurism is brought closer in Autogrill Monument, but in it the realistic image becomes an abstract event whose repetition is horrifying and admirable. The special event can only be experienced by the few within or in sight of the Monument. A seemingly contradictory phenomenon develops when the number of deaths increases and the blue-cloud event, through it's repetition, becomes 'normal' and loses its sublimity, while in the case of fewer deaths the event is more 'special' and increases the sublimity factor. Here we have an inverse sublime:death equation (as the body count climbs, the sublime event diminishes and vice versa) that, together with the chance encounter with a blue-cloud event, makes this encounter more special with a low death count.