This thesis develops a creative Project, the "Urban Observatory", situated on a traffic island in the center of Chicago on Wacker Drive and Wabash Avenue along the Chicago River. The aim of the building is to inspire and motivate people to experience the city from a different standpoint and to raise the inhabitant of the city to a different level of perception.The purpose of this study was to explore everyday circumstances and observations of an individual place, the American City and the search for its true genius loci. The main intention is to explore and visualize issues about culturally based differences in behavior and perception of people living in place of 'super scale' and 'high technology' on one side and abandonment and destruction on the other side. The study of the American City and its inhabitants results in an experimental design for an Urban Observatory, an architectural formulation standing in opposition to an architecture of change and fragmentation, an architecture of lost and senseless space. Furthermore the study researches the urban American fabric in practice as well as in theory. The intensive study of the writings of Malcolm Quantrill, Richard Sennett, Toni Hiss and others were the base for developing ideas about how people perceive and react consciously and unconsciously to a specific environment.This helped to identify the frame of the architectural exploration, in order to focus on ideas about: what is architecture of observation in the urban context, and what is the idea of perception in its spatial form?A journal of the design process (sketches, writings), models of varying scale and detail, drawings, photographs, etc. are the working tools to shape the idea of a building and fusing all aspects in a final project. / Department of Architecture