You Are Here

”You are here” reverses the purpose of the architectural model. The building sits as the only populated place in a typical suburb and exists solely for the life of its numerous inhabitants. Instead of focusing on the outside world, the model concentrates on the inhabitants of the house and relentlessly displays their lives in 220 continuous windows.

The images in the building are inspired by Pictograms, stereotypical figures in stereotypical flats, normally used in architecture to represent where to “Go,” “Eat,” “Park,” “Urinate,” etc. In “You are here” these pictograms no longer represent the clean, formal and abstract but instead create a series of highly personal characters, displaying all sides of human nature, good and bad.

”You are here” is a drama that mixes the everyday and the absurd, humour and seriousness, love and death. The working idea both criticizes a commonly used architectural language which signifies that the architectural model should be devoid of life and populated by odor-free robots, while simultaneously displaying a building populated by people of flesh and blood utilizing the same architectural language with playful exaggeration.