All problems can never be solved

I was asked to make an artwork in the Cité Modèle, a modernist social housing project, just north of Brussels. (Cité Modèle means Modelcity)
Before it was build, the Cité Modèle was exhibited as a scale model, marvelled by hundreds of thousands on the world exposition of 1958.

After moving my atelier to one of the apartments and after reading too many books about architecture and art in public space,
I had no idea what I was doing there.

Then one day I changed my apartment in an architecture office, I printed 50 black hoodies with ‘architect’ written on them gave one to every (self acclaimed) architect,
both local and visiting, who came to work in the office.

The architects were encouraged to interact with the local context,

but rather than building real things, they were restricted to work in scale models.

I like scale models.

They express desire.

After 6 months of work, we exhibited all the models in the empty garage underneath the central square (the garage is empty because, against expectations, not every family owns a car).

For 3 weeks, night after night, an audience was invited to look at the models, re-enacting mankind’s tradition of looking at scale models, projecting desires on the future.