Sculpture & Object Studies
Stacked Cities: Isn’t It Beautiful?
A modular city leans into repetition
Pringles cans, shared routines and an insistent question become a precarious modular city about repetition, tenderness and the possibility of connection.
LEGO BRICKS / PRINGLES CANS / ONE WORK
The city was
already modular.
These LEGO city studies are not a separate project. They are the rectangular half of Stacked Cities: standardised bricks beside standardised cans, both repeated until an ordinary object begins to resemble a skyline.
Different rooms can contain the same bricks, the same snack and the same small routines. Repetition becomes evidence that strangers are living alongside one another.
A repeated brick becomes a façade; a repeated façade becomes a neighbour.
LEGO city study · Stacked Cities
The same units, rearranged into another address.
LEGO city study · Stacked Cities
Landmarks, towers and windows compressed into one domestic skyline.
LEGO city study · Stacked Cities
Standardisation does not prevent intimacy; it gives intimacy something to repeat.
LEGO city study · Stacked Cities
One city, assembled from modules that already know how to connect.
LEGO city study · Stacked CitiesDIGITAL WORK · PROCEDURAL STUDY 01
The modular city is the artwork.
This is not a digital model of a future sculpture. It is a city generated from the work’s own rules: repetition builds floors, matching routines light windows, language becomes architecture, and too much agreement makes the skyline lose its balance.
- Times they met
- 000000
- Connections felt
- 000001
- Loop
- 00:24
A 24-second procedural study. The city rebuilds itself every time the question returns.
ONE QUESTION · AS MANY TIMES AS NEEDED
I know. It is only a crisp. It is only soap. It is only an empty can. But somewhere, a stranger is doing almost the same thing—and for one silly, tender second, the city is not quite so lonely.
If I accept that feeling sincerely, repetition stops being only conformity. It becomes evidence that we are together.
A stranger, a few doors away
- the same little floor plan
- the same curved crisp
- the same clean soap smell
- one empty can kept for later
Another stranger, in the same building
- the same little floor plan
- the same curved crisp
- the same clean soap smell
- one empty can kept for later
Isn’t it beautiful?
Stacked Cities begins with an industrial object designed to repeat. Pringles cans become modular towers; crisps become architectural units and edible letters. Their colours, seams and standard dimensions make visible the logistics that allow the same product to travel, stack and remain recognisable across distant places.
The repeated question Isn’t It Beautiful? is sincere, teasing and a little needy. It does not ask once and wait politely. It keeps asking—like a joke, an advertisement, a ritual and a request for reassurance—until the possibility of connection starts to feel emotionally true.
Two strangers can live a few doors apart in almost identical flats, eat the same curved crisps, use the same soap and keep the same empty can. They may never meet. Yet these tiny parallel actions can still become evidence that neither person is entirely alone.
The installation remains deliberately precarious. Cylinders rise like a city, identical crisps balance into a comic monument, and the written phrase can collapse or be eaten. Humour keeps the critique open; repetition operates simultaneously as material, language, persuasion and ritual.
Read the process essay and view the complete material study.
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