Ground Plans for Paradise

1994
Installation


Images: © Tim Etchells and Hugo Glendinning

Ground Plans For Paradise is an installation comprising 1,000 crudely-yet-obsessively-made balsa wood tower blocks, each of them named and lit from inside. Surrounded by Hugo Glendinning’s photographs of sleeping figures, the work creates a miniature abandoned metropolis which viewers are asked to fill by imagining the lives, people and stories that might belong there.

Drawing on the reality of city life and on the utopian dreams which urban spaces can inspire, Ground Plans for Paradise features the names of places and of buildings from both real and imaginary cities: from The Big Kodacolour Building to The Dallas Book Depository, via Scargill Towers, The K.K.K. Building and The Blood Club.