rare standards

Standards have been an interest of mine since I started architecture studies and got my hands on an edition of Neufert. Standards are supposed to represent the "normal and neutral". They define an immense amount of spaces, activities and bodies, from stairs and chairs, to boxing rings, churches, mincers, farm animals and coffins.

They are extremely generic and oddly specific at the same time, and once one becomes aware of their presence and impact the apparent plurality of spatial products suddenly becomes extremely shallow. Understanding, analysing and questioning these standards, how they impact us and how the modernist standards deviate from postmodernist ideas and economic paradigms is key in understanding the formation of space today.

The project is an examination of standards and their manifestation in architectural space, as well as a search for a subversive redesign of such standardized spaces. Taking place in an underground shopping passage in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the project attempts to reconcile the predictability and repetitiveness of a modernist space by reinventing the elements found on site through a surrealist prism.