Forced Entertainment | Ground Plans for Paradise

The installation Ground Plans for Paradise conjures a vast imaginary city using model buildings, street indexes and photography. The project draws on the reality of city life and on the utopian dreams which urban spaces can inspire. Using 1,000 crudely yet obsessively made balsa wood tower blocks, each of them named and lit from inside, it creates an abandoned metropolis which viewers are asked to fill: imagine the lives, people and stories that might belong there.

This deserted modelled space is inhabited, or dreamed perhaps, by the sleeping figures in Hugo Glendinning’s accompanying photographs. Ground Plans… features the names of places and of buildings from cities both real and fantastic: from The Big Kodacolour Building and The Dallas Book Depository to Scargill Towers, The K.K.K. Building and The Blood Club. Ground Plans for Paradise was later used as the basis for an Internet project titled Paradise (1997).