An unorthodox architectural exhibition has come to Sofia for the second annual Sofia Architecture Week.  As part of the event, organisers have invited Austrian curator Michael Rieper and his German colleague Oliver Elser to display their Housing Models: Experimentation and Everyday Life.

The exhibition opened at the Sofia Art Gallery, 1 Gourko Street, on October 19 and will be there until November 8.The two artists say on their website, wohnmodelle.at, that the exhibition puts the buildings and their inhabitants, rather the architects themselves, in the focus of attention.

The exhibition shows 11 selected international housing structures, along with their inhabitants who have lived there for at least two years. "We asked the residents to take stock of their lives in the constructed experiments: the images for the slide projections were taken by the inhabitants themselves, and the explanatory statements have been excerpted from related conversations," Rieper and Elser say.

Thus, 12 test beds were created where housing architecture was subjected to an everyday-life assessment because, according to the duo, "experiments in the realm of housing actually enjoying success or not is something decided by everyday life, which does not begin until the first residents have moved in".

Every structure is shown as a single exhibit. Some of them have been re-created full-scale so that visitors can experience the feeling of living in one themselves. The selection of projects from various continents facilitates insight into specific cultural and social conditions linked to experimentation in housing.

It spans from a Chilean development in impoverished Iquique to Dutch low-cost terraced housing in Roosendaal, to even include a Japanese housing project in Tokyo, where residents have opted to live in white steel cuboids that they must exit in order to enter the bathroom, according to the website.

The exhibition will also feature a documentary survey of Bulgarian every-day life, Sofia Architecture Week organisers from Bulgarian lifestyle magazine Edno said. It compares contemporary living conditions in Bulgaria and in the rest of the world.  

* Sofia Architecture Week 2009 is an international architecture event aimed at gathering lecturers from all over Europe. The event takes place each autumn. This year the curator is architect Peter Torniov, and the event is presided over by Sofia municipality chief architect Petar Dikov.