Made in IKEA
Time: 2018-2019
Place: Tel Aviv University
Status: B.Arch thesis
Media: Varied
Made in IKEA presents a hyper-realistic environment generated by IKEA’s consumption space. The project imagines a lifetime in which we work, learn, raise a family and enjoy leisure time all within IKEA. The outcome is a building built to house 570 families.
Residents of Made in IKEA are not immigrants to this environment. Their lives, since birth, have been governed by IKEA’s ideology of a ‘better everyday life’. The architecture serves as a shell for a highly efficient and fullyoptimized “better everyday life” - streamlined and perfectly timed. They wake up in their IKEA apartment, go to work in the Catalog Center, pick up their children from the Kids House, and dine on organic Swedish sausages.
‘Made by IKEA’ is an experimental architectural environment that presents a critique of Western daily routines and the ways in which consumer culture serves as both an engine and an enforcer of time and space. It disassembles and reconstructs Eurocentric lifestyles into IKEA’s neatly ordered kits and gives it expression in repetitive architectural tools. In this giant dollhouse, with its predetermined routes and rules, the IKEA community operates under a collective capitalist illusion of “a better life.”
Residents of Made in IKEA are not immigrants to this environment. Their lives, since birth, have been governed by IKEA’s ideology of a ‘better everyday life’. The architecture serves as a shell for a highly efficient and fullyoptimized “better everyday life” - streamlined and perfectly timed. They wake up in their IKEA apartment, go to work in the Catalog Center, pick up their children from the Kids House, and dine on organic Swedish sausages.
‘Made by IKEA’ is an experimental architectural environment that presents a critique of Western daily routines and the ways in which consumer culture serves as both an engine and an enforcer of time and space. It disassembles and reconstructs Eurocentric lifestyles into IKEA’s neatly ordered kits and gives it expression in repetitive architectural tools. In this giant dollhouse, with its predetermined routes and rules, the IKEA community operates under a collective capitalist illusion of “a better life.”