Living Units is the result of our research on serial architecture and its implications across several locations, including Budapest, Bucharest, and Dunajvaros. The project reflects on post-socialist living in these cities, where people had to adapt to a post-traumatic urban reality. The blocks of flats had lost the ideology that once defined them.
The trip to Dunajvaros was particularly significant for our research. The city was built from scratch as a purely utopian socialist project at a crossroads dictated by Stalin’s orders, initially named Stalin’s City. In Romanian cities, many houses were destroyed by communist urban planning to make way for new socialist blocks of flats. Our installation sought to reverse this reality: we projected two films featuring serial socialist architecture filmed along the streets of these cities as patterns onto the surfaces of two simply shaped houses.
In Budapest, we also photographed our flat furniture, designed in the 1970s–80s style and now old and worn. What fascinated us was the universality of these interiors across former socialist territories. One flat, in particular, reminded us of a flat in Ploiesti in 1980…
Visiting these spaces felt like revisiting Utopia after twenty years. In a way, our work resembled an archaeological investigation—excavating the remnants of a vanished world.

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