Frank Kunert Builds Buildings That Cannot Work

Frank Kunert's work happens twice. First a scene is built by hand at small scale — a stairwell, a bathroom, a bus stop — and then it is photographed, so what circulates is the picture rather than the model. Inside these constructions the rules of architecture stop holding: stairs climb into walls, doors open onto themselves, rooms intersect in ways no builder could deliver.

Photography is doing the persuading. Seen directly, a model announces its scale and the strangeness reads as a toy. A single frame, correctly lit and focused, removes those cues long enough for the scene to pass as a real building, and the discomfort arrives in the delay between accepting the space and noticing it fails. His references tend towards ordinary postwar European construction, all tiles and cladding and economical solutions, which sharpens the joke. Efficiency, pushed one step further, turns absurd.