An imaginative project that invites visitors to construct a home and build a community as an art experience is currently on view at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. This inventive installation, created by the British theater company Subject to_change, turns gallery space into an interactive miniature town where participants become residents, planners, and neighbors.
The installation, titled “Home Sweet Home,” asks visitors to select a plot of land, purchase a tiny house, and sign a real estate agreement. Once registered, participants receive a key and a flat-packed cardboard unit that serves as the shell of their new dwelling. With a creative kit of materials—some provided by the Skirball and others that visitors may bring themselves—each person or group is free to transform their unit into a private home, a small business, a public building, or any other structure that contributes to the evolving micro-city.
Over the course of the ten-day installation, the space grows into a working micro-community. Houses and public spaces appear side by side, and participants establish systems and rituals that mimic real urban life: a Town Council handles planning permits, a local radio station plays requested songs and creates communal programming, and everyday interactions create the fabric of neighborhood life. Actors collaborating with Subject to_change help guide the process, facilitating events, encouraging participation, and prompting conversations about how communities form and function.
Participants are encouraged to return throughout the run to refine and redecorate their buildings, attend council meetings, make radio requests, or raise local issues. The hands-on nature of the project makes it possible to observe how personal decisions and collective choices shape the neighborhood’s appearance and social dynamics. Through play and construction, visitors can reflect on the roles they take in their own communities—how they negotiate shared spaces, contribute services, and interact with neighbors.
“There is something rather thrilling about watching an entire city mushroom in a room almost overnight—particularly when you are building it yourself,” observed Lyn Gardner in The Guardian, capturing the sense of surprise and delight that comes from seeing an improvised city take form.
This installation blends art, theater, and civic imagination, offering a playful yet thoughtful exploration of urban life. Whether visitors are curious about design, community-building, or participatory performance, Home Sweet Home provides an accessible space to experiment with ideas about belonging, infrastructure, and creative collaboration. The Skirball’s version of the project transforms the museum gallery into a living laboratory where small-scale decisions produce visible, collective outcomes.
By inviting people to act as homeowners, business owners, planners, and neighbors, the project sparks conversations about responsibility, cooperation, and the everyday labor required to sustain a community. It also offers a unique opportunity to see how individual creativity contributes to a larger, shared environment—how a cardboard house, decorated and cared for, becomes part of a functioning neighborhood. For those in Los Angeles, the installation is an engaging, hands-on experience worth visiting to observe and participate in the slow, joyful emergence of a temporary city.