The Swedish artist Christopher Robin Nordström had wanted to visit Tokyo since he was a child and, when he finally went in 2018, he loved it. “If you like Star Wars and Blade Runner, Tokyo is as close as you get,” he says, “but I was really struck by how small the city felt, especially the houses with not more than 40 sq metres of living space.” At the time he was looking for a “kitchen-table hobby”. So he decided to recreate Tokyo’s houses in intricate miniature – a scale of 1:20 – with rust stains, broken gutters, electricity meters and all. “Overlooked architecture is extra interesting,” he says. “These are houses with lots of stories. They have personality, scars from their lives.”
