La Maison aux Personnages in Bordeaux, France

A house and its garden stand alone on a traffic island, with bicycles, cars, buses, trams and pedestrians passing by on all sides. However, nobody lives there, as this abode is inhabited instead by imaginary characters dreamed up by Emilia Kabakov and her late husband, Ilya, both Russian-born artists who relocated to the US. 

The piece is known as La Maison aux Personnages (The House of Characters), and the vacant building was erected in 2009 as part of a project by the local metropolitan authorities to fund and install permanent public artwork at various locations along the city’s new and expanding tram network.

The house cannot be entered but visitors are encouraged to voyeuristically peer through the windows of the ground-floor and first-floor rooms (the latter can be reached via an outdoor staircase). Each room has been decorated as if inhabited by a different imaginary character, and poetically worded panels provide a minimalist backstory for each static scene. One room contains a wooden sailboat; another appears to be an inventor’s workshop; one resembles a hoarder’s paradise; and another contains a ladder that leads nowhere. 

When it was unveiled, the installation caused controversy due to the inconvenient symbolism of building a house for imaginary characters at a time when homelessness is widespread, the significant energy footprint of the air conditioning required to maintain a constant temperature in the rooms, and the project's substantial cost.

While the controversies have died down over the years, the house and its imaginary inhabitants remain, providing passers-by with a surprising touch of absurd escapism, whatever the time of day or night.