Our contribution to London Festival of Architecture this year highlighted rising levels of homelessness in London. We worked with charities CRASH and Kairos Community Trust and collaborated with local artist, A Labour of Love to create a hard-hitting large scale cardboard installation.

The one day event took place on Saturday in our studio courtyard, where an 80 square meter 1:50 cardboard model of Dalston was suspended from scaffolding, with powerfully emotive stories about addiction and recovery falling from it.

Residents of Kairos Community Trust, a charity which is dedicated to helping homeless men and women with drug and alcohol problems, helped to create the installation, cutting out hundreds of cardboard skyline silhouettes whilst sharing their stories with the Levitt Bernstein team. The stories were recorded, laser-etched onto hand crafted Jacob’s ladders and hung from the cardboard city on brightly coloured ribbons – the concept being that ‘If you turn the City Upside Down, the Stories will Fall Out’.

The event on Saturday was very well received, with many of the Kairos residents whose stories featured in the installation attending in the morning. The residents were delighted to have been involved and were very moved to see the installation brought to life after all the weeks of hard work with us.

The installation will be touring other venues in London later this year.