project: reconstruction work at the Memorial for Peace in Munich at the architecture week year: 2022, typ: Installattion architecture: Opposite Office team: Benedikt Hartl, Zina Arborranu place: Memorial for Peace in  vicinity of the Russian Consulate General, Munich

The project originates from a seemingly pragmatic commission: to develop a spatial orientation system for a staff kitchen. Rather than responding with a conventional design vocabulary—wayfinding graphics, color codes, signage—the approach deliberately departs from functionalist logic and enters a speculative realm. Orientation is not treated as a navigational issue to be solved through information design, but as a phenomenological and narrative event, situated within the ambiguous space between fiction and reality.

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Through a cinematic narrative, the cook—symbol of the mundane—is transformed into a galactic figure: the Stormtrooper. The kitchen becomes a space station; function dissolves into fiction. Space is no longer given but enacted, no longer explained but experienced. The mirrored metal surfaces, the starlit void, the silence of space—these are not mere stylistic devices, but instruments of meaning displacement. The boundaries between interior and cosmos, between labor and myth, begin to dissolve. The kitchen becomes an interface between daily necessity and speculative projection. The impact on the workers unfolds subtly yet profoundly. By immersing the staff in a fictionally charged environment, the project opens a temporary portal out of the ordinary logic of labor. The cook is no longer just a cook but a figure inscribed in a larger mythological narrative. This symbolic reframing activates a latent agency, allowing workers to re-encounter their own gestures, tools, and rhythms with a heightened sense of presence.

Rather than offering a linear or hierarchical system of orientation, the project introduces a field of affective cues and narrative anchors. Workers orient themselves not through signs, but through sensations, associations, and a sense of narrative immersion. In place of command and control, it offers ambiguity and imagination. In place of signage, story. In place of order, experience.