This project investigates the Covent Garden shopfront as a performing surface: A facade that stages authenticity through strict heritage regulations. What appears as historic character is actively maintained through conservation rules that dictate materials, colors, proportions and details. These rules act like invisible strings, choreographing how each shopfront must look and behave.

Read through the lens of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Covent Garden can be understood as an image-producing environment shaped for consumption, where experience is transformed into something to be seen. Within this context, the shopfront functions as a threshold between inside and outside, desire and access. It invites the viewer in while simultaneously controlling how space is perceived. The facade becomes a stage and regulation becomes the script behind the performance.

Rather than reconstructing the shopfront, the project moves towards a fragmentation of the frame. It picks apart a coherent object and elongates the threshold of the shop window into space. This approach is informed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Shop Window Series. While their interventions often neutralise or flatten architectural elements through wrapping and serial presentation, this project does the opposite: it animates the fragments, assigning meaning to each element and exploring the relationships between them.

This direction is further shaped by Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual object works, such as One and Three Chairs, which separate object, representation, and definition. Instead of representing the shopfront through images or drawings, the project uses real objects to stand in for the elements and carry meaning directly.