Apartment

By typing in words of their choice, users create rooms and apartments as a two-dimensional plan, similar to a blueprint. The architecture is based on a semantic analysis of the user's words, reorganizing them in the rooms to reflect the underlying themes they express. This structure is then translated into navigable, three-dimensional dwellings composed of images from a previous Internet word search.

The apartments created on the Apartment Web site are clustered into cities according to their semantic relationships. The cities can be arranged according to semantic complexes such as "Art," "Body," "Work," and "Truth"—the apartments with the highest occurrence of the respective theme will move to the center. Apartment both alludes to and reverses the idea of the memory palace, a mnemonic technique originating from the 2nd century B.C.E. used for rhetoric purposes. The technique was based on mentally assigning parts of a speech to specific rooms or spaces, and then delivering that speech by mentally walking from space to space. Establishing an equivalence between language and space, Apartment connects the written word with different forms of spatial configuration.