There’s something quietly magical about watching a building come alive on schedule. Clock House No. 2, a public art installation by Drawing Architecture Studio, does exactly that. Every fifteen minutes, it chimes and glows, turning timekeeping into something you can walk around, peer into, and experience with your whole body.
The Beijing-based practice created this piece for the 7th Shenzhen Bay Public Art Season in China, where it’s on view until April 19th, 2026. At first glance, it looks like someone took a mantel clock from a fancy living room and scaled it up to the size of a small house. Which is kind of the point. The project collapses the distance between furniture and architecture, asking what happens when an everyday object becomes a building you can step inside.
Designer: Drawing Architecture Studio
Drawing Architecture Studio looked back to a specific historical moment for inspiration. During the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, Western missionaries brought automaton clocks to China as diplomatic gifts. These weren’t just timepieces. They were theatrical objects, intricate mechanical wonders that moved and chimed with precision. The Chinese called them Zì Míng Zhōng, which translates to “the clock that rings automatically”. These devices started in the imperial court but eventually found their way into domestic life, becoming both functional tools and symbols of cultural exchange.
Clock House No. 2 revisits that exchange, but through a contemporary lens. Instead of brass gears and delicate springs, the studio used low-cost industrial components. The structure references the layered facades and tiled roofs typical of everyday dwellings in Guangdong Province, blending local vernacular architecture with the ornamental logic of those historical automaton clocks. The result is something that feels familiar and foreign at the same time.
The installation doesn’t contain intricate mechanical movements like its historical predecessors. Instead, it marks time through light and sound. LED strips are embedded within the structure, glowing through openings in the facade. Every quarter hour, an automated musical chime triggers while the lights shift in color, creating a gentle spectacle that feels ceremonial without being overly dramatic.
The project draws on ideas from Italian architect Aldo Rossi, who wrote about the relationship between architecture and ordinary utensils. Rossi believed that everyday objects accumulate what he called “forms of memory” through repeated use and cultural continuity. For him, the line between a domestic object and an architectural artifact wasn’t fixed or absolute. Clock House No. 2 extends this thinking by turning the clock into a building and the building into a clock, playing with scale in a way that makes you reconsider what architecture can be.
What makes this installation compelling is how it situates itself at the intersection of mechanical timekeeping, architecture, and trade. It’s not just about recreating a historical object. It’s about exploring how objects move between cultures, how they change meaning as they cross borders, and how architecture can embody those shifts.
The choice to use industrial components rather than precious materials also says something about accessibility and contemporary making. These aren’t rare or expensive parts. They’re the kind of materials you’d find in construction supply stores, which makes the project feel grounded even as it reaches for something conceptual.
Standing near Clock House No. 2 during one of its fifteen-minute performances must be a peculiar experience. You’re not just observing a sculpture. You’re witnessing a building perform timekeeping as a ritual, something that happens whether anyone is watching or not. It’s architecture that insists on marking the passage of time audibly and visibly, refusing to be background scenery.
The installation also speaks to how we experience time in public space today. We’re used to checking our phones for the hour, but Clock House No. 2 offers something more communal. It announces time to everyone in earshot, creating a shared moment of awareness. That’s rare now.
By April, the installation will come down, but the questions it raises will linger. What happens when we scale up the objects we live with? How does architecture remember cultural encounters? And what does it mean for a building to keep time like a grandfather clock in the corner of a room, ticking and chiming through the hours?
The post This House-Sized Clock Glows and Chimes Every 15 Minutes first appeared on Yanko Design.
