"Kleine Häuser" is a photographic project with pre-archaeological characteristics that analyzes, with simplicity, visual, and ethical rigor, a phenomenon of vernacular architecture widespread in the German region of North Rhine-Westphalia: the “Kleine Gärten.” These small country dwellings, built in series on the outskirts of cities and individually customized, appear as archetypal configurations of the concept of home, as it manifests in our imagination in its most elementary and childlike form.

Through a comparative vision and an application of photography to the banality of the everyday as an “unbalancing device” capable of introducing estrangement, the project methodically reinterprets these small dwellings. The repetition of this housing pattern gradually transforms into visual pretexts, triggers, and activators of speculation not only on sustainable and vernacular architecture but also on the act of photographing: fixing the vision, codifying space on a surface, and activating a different level of attention by cataloging the real.

This brief overview of "Kleine Gärten" illustrates how architecture—and photography—serve as imaginative tools for interpreting and documenting the landscape. The “minimal journey” proposed here, deliberately simple and light yet rational, anonymous, and impartial, becomes an exploration of signs, significant surfaces, deposits, and layers of data that reveal the private life stories of ordinary people through the modifications and personalizations they introduce over time into the spaces they inhabit.