In 2003, the BBC produced a documentary on the work of the German artist Gregor Schneider. The film, entitled House of Horror, documents the work of Schneider in general, but first and foremost Dead House ur, the project with which he had gained international fame. House ur is the name of Schneider's dwelling in the German village of Rheydt, a desolate town in the vicinity of Düsseldorf. Between 1985 and 2003, the artist secretly reconfigured this house from the inside, duplicating and transforming its interior spaces. He isolated rooms with rock wool, foam and lead, copied rooms within those same rooms, placed false walls in front of existing ones, reconfigured the location of walls and doors, made secret hallways, corridors and openings, built rotating rooms, and installed moving floors and ceilings (fig. 3). The list of the delivered works reads as a staccato of absurd architectural interventions, acts and undertakings, and is best cited in its original German:

Behind the banal façade of a prototypical middle-class German house, Schneider surreptitiously constructed a labyrinthine, indecipherable and highly mysterious architectural tangle. No space was original or genuine: every room turned out to be a kind of copy, a reconstruction, a reconfiguration or a transformation. House ur occupied and secreted the original dwelling with a replica that was actually not one. There was no way to distinguish between the original and its double, between the initial structure and the new construction, between the existing building and the added-on artistic work, as Schneider himself indicated: