Exquisite Corpse, invented by Surrealists in the 1920s, is a game where each player writes down or draws something on a piece of paper, folds it, hiding what was recorded, and passes it to the next player to do the same. When finished, the paper is unfolded and a drawing – free from logic, restrictions, and reasoning but full of multiplicities – is revealed.

A city is also made up of multiple ideas and issues. Similar to how a body is made up of parts while simultaneously functioning as a whole, a building should work in the same way. The idea of the Exquisite Corpse can be directly translated to buildings in section, where each fold or floor addresses a different idea.

The drawings in an Exquisite Corpse are ultimately dependent on each artist's desires. In architecture, one must interpret what may be desirable for the building in the city's existing condition. The Sears building stands in the very centre of downtown Vancouver and it serves as the testing site for these ideas.

The top floor is of the building is an ideal place for a social gathering as well as a public viewing platform for the city. The ground floor becomes an urban landscape that links to the city, blurring the boundary between building and street. The floors in between are designed to connect the consequences – how a sheltered landscape gains access to water and light and how a public viewing platform is accessed through a building that is not operational at all times – of the two disparate ideas from above and below. The result is a collage of elements, both functional and surreal.