what's Colors of Happiness?

Elena Lazutina is a Russian artist, illustrator, and designer drawn to architecture and objects for their form, materiality, rhythm, strangeness, and ability to evoke new meanings. Each piece dialogues between structure and spontaneity, perception and imagination. Colors of Happiness, released on objkt.com in 2022, continues her AI experiments from generating imaginary architectural postcards. The works employ mid-century editorial illustration aesthetics—grainy textures, flat color fields, muted pastels—like 1950s–70s magazine spreads or travel posters, depicting model-like buildings and dollhouse spaces that feel complete yet uninhabitable. These images transform strict architectural forms into emotional moods via soft pastels, balanced geometries, and frictionless surfaces, staging atmospheres of calm, desire, and reassurance. Happiness is portrayed as accessible and procedural, achieved through design thinking: arrangement, tone, and small environmental adjustments rather than grand ideals. The visual language is direct and legible, mobilizing familiar illustration and design vocabularies for controlled emotional effects without opacity or metaphor, recalibrating feelings in the present.

Colors of Happiness featured in an objktor write-up by Anna Leven.