What’s special about Lina Lapelytė’s 400,000 cubes?

Inside “We Make Years Out of Hours” and its cube-scale view of time

Lina Lapelytė’s We Make Years Out of Hours at Hamburger Bahnhof uses a striking, literal approach to time and collective work: 400,000 wooden cubes, arranged so that viewers can experience time not as an abstract idea, but as something built, handled, and shared.

The installation is also described as exploring labor and collective experience, which is a big part of why the cube count matters. Four hundred thousand units turn the act of making into a measurable, human-scale project—suggesting that “years” and “hours” can be understood through how many physical components are produced over time.

The work’s significance

Based on the exhibition’s stated themes, the display functions in a few interconnected ways:

• Time becomes material. Instead of clocks or calendars, the viewer encounters time as an accumulation of objects.
• Labor is made visible. The scale implies coordinated effort—time is represented by what people build.
• Collective experience is central. The structure suggests many participants, hands, or weeks of work contribute to what ultimately appears as a single, unified environment.

The exhibition also includes weekly performances, adding another layer. Those repeated events link the static sculpture to ongoing social rhythms, reinforcing the idea that time isn’t only counted—it’s enacted.

For museum-goers, that combination of cube massing plus scheduled performances turns the gallery visit into a form of witnessing: you don’t just look at a timeline; you see the ongoing process by which time and meaning are constructed together.