Created for the finale of the 2013 Merge Festival, the upside down house or Under the Weather but Over the Moon on the southern side of London's Blackfriars Bridge consists of a perfect but completely inverted facade. Using brick slips and a local business sign dating from 1876, recovered from a Welsh salvage yard, the killer details are the upside-down real-estate board advertising the building for sale, the crooked blinds and the shuttered, untenable historic shopfront occupying the bottom (or top) floor.

Installed in Margate, Chinneck's piece seems to express the longstanding local decline.

After all, Bankside has seen astronomical leaps in terms of value and investment over the past decade. The idea that a 19th-century livery and engineering company could still exist there is as unbelievable as the flipped facade itself.

Telling the Truth through False Teeth (2012) features 312 identically smashed window panes

Outside of London, the housing crisis à la Chinneck takes another tone: a sliding frontage in Margate shows a house in structural, if not existential, crisis. From the Knees of my Nose to the Belly of my Toes (2011) is perhaps more emotive than his others: the frontage of a suburban, terraced house has slumped like a drunk slid low on the sofa in front of the telly.

Completed in the same year as the London Olympics, this piece subverts a symbol of dereliction

The house is part of a terrace which had lain derelict in a side street. Perhaps it is in this context -- away from London -- that Chinneck's work is really tested in its desire to allow sculpture to speak of the everyday. As the masonry surface slides away from the structure, it is hard not to anthropomorphise, relating the facade's loss of grip to the fatigue of the surrounding area. Except that paradoxically the very presence of an artwork points to the opposite syndrome -- the utility of art in revivifying a stagnant town. The work was recently vandalised, and the teen offender subsequently invited to take part in making a future piece.

The Upside Down House or Under the Weather but Over the Moon (2012), is the subject of many double-takes

Though he's about to take a well-earned break from his prolific early successes, Chinneck isn't the sort to switch off. 'I do get anxious when people feel they know what is coming next,' he confesses. 'I am very conscious of the line between refining an idea and repeating it.'

Artwork of a project in development: Chinneck's Hampstead Heath windmill

Future projects include a windmill on Hampstead Heath. Broken from its base, one of its sails will be embedded in the ground, while the building itself spins around instead. Camden Council has already approved the 24m-high project, which will be anything but 'run of the mill'. This year, in the Belgian city of Mons, an historic bank building will apparently be flooded and filled with fish. He hints: 'I want to start working with nature, as I've been working with architecture for a few years...'

Artwork of a project in development: Chinneck's Hampstead Heath windmill

Chinneck's work may be accused of being limited to spectacular one-liners, but rather than prescribing an ontological significance, the idea of open-endedness in his familiar-made-strange world allows the viewer to find and lose their own way.

When the exhaustion of financial constraints, everyday stress or banal familiarity leave us no other way to imagine the environments around us, there is definitely space for the theatrical stagecraft of Chinneck's art to turn the city back into a place of wonder, and jolt us into looking again.