Beyonce and Bieber do it, Cameron and Obama have done it, and even the Pope is at it. So it was only a matter of time before buildings joined in the fun and started taking selfies too.

While the paint might not have dried, nor the hotel floors quite been laid, the Sochi Olympic park now boasts a magical white box that morphs into the shape of its visitors’ faces, bulging their profiles through the surface of its rubbery skin, forming a kind of digital Mount Rushmore for the Facebook age. Or a wall of sinister monumental death-masks, depending on how you look at it.

“For thousands of years people have used portraiture to record their history on the landscape, buildings and through public art,” says its creator, the London-based architect Asif Khan, who also dreamed up the “playable” Coke Beatbox pavilion for the London Olympics, a cloud of inflated pillows that allowed visitors to mix different music tracks. “Selfies, emoticons, Facebook and FaceTime have become universal shorthand for communicating in the digital age. My instinct was to try and harness that immediacy in the form of sculpture, to turn the everyday moment into something epic.”

The 2,000 sq m pavilion, for mobile phone giant and Olympic sponsor MegaFon, contains photo booths where visitors’ faces are scanned, before being transferred on to the facade through 11,000 mechanical actuators, like a giant Pin Art toy – blown up 3,500 times the size of your real face, to loom out over the park like some benevolent mountain-sized Buddha. Only this is a Buddha with a techno twist.

“Each actuator carries a translucent sphere at its tip that contains an RGB-LED light, allowing an image or video to be simultaneously displayed on the facade,” says Valentin Spiess of Basel-based engineering company iart, which developed the system. “Each sphere acts as one pixel within the entire facade and can be extended by up to two metres as part of a three-dimensional shape. But the process will be as fast and simple as using a commercial photo booth.”

Images show people huddled in awe before the great faces, like some mesmerised cult, worshipping at the altar of the selfie. Quite how far the faces will be censored remains to be seen, but it could have rich potential as a wall of protest, displaying the anguished grimaces of the slaughtered Circassians or exploited construction workers – and perhaps we can look forward to the first eight metre-high gay kiss.

Let’s just hope the face of MegaFon’s founding shareholder and Russia’s richest man, the Uzbek oligarch Alisher Usmanov, doesn’t suddenly bulge out in menacing disco glory on a dark, wintry night.