Gilding the Lily

If you had a house that was going to be demolished, scrapped and completely replaced with something else – what would you do with it? Houston sculptors Dan Havel and Dean Ruck thought it would be “neat” to turn the house into one of the strangest installation art pieces the ‘burbs have ever seen.

Letting their sense of humor reign, the Tunnel House was built, creating an illusion of vertigo and a sense that the house is being sucked in upon itself.

One of the really great things about this installation piece is the ability for the viewer to interact with it, walking through the middle and coming out the other side.

The tunnel tapers through the center of the house, becoming a crawlspace that ‘drains’ out the other side. Suitably enough, the homes on the site were slated to be demolished for the site to be turned into a new arts center. Since the houses’ demolition was slated for early June 2005, the installation piece, which was constructed in April of that year, was designed to only remain up until the, though Gilding found pictures that were dated as having been taken as late as June 2007. Whether the Tunnel House installation is still up at this point in time no one mentioned, however, boukou pictures can be found on Flickr if you search with the tag ‘Tunnel House’.

Link: WebUrbanist