This issue showcases projects from the AR House shortlist and studies the artist’s house and the myths it contains
The architecture of the home is a mirror of contemporary life. The houses included in this year’s AR House shortlist are no different: modular furniture alleviates the spatial pressures of super-small flats in Hong Kong, housing for Mexican rubber workers attempts to accommodate transient populations, and vertical living in London responds to a scarcity of land. As the argument for retrofit strengthens, three projects transform existing buildings: a machiya in Kyoto, a factory in São Paulo and a 1950s villa in Copenhagen.
As well as their contemporary context, homes also carry traces of their inhabitants; artists’ houses, for example, hold clues to their creative process. The artist’s house can form a Gesamtkunstwerk – a large‑scale spatial representation of an entire creative world – as seen at Charleston, home to Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, or Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee’s Meisterhaus in Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius but painted by the artists.
‘Artists have long used their homes to cultivate various publics,’ writes Tom Wilkinson in this issue’s keynote, and this role continues after their death. The space is often fetishised, painstakingly preserved and sometimes used to market a city or a whole region. As seen at Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury, an artist need not have lived in a house for long for it to be a tourist attraction. The myth of the artist – the aspirational figure of an autonomous and creatively fulfilled individual – lingers on.
In 1993, British sculptor Rachel Whiteread created a free-standing concrete cast of the internal spaces of a Victorian terraced house slated for demolition. It stood on the site of the demolished building on Grove Road in London’s Mile End: a ghost haunting the rapidly gentrifying street. Though thousands petitioned the UK parliament to make it a permanent artwork, House was itself demolished less than three months after being unveiled.
Credit: Artangel / Photograph: Susan Ormerod
