The fantasy architecture of Matthew Houlding

[imomus]

There's a touching scene in Kurosawa's 1970 film Dodesukaden where an old homeless man conjures in thin air, to inspire the little boy who's his only friend, his dream home. I thought of the scene yesterday at Preview Berlin, the emerging art fair held in the Tempelhof airport (a building with a darker architectural legacy; Albert Speer redesigned its interior) looking at a fantasy architectural model called "Pacific Swiss" by artist Matthew Houlding.



Matthew Houlding is a 40 year-old British artist who spent his formative years in Kenya. He makes scale models of unlikely or impossible buildings. The structures (they'd make bizarrely brilliant miniature railway scenery) use common packaging materials -- old KFC boxes and stuff. The technique is one Houlding picked up in Kenya, where people recycle old petrol tins into toy cars and planes.

When I got home I googled up some of Houlding's other creations:


Summertime (2004)


Cartel Beach House (2004)


Installation view (2005)

Another Preview artist had installed some 3D photos of illuminated Chinese skyscrapers perched above a big pool of oil. Apart from the architectural art, I thought the strongest work -- and the most committed buzz -- was around the Eastern European galleries; I liked the Polish booths here and at the Berliner Liste (a duller fair than Preview), and this interesting gallery, Budapest's Impex. There's something good -- some kind of interesting art energy -- in Eastern Europe just now.

Comments

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Wonderful work--California craftsman bungalow meets chalet/cuckoo clock.

Brings William Christenberry's model houses to mind, although his tend to be slightly sinister in that they never have openings, and vaguely look like Baptist churches/Klan hoods.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Is that a...miniature Hockney?

Vaguely look like Kaln hoods?

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Another series of works was provoked by a terrifying incident when, out of curiosity, he tried to attend a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan. Confronted at the door by a glaring masked figure, Christenberry fled. Though he destroyed his first two Klan paintings, the subject occupied him for many years, resulting in a dense multi-media construction adjacent to his studio that came to be known as the Klan Room, which was mysteriously burgled in 1979. Christenberry has largely reconstructed the room, which is filled with paintings, found objects, drawings, sculptures, dioramas, and a series of fabric dolls of klansmen in their hooded robes.

Could have been deliberate!

[grzeg.livejournal.com]

I’m suspicious of this, which seems to be of the same vein as the “Poor Architecture (http://imomus.livejournal.com/281748.html)” movement.

It’s one thing when it’s “really incredible to see how African people can use a lot of different materials, the materials they have around themselves. They can find the simplest way to make the minimum essential things fit for a purpose... 90% of what you need to make a building is already present on the site”, and another when a Western artist/architect takes those same materials, brought about by the cultural contamination, disrespect and environmental disregard of the West’s colonial imperialism (seriously? KFC boxes?!), appropriates them, and re-presents it as architecture (that is: the built representation of a culture) to the very people that were disenfranchised.

Re: Vaguely look like Kaln hoods?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Oh, it certainly was. I saw his ongoing "Klan doll room" installation about ten years ago. The room was full of Klansmen dolls he had made by hand.

hopefully alien

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

It all reminds me of William Gibson novels but that all might be to dark for these sublime creations.

[33mhz.livejournal.com]

I dunno, despite the references to his Kenyan upbringing and their practice of refashioning leftover consumer goods into toys and things (perhaps to add an extra exotic tinge) it's not very different in concept from the types of crafts/folk art that would show up in the Children's museum in my Texas hometown: airplanes made from flattened soda cans, raw spaghetti stick Eiffel towers, and so on.

While there was abject poverty in Laredo, these recycled crafts were rarely their work: those coke can airplanes are awfully time consuming to create and tend to have lots of sharp little angles besides. Children of the very poor were still more likely to get a dragon ball-z knockoff action figure at the dollar store than to fashion their own toys from consumer detritus.

[saint-claws.livejournal.com]

I would live in all of those houses.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

They look interesting, but expensive, and how sustainable would these constructions be?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

That's an architectural question.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Ah, I get it, in reality these fantasy castles would be made out of cardboard boxes, right?!

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Well the "fantasy" is the point. As it is, these models have more to do with sculpture than actual dwellings.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Yeah, yeah, but when I saw them the thought: "Man that would be expensive" and I saw tons of trucks, machines and people constructing these buildings, adapting nature (Especially the Cartel Beach House) instead of adapting architecture.

[(Anonymous)]

Since when is it the artist's role to reflect and advocate liberal social values with their work?

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

And since when is it the thought's role to reflect and advocate the artist's role?

[(Anonymous)]

Who here did such a thing? And how do you reflect a role? Does this involve mirrors?

[(Anonymous)]

Did it.Once..No mirrors..Years ago,though..Don't remember much about it..A cop out,I know.