The project I am engaged in is the production of a three-foot tall sculpture on a table-top of the collapsed William Livingstone house in Detroit. This is important to me as it represents a metaphorical revisiting of my past, as this Detroit home represents what also happened to places I grew up in, on Cleveland's East Side, where I was born. For this project I am seeking $12,000 to cover the model builder's labor expenses for the house.
By recreating the collapsed William Livingstone house as a small sculpture, the project effectively becomes a form of psychological historic preservation at the scale of a doll house. As I have a tremendous personal interest in distressed and dead architecture, and have photographed the evidence of this for over a decade, this project seems an ideal one for me to pursue. The $12,000 would cover the cost of labor for the fabrication of the house by a Hollywood model builder in Los Angeles. Should an additional $10,000 be raised, it would cover material costs for the three foot house and the creation of a small Victorian era style table that the sculpture would rest upon, as well as European standard shipping crates. There are two major themes to the William Livingstone house project. One is the loss of the structure that was built to protect and shelter the family; the other is the theme of irony. This house was a French Renaissance mansion built in Detroit in 1893. The irony is that this house, built by a powerful and wealthy Detroit industrialist, has fallen to the same fate of abandonment, collapse and of finally being raised, no different than the least valued and least maintained properties in the Midwest, from Cleveland to St. Louis and beyond.
Over the past decade local Detroit preservationists have attempted to rescue the William Livingstone property. In each instance further damage was caused. During this same time the house became a local tourist destination, with many people taking photos of the house and posting them online.
What I also recall about the places I lived in as a child in Cleveland was that each property retained some of the elements of its refined original architectural and design elements, while sometimes being at once completely distraught and unraveling. The project then enjoins several other narratives, from why was the home abandoned, to why was it not maintained, to it being demolished, to how the people of Detroit valued its existence. Lastly the project is rife with metaphors about life and the desire for permanence and the inability to preserve. Other factors like wicked winters and tremendous rains and of course gravity and the relatively short passage of time itself, from 1893 to September 7, 2007, when the property was raised, are part of the psychological equation of the life and end of this former mansion.
The project I am engaged in is the production of a three-foot tall sculpture on a table-top of the collapsed William Livingstone house in Detroit. This is important to me as it represents a metaphorical revisiting of my past, as this Detroit home represents what also happened to places I grew up in, on Cleveland's East Side, where I was born. For this project I am seeking $12,000 to cover the model builder's labor expenses for the house.
By recreating the collapsed William Livingstone house as a small sculpture, the project effectively becomes a form of psychological historic preservation at the scale of a doll house. As I have a tremendous personal interest in distressed and dead architecture, and have photographed the evidence of this for over a decade, this project seems an ideal one for me to pursue. The $12,000 would cover the cost of labor for the fabrication of the house by a Hollywood model builder in Los Angeles. Should an additional $10,000 be raised, it would cover material costs for the three foot house and the creation of a small Victorian era style table that the sculpture would rest upon, as well as European standard shipping crates. There are two major themes to the William Livingstone house project. One is the loss of the structure that was built to protect and shelter the family; the other is the theme of irony. This house was a French Renaissance mansion built in Detroit in 1893. The irony is that this house, built by a powerful and wealthy Detroit industrialist, has fallen to the same fate of abandonment, collapse and of finally being raised, no different than the least valued and least maintained properties in the Midwest, from Cleveland to St. Louis and beyond.
Over the past decade local Detroit preservationists have attempted to rescue the William Livingstone property. In each instance further damage was caused. During this same time the house became a local tourist destination, with many people taking photos of the house and posting them online.
What I also recall about the places I lived in as a child in Cleveland was that each property retained some of the elements of its refined original architectural and design elements, while sometimes being at once completely distraught and unraveling. The project then enjoins several other narratives, from why was the home abandoned, to why was it not maintained, to it being demolished, to how the people of Detroit valued its existence. Lastly the project is rife with metaphors about life and the desire for permanence and the inability to preserve. Other factors like wicked winters and tremendous rains and of course gravity and the relatively short passage of time itself, from 1893 to September 7, 2007, when the property was raised, are part of the psychological equation of the life and end of this former mansion.