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11/4/2009

Cold discomfort in Detroit
Rice Architecture alum's Ice House project will raise awareness of urban woes

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

An economic frost settled on Detroit long ago, but one house will get colder than usual this winter when a graduate of the Rice School of Architecture sets out to make a point.

	GREGORY HOLM
	Matthew Radune '05 sees projects like Ice House Detroit as "red flags, or wayfinding devices, toward more environmentally benign ways of living in buildings, cities or countries."

Matthew Radune '05, a New York architect and artist, is working with photographer Gregory Holm, a New York photographer who was raised in Detroit, to put the big chill on one building to highlight the devastation the economic slump has brought to Motor City, where 20,000 homes now stand vacant.

"Freezing a house in ice was an idea I came upon years ago while doing some research at Rice for a project," said Radune, 32, who also has a background in environmental studies. "I was fascinated by images I found of architecture at the mercy of nature -- frozen houses sprayed by the fire department in the winter time -- or architecture created from nature in extreme ways, like bamboo scaffolding in China."

Radune and Holm want the house to serve as a "red flag," drawing attention to the glut of abandoned, dangerous houses in Detroit. "In effect, it will serve as a front operation for Ice House Detroit, the social capital project," Radune said. "Our goal is to highlight organizations within urban Detroit that are doing radical work to remake the urban fabric of the city by recycling materials from abandoned houses, foresting abandoned lots and putting up vegetable-growing greenhouses within sight of downtown."

The duo will choose one house from a list of 100 abandoned properties the State of Michigan Land Bank plans to demolish in the spring. "There are urban blocks near downtown with only one or two houses left on them out of an original 16 or so, the rest having long ago been torn down," Radune said. "We don't want to bother any neighbors, if possible."

Beginning in January, they will spray the house over a succession of days, building up a coat of ice they hope will last several months into the spring thaw. The house will then be deconstructed, and most of the materials will be recycled.

Radune and Holm are paying for the project through Kickstarter, a microfinance site helping them raise $11,000 by Dec. 15. It's an all-or-nothing proposition; if the goal isn't reached by the deadline, they will have to start over.

Rice "was incredibly instrumental in preaching holistic thinking in solving large-scale architectural and urban problems," Radune said. "After working in architectural firms in New York City for the last four years, I've become interested in exploring nontraditional ways of solving urban environmental issues. While this is not technically an architecture project, it draws on skills learned at Rice, such as the influence of endless research and the importance of working with multiple organizations to strengthen a design project.

"I'm interested in moving toward other large-scale collaborative art or architecture projects that have environmental change as their basis," he said.