Artist:
Sam Durant (born 1961 in Seattle, USA; lives and works in Los Angeles, USA).

Materials:
Foam core, cardboard, Plexiglass, tape, spray enamel, wood, and metal; various sizes.

Documentation:
Seen above: Abandoned House #4, 64.8 x 104.14 x 11.43 cm.

Description:
An installation from 1996 for Roger Merians Gallery in New York. Consisted of six sculptures and dozens of small photocopied collages made between 1994 and 1996, in which Durant defiled the concept of the pristine modernist home. Sculptures were cheap copies of Case Study homes made from raw foam core and cardboard with wobbly bases. Buildings by  architects such as Neutra, Koenig, Killingsworth, Brady, and Smith were burned, riddled with holes, and defaced. Referenced Robert Smithson and his concept of entropy.

“The Case Study Houses were an experiment in residential architecture, designed by major architects to provide inexpensive and efficient model homes in response to the post-war American housing boom. Durant has made a series of scale replicas of the houses in states of disrepair. Case Study no.22, the Stahl House, was designed and built by Pierre Koenig in 1960 and has become a modernist icon. Durant’s model has holes knocked through the walls and is littered with debris, suggesting decline and degradation, and the failure of this utopian ideal.”
—”Abandoned House #1 (Case Study #22),” Tate, last modified April 2008.