House (sculpture)

House was a temporary public sculpture by British artist Rachel Whiteread, on Grove Road, Mile End, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

[1] Whiteread had previously exhibited her sculpture Ghost, a plaster cast of the four living room walls inside an abandoned Victorian townhouse, at the Chisenhale Gallery in 1990.

The local buildings comprised a mixture of Victorian terraces and villas, with high-rise blocks of flats from the 1960s and later, and the development at Canary Wharf was visible in the distance.

Internal structures such as sinks and cupboards were removed, holes in the walls filled and the windows covered, to prepare a continuous internal surface that could be sprayed with a debonding agent, then a 5 centimetres (2.0 in) layer of locrete coloured light grey, and then a final 25 centimetres (9.8 in) layer of concrete reinforced with steel mesh.

[8] Being so heavy, the work was exhibited at the original site of the house, on the edge of a new public park, Wennington Green, and beside Grove Road.

A motion for its retention was moved in the House of Commons by the local Bow and Poplar member of parliament Mildred Gordon in November 1993.

[12][8] The work won Whiteread the Turner Prize in November 1993, but the council confirmed the decision to demolish it the same day, passed by the casting vote of the chairman of the planning committee.

[8] The controversy was compared to that over the public sculptures by Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill, with the fate of the work recalling Richard Serra's Tilted Arc in New York.