Detroit Ice House is really all about art

Detroit -- For the past couple of weeks Detroit has been buzzing about the Ice House, the abandoned house at 3926 McClellan that two Brooklyn, NY artists have encased in ice.

Matthew Radune, an architect taking a break from his main profession to pursue dejaying and making art is a Connecticut native transplanted to New York. His cohort Gregory Holm is a native Detroiter who still owns a rental house in Hamtramck even though he now lives in New York.

The two had a eureka moment when Matthew showed Gregory a photograph of a house engulfed in a frozen waterfall from a burst pipe. Wouldn't it be cool to freeze a house on purpose as an art/architecture installation? And where better to do it than Detroit where abandoned houses seem as plentiful as stray dogs.

So the two struck a deal with the Michigan Land Bank to lease a house from a list of buildings slated to be torn down in the spring in a new program that will deconstruct and recycle, rather than demolish, blighted buildings using the labor of early-release prisoners. In addition the pair paid the back taxes on a foreclosed house so a single mom and her family could move in. "That was kind of our gift to the city for doing this project in the middle of a neighborhood," says Radune.

Other expenses for the project include licenses for use of a fire hydrant and city water and paying for police to cordon off the street for a morning. Then there was bringing world-class cinematic director of photography Rick Sands to supervise the lighting for the final project. In all the pair have spent about $15,000, most of it raised through kickstarter.com, a Web site that matches donors with projects. The rest came from their own pockets with no guarantee of making it back.

Asked about the meaning of the project, Holm says it was not so much about the housing crisis, although they did say that numerous times. Holm says that was more the media taking a statement about possible interpretations of the art installation and running with it.

"It's grown into something much more than a reference to the housing crisis in Detroit and beyond," Holm says, "and more about the personal quest that this has become and the community that has grown around it."

"It's more a testament to my persistence," he says. "Me trying to mold Mother Nature." And she hasn't been that cooperative, following ice-friendly cold snaps with balmy days that melted the ice but not their resolve.

The artists' blog icehousedetroit.blogspot.com calls it an "architectural installation and social change project," I don't know how much social change happened -- although while waiting for the weather to cooperate the dynamic duo did foster a food and clothing drive on Martin Luther King Day.

It was really all about art. All the planning, spraying the house over and over again with water, the sleepless nights as the team took turns babysitting the house round the clock to make sure it remained intact and that no one could get hurt trespassing on the ice -- all the stress and the worry and the zillion phone calls and fending off the press who tried to foil the plan of keeping the house's location secret -- all this led up to Friday night's lighting of the house like a movie set and the fulfillment of the dream Gregory Holm has had since last summer when Matthew Radune showed him that inspiring photo.

Just before dawn on Saturday he finally had the opportunity to make his ultimate photograph of the Ice House.

"I knew it from the first day I considered doing it that it would be a beautiful photograph," he says.