Miniature Worlds

In my sculpture class this morning we were prepping for presentations on our semester final: "SITE."  More on my idea later (it involves periscopes and is situated in Kevin Roche's Center for the Arts at Wesleyan), but I have been inspired by my childhood fascination with the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago.

These rooms give the most detailed entry to another time, another world, from the perspective of a larger-than life voyeur.  As kid you could stand on a ledge, tip-toe as high as posssible, and look into the meticulously placed artifacts, all rendered to extreme accuracy and no bigger than your thumbnail. 

I loved it.  I wanted to recreate them.  I didn't care about playing with dolls themselves, but I wanted the dollhouse.  To that end, I went about creating furniture that would be fit for a small fairy, and complete with miniature french toast for breakfasts-in-beds.

Now I would love to make miniature to-scale models of some of Roche's modernist influences on his work at Wesleyan, such as Mies van der Rohe's Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago or Erik Gunnar Asplund's Woodland Cemetery in Stolkhom.  But for now I'll just have to settle for more views into 19th century English homes.

More Thorne Rooms from the Knoxville Museum of Art on this flickr photostream.