ST. PAUL, Minnesota - Early this month, Chris Larson set fire to Chad and Kate Bogdan's home. Or something that looked a lot like it. The mood was festive: A ragtag squad marched by humming "We Didn't Start the Fire" on kazoos.

It was the dusk-to-dawn cultural frolic called Northern Spark, held on June 1. And for this year's edition, a burning building was the main event.

The building shouldn't have burned so quickly. It was one of about 100 homes drafted by the well-known Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer, who later designed the Whitney Museum of American Art. He had specified incombustible materials: white concrete block for the walls, red ceramic tile for the floors.

What burned was not the actual Breuer house, but a replica constructed by Mr. Larson from the original 1961 blueprints. He had made the walls and roof out of cardboard and two-by-four studs, completing work in a month.

Why had someone chosen to clone such a distinguished home only to destroy it?

"It's a gesture," said Mr. Larson, a 46-year-old art professor at the University of Minnesota. He once crashed a wood model of the '69 Dodge Charger from "The Dukes of Hazzard" TV show into a replica of the Unabomber's cabin. And he coaxed a family gospel group, the Spiritual Knights, to pose around a formal dining table, recreating the cover of a Mahalia Jackson gospel album. He then floated the room, and the house it was in, across an empty lake.

Demolition, Mr. Larson said, frees up energy trapped in the materials. "There's some potential in that action,"he said.

Breuer, a Jewish emigre from Hungary, sketched the St. Paul house as a favor to a Catholic liturgical artist, Frank Kacmarcik. But the house has been neglected in books on Breuer. The burning presented the opportunity for its present owners, the Bogdans, to earn it some respect.

On the eve of the fire, a parade of onlookers circled the perimeter of the house, in a kind of funeral procession, tapping on the cardboard walls and posing for trophy photos. But this crowd wasn't exactly mourning the death of high modernism.

Sarah Kesler, 42, of Minneapolis said: "Thank God they're going to burn it, because it's ugly and depressing."

For a time, Mr. Larson helped his crew of friends and art students slash diamond-shaped ventilation holes in the walls and ceiling. But before long, he was huddling in a small, enclosed room.

"It feels really decadent," he said. "I wish we could do it without the crowd."

An assistant came by to ask where to stash the first wood pallets - more kindling. "Start in the kids' bedroom," he said, and then added, "That sounds awful."

Forest Lewis, a home remodeler who helped Mr. Larson, said of the fire: "There's spectacle involved. But because it's the Breuer house" - that is, practically a holy shrine for shelter magazines - "I think it has to do with idolatry on some level."

The New York Times

(China Daily 06/23/2013 page12)