Rachel Whiteread. House.

A house turned inside out

In the autumn of 1993, at the corner of Grove Road and Roman Road in Bow, East London, passers by saw something strange. It had the size and outline of a Victorian terraced house. But there was no door. The windows were solid. The whole thing was a single grey block of concrete, its surface full of hollows and ridges.

This was House by Rachel Whiteread. The real house had stood on that spot, and it was already due to be demolished. Before that happened, Whiteread was allowed to use it as a mould.

The method is simple to describe and hard to carry out. The inside walls were coated with a release membrane. Then, room by room, concrete was sprayed on: first a fine white layer, then about ten centimetres of mesh reinforced concrete, bolted at the corners. Once it had set, the brick walls outside were taken away. What remained was the shape of every empty space inside, cast as one mass.

The house disappeared. The places where people had walked, sat and slept came into view.

Traces pressed inward

Standing close to House, one could read the life of the building in reverse. A socket became a small hole. A fireplace became a square recess. The ceiling moulding turned into a groove. The window frames showed up as sunken panels, like eyes that had been filled in.

Whiteread had already been casting empty spaces on a smaller scale: the space under a bed, a bathtub, a single room. Her idea was not to invent new forms. She took the spaces we pass through every day without noticing and gave them weight. With House, that emptiness reached the size of a whole building, and stood in the street.

The project was realised by Artangel, an organisation that makes art happen outside museums. No white walls, no tickets. The work stood in a residential neighbourhood, next to the people who still lived there.

Less than three months in the street

House opened to the public on 25 October 1993. Over roughly ten weeks, more than one hundred thousand people came to see it, according to Artangel. Some wrote on the concrete. Some stood for a long time. Some found it an insult.

The argument reached local government. The Bow neighbourhood council voted to demolish the work. Its chair described it in harsh terms, and his casting vote settled the outcome. On the other side, a motion in the House of Commons called for the work to be kept for three more months.

That same year Whiteread won the Turner Prize, the first woman to do so. The prize did not save the concrete. House was demolished in January 1994. It lasted less time than any house.

Today House exists only in photographs, documents and the memory of those who stood in front of it. In other words, it has become exactly what it once cast: an empty space where an object used to be.

Why an emptiness is worth remembering

We usually remember houses through objects: a table, a wardrobe, a picture on the wall. Whiteread removed all of them. She kept only the space that objects and people had occupied. The result is something you cannot enter, yet it recalls exactly what it felt like to be inside.

House also speaks of a neighbourhood in change. A house marked for demolition became a monument to that disappearance, and then disappeared in turn. The work took no side. It only recorded.

After House, Whiteread went on casting other empty spaces, such as the space beneath a flight of stairs. But House is still the work people mention first. Perhaps because it was brief. Perhaps because it was once someone's home.