Chris Larson Rebuilt a House by Marcel Breuer, Only to Destroy It By Nick Clausen Caroline Yang for The New York Times Illuminating St. Paul: The artist Chris Larson built a life-sized replica of Marcel Breuer's St. Paul house. Early Sunday, Mr. Larson set the piece ablaze in downtown St. Paul before a crowd of onlookers. PAUL - At 2:15 a.m. on Sunday, Chris Larson set fire to Chad Bogdan's home. Or something that looked a lot like it. The two-bedroom house was unoccupied at the time. Mr. Larson had just finished assembling it a few hours earlier, on a vacant lot. No apparent rancor existed between the men. Mr. Larson, a 46-year-old art professor at the University of Minnesota, had recently discussed the sale of an original drawing to Mr. Bogdan, 40, an industrial design executive. When the fire started, Mr. Bogdan was milling about in a crowd of thousands outside the Union Depot, along the Mississippi riverfront. The mood was festive: A ragtag pep squad marched by humming "We Didn't Start the Fire" on kazoos. It was the night of the dusk-to-dawn cultural frolic called Northern Spark. And for this year's edition, arson was the main event. First, a tube of smoke spiraled out of the house. A moment later, the roof was on fire. By the time the walls started collapsing, the conflagration was probably 2,000 degrees, or so said the guy on the fire truck, and he would know. The building shouldn't have burned so quickly. It was one of roughly three dozen midcentury homes drafted by the well-known Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer, who later designed the Whitney Museum of American Art. And as a matter of taste, he had specified inflammable materials: white concrete block for the walls and red ceramic tile for the floors. But Mr. Larson had cut some corners when he was following the original 1961 blueprints. He had made the walls and roof out of cardboard and two-by-four studs. Working with a crew of two laborers, a country-western singer and an erstwhile horoscope writer, he had completed the building in a month. Once the scene ended, Mr. Bogdan said he planned to enjoy a few slugs of club soda and "potato juice" (presumably vodka). He had adopted a stoic line. "At the beginning, I took it personally," he said of the fire. But this has nothing to do with me. The hour was late. And soon he would be bundling his wife and older son into their Land Rover and returning - get this - to the same white house, a few miles downriver. To be clear, there were two Marcel Breuer houses, identical twins: a 50-year-old exemplar of high modernism and a stunt double that Mr. Larson had devised for the night's bonfire. The first was intact and standing where Mr. Bogdan had left it earlier that evening. The second, as everyone could see, was on its way to becoming ash. Something profoundly weird had just happened. Lacking another word, Mr. Bogdan called it art. Why had someone chosen to clone such a distinguished home only to destroy it? Earlier in the evening, Mr. Larson's response to the crowd's pressing question had been to hide inside the house. His wife, Kriss Zulkosky, explained that this wasn't the first piece of art he had torched. Now and again, he burned his own hand-hewn sculptures - gargantuan and monstrous machines - in the backyard. Friends would drop by for beer and barbecue. "It's a gesture," Mr. Larson said, in a tidy bit of understatement. Then he expanded a little on the nature of material. The shiny, finished object, be it a car or a mansion, was inert, tedious to the eye, dead. Demolition freed up the energy trapped in the materials. "There's some potential in that action," he said. Mr. Larson could have been paraphrasing the Greek philosopher Heraclitus ("The death of fire is birth for air"), or just exercising his tongue. Pressing him to explain why he creates and obliterates houses ultimately seemed like asking the photographer Cindy Sherman why she takes so many pictures of herself. It's what he does. So let the building tell the story. Marcel Breuer's little white box had a colorful history before Mr. Larson ever got his hands on the blueprints. Breuer, a Jewish émigré from Hungary, sketched the house as a favor to a Catholic liturgical artist and future monk named Frank Kacmarcik. The pair had collaborated on the glorious Abbey Church and 2,500-ton concrete bell banner, at Saint John's University, 75 miles northwest of the Twin Cities. The architectural historian Larry Millett included the Kacmarcik house in his magisterial "AIA Guide to the Twin Cities," but he also possesses an intimate acquaintance with Breuer's blockhouse brutalism. "I went to Saint John's," he said. And I lived in Breuer's dorms, which I believe were designed to mortify the flesh.