House (sculpture)

House was a temporary public sculpture by British artist Rachel Whiteread, completed in East London on 25 October 1993 and demolished eleven weeks later on 11 January 1994. The work won Whiteread the Turner Prize for best young British artist and the K Foundation art award for the worst British artist in November 1993.

Whiteread had previously exhibited her sculpture Ghost, a plaster cast of the inside of a room in a Victorian house, at the Chisenhale Gallery in 1990. House was conceived as a similar work on a larger scale, encompassing not just a single room but an entire house. The work was commissioned by Artangel and sponsored by Beck's Beer and Tarmac Structural Repairs. It was intended that the selected house would have been already scheduled for demolition and that the work would be temporary, but the structure had to be free-standing so it would be visible from all sides.

After some initial discussions in 1991 and 1992 when other locations in London were considered, a Victorian terraced house in East London was selected for the work, and a temporary lease was granted by the local council of 193 Grove Road, in Mile End, E3, near the old Roman road from London to Colchester. The house was formerly part of a terrace, but some of the buildings on the road were destroyed by bombing in the Second World War, and later replaced by prefabricated dwellings.

By the 1990s, the area had a diverse social mix, with churches from three different denominations nearby. The local buildings comprised a mixture of Victorian terraces and villas, with high-rise blocks of flats from the 1960s and later, and the development at Canary Wharf was visible in the distance. The area was in the middle of an extensive redevelopment, and the local authorities decided to demolish the terrace to create a new park beside Roman Road and Grove Road. Sid Gale, the last residential occupier of 193 Grove Road, opposed its demolition, and continued to live in the house while the remainder of the terrace was demolished, leaving his house and the ones to either side, but he was eventually persuaded to move out.

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