Many of the sculptures that Eldon Danhausen has made over the past half century blend human forms and geometric shapes–a cube that is a man sitting with his knees pulled up and his arms resting on them, a sphere that is also a woman. Danhausen did pretty much the same thing when he sculpted a house and garden out of a dilapidated Old Town boarding house 40 years ago.
He recast traditional spaces–a bedroom and other indoor rooms, a back yard–into entirely new takes on what they ought to look like.
His beguiling version of a living room is 500 square feet of mostly open space with a pair of boulders protruding from the floor and a round conversation pit sunk into it. In the bedroom, Danhausen put his bed inside an arched black tunnel that is cut out of a wall covered with nuggets of bright blue glass. And an abstracted pond flows 40 feet through his back yard, its banks lined with sinuous mounds of terrazzo and trees pruned into severe shapes.
In the garden, which will be among 50-plus yards featured in the Dearborn Garden Walk and Heritage Festival next month, Danhausen’s method is most visible. Look at it one way, and it has all the fundamentals of a garden: trees, smaller plants, water and walkways.
But each of those elements has been tweaked in a way that propels this garden way outside familiar boundaries. The pond has a naturally fluid shape, but it’s not remotely natural; it’s more like a concrete-lined ditch, but with nice curves thrown in.
The rocks come in two primary varieties: waves of so-’60s terrazzo, and moldy, blocky lumps of Michigan tufa, a protected natural stone that lends an ancient look (and that Danhausen collected legally many years ago).
Then there are the trees, warped and contorted into extraordinary forms by this semi-retired sculptor and professor emeritus of the School of the Art Institute. Out front, near the sidewalk, stands a 40-year-old crabapple with a poodle cut that would look dated if it didn’t fit so well into the larger picture. The space-age look is picked up by hard-pruned junipers that jut out of the sides of some of the terrazzo mounds, as if pencilled into the landscape by Dr. Seuss.
“I didn’t want any traditional connotations to the place,” Danhausen, who is 76, says of the remarkable home he shares with roommate, Andre van Ee. That’s a bit of an understatement from a man who curved all the walls and the ceiling of his guest bathroom and covered them with a brown terrazzo, making the space feel more like the inside of an African termite mound than a powder room.
Danhausen did this in 18 months in the early ’60s.
And the most surprising thing about Danhausen’s home is that it’s still surprising–40 years out. Often, avant-garde visions grow up to make their way into the mainstream and then age into cliches. But that hasn’t happened with Danhausen’s ideas–do you know anyone else who sleeps in a black tunnel?–and it’s not likely to anytime soon.
It’s such a thoroughly personal expression of what a house and garden can be that even though some aspects like Danhausen’s extensive use of terrazzo seem to tie it to the time he did it, overall it feels unhooked from time or fashion. Danhausen’s home is his own portrait of the artist as a young homeowner.
“That house is an incredible experience,” says Kris Jarantoski. Jarantoski is the director of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe and lives in Danhausen’s neighborhood. “It’s like some exhibit at The Field Museum, where you’re exploring a whole new part of the world as you go through.”
But at The Field Museum, the original inhabitant wouldn’t be living in the exhibit, going through the mail, talking to the three captive ducks who drift on the pond, and fretting that his back yard has somehow evolved from the spartan composition of hills, water and trees he began with into a “crowded, too crowded” den of perennials and annuals.
Living in art
But there’s Danhausen, still living in his largest sculpture. He’s changed it very little over the years, except to paint the sole paintable wall in the otherwise black kitchen. Over time, it’s been blue and orange; it’s now a deep, dark purple, a shade he got a paint store to copy from a delphinium he grew in the back yard.
Danhausen was a successful 36-year-old sculptor and teacher at the School of the Art Institute in 1960 when he went looking for larger studio space in Old Town. The house he settled on dated from 1880 and had a candy store in the basement and rented sleeping rooms on the upper two floors.
“To call it a Victorian would be flattering it,” Danhausen says. “I had no problem ripping everything out. It wasn’t some beautiful piece of architecture.”
Over the next year and a half, Danhausen built a two-story studio at the back of the lot, gutted the house and let his vision take the house wherever it led. In his bathroom, that meant making a shower with a wall of boulders that seem to tumble into the step-down tub. In the stairwell, huge chunks of transparent glass, byproducts of a blast furnace, pepper the wall, coloring the sunlight that passes through. His bedroom has what passes for a door but is actually a curved panel of zebra wood that can be either pressed against a curved wall or swung out to block entry. There’s no latch, no doorknob, no doorjamb–just a slab of wood.
“I was really having fun doing something I’d never seen before,” Danhausen says.
Water features
He knew from the start that there would be a garden; since his childhood on his parents’ sugar beet farm in the thumb region of Michigan, Danhausen had been gardening. But the garden took the shape it did primarily because of where the downspouts were on the original house.
“I needed a wall of glass here across the back,” Danhausen says in his dining room, which opens onto a semi-circular balcony. “But there was a downspout that hung right down the middle. It was going to block my view.”
Moving the downspout to the side would have been the simplest solution, but Danhausen devised something far more sculptural. He installed two black aluminum gutters that carry rainwater 14 feet horizontally off the back of the house, then let it drop two stories into the concrete pond below.
The pond he developed beneath that spillway became the major feature of the garden, winding among bonsai-style trees and the mounds he created to break up the flat ground. One of the mounds is hollow. “I knew it would be a home for some kind of pet,” Danhausen says. “I thought a dog.”
But the pond seemed perfect for ducks, so the three Mandarin ducks he tends nest in that mound. They can survive to temperatures of 60 degrees below zero, he says, and he keeps water running in the pond all winter so it won’t freeze.
Initially, the garden was to be planted primarily with trees–most of them sculpted through harsh pruning and bonsai techniques. Danhausen forced a pine’s trunk to make an S-curve by wiring it to heavy boulders. Elsewhere in the yard are a crabapple (Malus floribunda), a Japanese maple (Acer palmatum atropurpureum), several junipers (Juniperus pfitzeriani) and other trees and shrubs that resemble bonsai.
“Every branch in this whole garden is controlled,” Danhausen says. His urge to sculpt extends to his work with back-yard trees.
Over the years, Danhausen and friends have planted lots of wildflowers, perennials and annuals in the yard, but it’s dawned on him recently that the garden has lost its early spareness. “I’m going to have to dig things out and give them away,” he says.
With some judicious editing, he’ll get the garden back to its original feeling, but that shouldn’t suggest that Danhausen is a slave to his ideas from 1960. “If I were to do another house today, it wouldn’t look anything like this one,” he says. “It would be all colored anodized steel and colored glass. But I haven’t felt the need to make another one. This one has always worked as my house.”
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Eldon Danhausen’s garden (but not the house’s interior) will be featured on the Dearborn Garden Walk July 16. Hours: noon to 6 p.m. Free, but a $5 donation secures a map, which is available at booths set up at intersections on Dearborn Street, between Division Street and North Avenue. For more information, call 773-472-6561.
