Iebegan, an idea without a name, in the quict of Rachel Whiteread’s studio in East London. And tended several years later, a sculpture called House, demolished in the fill gate of the world’s ‘media, House always had the potential to be & contentious work of art But in my fist conversations with Rachel Whiteread in the summer of 1991. it was impossible to imagine that it would be quite as exposed, quite as contentious as things eumed out; and that its tcanstion ftom private projection to public phenomenon would beso dramatic and so quick Howse could have been made elsewhere, ina diferent place, ata differenc time; perhaps with another eas lst and chorus. Indeed, Whiteread and I had looked at severl other terraced houses in North and East London through 1992 without success. At one stage. a condemned house in 'Wlington seemed possible, but the right permissions filed to materialize. Another in Hackney was knocked down before we could make a proposal to the owner. Finally, afer months of private persuasion and occasional public meetings, the councillors of Bow Neighbourhood voted by a small majority to sive a temporary lease on 193 Gi of the few remaining houses in what had once been a Victorian terrace. After several months ve Road, one more waiting, Whiteread took possession and the physical making ofthe work began in August 1993, From that moment, House was ofa specific place and a particular time. And ie was this configuration of time and place, with its attendant contingencies of local and national politics and the added spice of the 1993 Tamer Prize which, as much as the physical appearance | ofthe sculpture, ereated the meaning of Howe | and determined the course of fs shore He. | House was completed on October 25 1993 There had deliberately been almost no press until one day before, Slowly at fint and then more quickly, interest and comment began to grow in the locality and beyond; in the pages of the national press and on television news. Newspaper leaders and letters, columns and cartoons appeared and multiplied. Visitors grew day by day. On November 23 two decisions were made simultaneously in different parts of London. A group of jurors at the Tate Gallery decided that Whiteread had won the 1993 Tumer Prize, and a gathering of Bow Neighbourhood Councillors vored that Howse should be demolished with immediate effect. It was an incendiary combination. From that moment, the debate which swirled around House became i the press, on television and, in a more good~ creasingly adversarial; inhumoured way, in front of the sculpeure itself Seasoned campaigner dusted down familiar nations fi battle fo past controversies such as the Tate Gallery's acquisition of Carl Andre's infamous ‘bricks’ or, fa se few who cared to add an international dimension, the notorious case of Richard Serta’s Tilted Are. Others invoked the English taste for i had gen ated campaigns a sculptures by Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill earlier in the century. But perhaps the most salient and certainly the most encouraging aspect of the controversy around House was the way in which it exposed the inadequacies of these old charts to describe the complexities and che particulae contours of this controversy. Local against national, the art world against the real world, grass roots realities against disconnected ttantes... Such binary oppositions could neither explain nor contain che multiple shades of opinion and sentiment which House engendered. There were passionately different responses, of coun. But the differences of opinion were always located within any identifiable community ‘or constitueney, and not besweon them, There ‘was no consensus amongst the inhabitants of the block of houses opposite, on the street or in the neighbourhood, nor in the letter pages of local Lingucos and national newspapers. There was no consensus amongst the local councillors, Even she fiteful decision not to grant an extension to House was taken only on the easting vore of the Chairman after the councillors were equally divided. There was no consensus even within the Gale family whom the Council had moved ut of the home which eventually became House. House did not seck to manufieture some confectionary consensus, as many public works of art are compelled to do, Indeed it laid bare the limits of language and expectation which afflict contentious arena of public art House was literally rooted to its spot, but the ining of Whiteread’ s work was inherently unstable. Unlike the heroic models of triumphal arches and declamacory statues, it was by no ‘means clear what values it sought to promote. It did not seck to predetermine the ways in which people could respond to it, Rather, like notable predecessors ofa similarly sombre kind such as Lucyens’ Cenotaph in Whitehall, originally planes a temporary memorial) or Maya Lin's Viernam War Memorial in Washington D.C House was both a closed architectural form and. an open memorial a ne and the same time but also able to absorb dheemetic and implacabl {nto its body all those individual thoughts, feelings and memories projected onto it,