Peter Culley : ''Lighthouse 1: Jackson Ward Installation''

A house made out of light, you’ll see it rise out of a vacant lot on Broad Street next to the Visual Art Studio. You’ll see windows, doors, every aperture of a house made out of light, but nothing else. It’s been called the Ghost House. Or the House on Broad.

The Lighthouse is an installation from British architect Peter Culley, who is also working on the VMFA expansion, set to open May 1, 2010. Its real name is “Light House 1: Jackson Ward” and it was originally created for InLight in 2008 where it won several awards.

Photography by Terry Brown

“I thought, I’m an architect, I’ll build a house,” Culley says. “Sort of like a joke. I thought it would be fun if it were almost like an illusion.”

The inspiration was a dream house, a house constructed out of light, so that you could pass by it in the day time and not even know it was there. But then at night, it would come to life. You would return and see one window shining in the dark. You’d pass it again and a whole series of windows, doors and apertures would be aglow in the dark.

Photography by Terry Brown

“It’s like a drawing of the house,” Culley says. “It’s how children draw houses – just the doors and the windows. It’s what iconizes a house.”

Culley, along with a team of architects and artists, set out to build their Light House in 2008. But first, they walked through Jackson Ward, looking for the type of row house they wanted to build. They found one that was being renovated and persuaded the owner to let them inside to measure it.

“We measured every single opening in that house,” Culley says. "Every door, every window, every skylight – we mapped out its exact location. And that was the project: we would build all of these apertures and nothing else.” And that’s how the Light House was born.

It is an exact replica of a Jackson Ward house, built scale to scale, made out of glowing windows, doors and openings. All the frames are painted with ultraviolet-reacted paints. Flood lights and black lights bring the installation to life.

If you go to First Fridays, you can walk around the space to see the scale and the depth of the house for yourself. You can also look up into the air between the spaces and dream.