Photos By Gail

If you’ve ever wandered through the contemporary galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago, you may have stumbled across an unusual architectural structure: Richard Hawkins’ Dilapidarian Tower (2010). Standing over eleven feet tall, this mixed-media sculpture reads at first glance like a dollhouse for ghosts — a miniature skyscraper whose outer shell suggests something haunted and uncanny.

But step closer, and the façade gives way to something unexpected. Instead of the cobwebbed interiors one might anticipate from its gothic exterior, each floor glows with clinical clarity. Fluorescent and incandescent lights illuminate sleek, gallery-like interiors, calling to mind the modernist purity of Mies van der Rohe. It’s a clever reversal, a play between surface and interior, expectation and reality.

Perched on ambiguous pedestals that look part domestic coffee table, part museum display, Hawkins’ tower hovers between worlds: high design and kitsch, the haunted house and the modernist temple, architectural model and fine art. That tension — between cultural extremes and aesthetic contradictions — is central to the artist’s practice. Known for collage, assemblage, and hybrid forms, he weaves together fragments of history, pop culture, and personal obsession into works that feel simultaneously scholarly and mischievous.

Dilapidarian Tower asks us to reconsider the spaces we inhabit, both literally and culturally. It toys with nostalgia (the dollhouse format), architectural ambition (the skyscraper), and the pleasure of looking into spaces that feel private yet staged. Like much of his work, it refuses a single interpretation. Instead, it revels in overlapping references, showing us how the line between the haunted and the modern, the domestic and the monumental, is far thinner than we think.

Dilapidarian Tower remains a striking reminder of how contemporary art can reframe the most familiar forms — a house, a tower, a room — into something unsettling, uncanny, and unforgettable.