Painted and raw scrap wood, plastic sheets, metal wires, nails, screws, and other found objects form an egg shaped structure. With a height of 7’ 8” (92 inches) and width and depth of 4’ 3” (51 inches), the scale of the sculpture requires viewers to walk around the form in order to observe the complete structure. Close examination of the object reveals the careful organization of the sculpture, which was required to create a stable structure from this diverse selection of materials with varying sizes and textures. A piece of painted scrap wood placed at approximately eye level for the average height adult prominently displays the numbers 4416.

The title given to the sculpture, Trespass 4416, alludes to the context in which the artists, Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, created this object. The materials and inspiration for this sculpture came from a nineteenth-century wooden bungalow that was being demolished in Houston’s historic Magnolia Grove district near Buffalo Bayou located between downtown and Memorial Park. As demand for centrally located housing in Houston rose in the early 2000s, development and housing prices rapidly increased throughout this small neighborhood south of Washington Avenue. When Havel and Ruck created Trespass 4416 in 2007, more homes were sold in the district that year than in any other year on record between 1997 and 2019.[1] Havel and Ruck scavenged the condemned property to gather wood and other fragments, which they brought back to their studio and used to construct the sculpture. The resulting sculpture documents the erasure of the architectural past of this historic neighborhood and its community.

Trespass 4416 was first exhibited for a group show at Diverseworks, Houston. After the exhibition, the sculpture was returned to the corner of the demolition site as a trash pile where it remained for six weeks without being removed.[2] The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, then acquired the sculpture, which became the first monumental work by the collaborative to enter an encyclopedic museum collection rather than remaining a site-specific or ephemeral project.

The two Houston based sculptors began working on projects together informally in 1994. They formalized their partnership in 2009 by forming the artist collaborative Havel Ruck Projects, LLP.[3] In an interview with Havel and Ruck for Glasstire in 2009, the artists responded about how the setting of Houston and particularly its rapidly changing built environment described as “hyper-impermanence” informed their practice. Havel commented:

“We’re both preservationists. I understand that a built site has an inherent soul or memory. It’s fun to play with that dialogue about houses disappearing. We’re interjecting ourselves in that dialogue, at a point where the house is going to go away and we’re going to give it another chapter.”

While Havel emphasizes how their work acts as a means of preserving the memory of impermanent sites by creating a new form, Ruck’s comments focus on the importance of their process as opposed to the context:

“I think there’s a bit of an applied context, one applied by others. Certainly, we have a sensibility. And I consider myself a preservationist. But the context of that being, the cue or key to the work is not in the forefront of our thinking. For me, it’s more a matter of process. As a formal approach, it’s a three-dimensional formal exercise as a means to a process which is more an element of the work than the context of the Houston environment of tearing things down.”

Throughout the interview, Havel and Ruck’s discussion of their collaborative projects both build upon each other’s ideas while also complicating singular interpretations of their work. Following Ruck’s commentary on the importance of process, Havel describes their interest in creating work that surprises their audiences and poses provocative questions:

“I like any opportunity where I can make art in the path of an unaware public. It’s fun to play with that element of surprise. We’re not really about architecture. It’s more about space, altering space and taking spatial relationships and tweaking it slightly and hopefully getting the audience involved or not. Salvage is closest to what we do. We salvage. One of the things I want to make sure that we don’t get pigeonholed is that we deal with only architecture… I think there’s a self discovery that happens that I’m much more interested in than telling everybody the answers. We’re just asking the questions-what if? What if we do this?”

Trespass 4416 raises innumerable questions deriving from its form, materials, process, and contexts. The provoking title itself prompts questions about the nature of trespassing. Did Havel and Ruck trespass to collect materials from the site being demolished? Or did the builders who transformed the site by destroying the earlier building trespass? By viewing the remains of a demolished building as a sculpture in a museum, are we trespassing?