More about Fallen Star

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Fallen Star has all the feels of The Wizard of Oz  when Dorothy and Toto’s house lands in Munchkinland except no one died in the process.

When Do Ho Suh suggested the design to the head of the Stuart Collection on the campus of UCSD, they said that they were really disappointed – not because it wasn’t cool enough because obviously it’s the coolest thing on campus (no offense to the other artists who are part of the collection), but because they assumed it would be completely impossible to make. You know because it’s completely tilted and hanging off of the side of a building and whatnot. They soon decided to throw caution to the wind and figure out how to make it anyway. It took a lot of people and a lot of really complicated strategies, but they did it and it’s amazing.

Fallen Star is like a normal suburbia house except it’s smaller and also mounted crookedly on the top of the engineering building on the UCSD’s campus. Inside the house, you have all of your normal household things – furniture, family photographs, trinkets, wallpaper, a working television, clocks etc. Everything looks right except for the chandelier, which hangs at a very odd angle to the rest of the house aka straight because gravity. That and the fact that everything is about 75-80% full size. So if you’re relatively tall, you’ll have to stoop a little to get into the room. All of the furniture and trinkets are pretty small. Even the landscaping and plants were all chosen for their daintiness. You could say that the entire thing is the perfect combination of absurdly cute and completely terrifying.

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Here is what Wikipedia says about Fallen Star


Fallen Star as viewed from Geisel Library

Fallen Star is an art installation by South Korean artist Do Ho Suh on the grounds of the University of California San Diego. It is a cottage perched at an angle off the edge of the main Jacobs School of Engineering building (Jacobs Hall).

The structure was installed at UC San Diego in July 2012 and has become one of the icons of the campus' Stuart Collection of public art. It is visible from Geisel Library and Warren Mall. The life-size installation weighs nearly 70,000 pounds and provides views of Geisel Library, Bruce Nauman's Vices and Virtues, the surrounding region and the campus' eucalyptus groves. The attraction can be accessed on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11AM until 2PM by visiting the seventh floor of Jacobs Hall (EBU-I). A small landscaped garden with East Coast plants surrounds a brick path leading to the front door. Inside, the 15 ft × 18 ft house slopes at a 5° angle and is fully furnished. It has been given the fake address 72 Blue Heron Way.

Fallen Star forces visitors to juxtapose the comforts of home with the unsettling impersonal nature of a large academic institution. In 2016, it was the subject of a 50-minute documentary produced by the artist and directed by Vera Brunner-Sung and Valerie Stadler, titled Fallen Star: Finding Home.

Check out the full Wikipedia article about Fallen Star