Poker House (Art Project Summary)

Andrew Vaccarezza

ARTH 300

12/14/2005

Final Project

Poker House

Creating a house made of cards and hot glue seemed to be simple until I actually got started on the project. Choosing a project to begin with was a task of its own. I looked down many different allies of art to try and find something which I could recreate. When I visited the Crocker Art Museum I saw a simple card house which seemed easy to create. As soon as I saw the piece I wanted to create one of my own and make it bigger and better than theirs.

This card house consist of 79 Bicycle playing cards, 5 sticks of hot glue, a dry erase board from Target, and five hours of my time. This took a lot longer than I thought it would, because of the complexity of fitting all of the cards together, while making it structurally sound so it would not collapse. The over all construction of this creation was completely spontaneous. During its creation, I would not plan out what it was going to look like because I just wanted the piece to be its own creation. When the house reached its second level, it became a little wobbly. To make sure the above weight was not going to make the bottom foundation collapse, I glued the overlapping cards together and this made all of the difference when it came to strength in the card house.

A reason for creating the piece was to make something which most people would think to be fragile, but when they get closer and touch the house, they would see it is quite durable. You can take this card house and turn it on its side, upside down, and even spin it around. I like this because you would never think a card house could do such a thing. Another reason why this house is so strong is because of its strong base. I took the bottom cards and folded them in half to make them