Building the HOUSEofCARDS

The story behind the cabin at Arnaudville’s Honey Locust Artist Retreat

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You’ve got four massive precast panels of concrete: “cards”. What is the best way—keeping visual aesthetics, basic physics, and maximization of space in mind—to arrange them into a dwelling? 

Architecture professor W. Geoff Gjertson turned this challenge into a design game for his Fall 2021 studio course at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Using a “deck” of fifty-four 2’x4’ concrete cards, students Ava D’Amato and Zachary Broussard played, until there it was: the four walls leaning inwards at an angle, drawing from the same philosophies on perspective used by the architects of the Parthenon. “The shape just became iconic,” said ULL Professor W. Geoff Gjertson. A house of cards. 

This project would be the seventeenth to be completed through ULL’s Building Institute, founded in 2003 by professors Hector LaSala, Edward Cazayoux, and Gjertson. The educational program provides students within the School of Architecture and Design opportunities to gain hands-on experience working on sustainable, regenerative, community-oriented construction projects, start-to-finish—with the assistance of local sponsors. Past projects include a series of energy-efficient infill homes in older Lafayette neighborhoods, including a tiny home and one built from shipping containers.

...there it was: the four walls leaning inwards at an angle, drawing from the same philosophies on perspective used by the architects of the Parthenon. “The shape just became iconic,” said ULL Professor W. Geoff Gjertson. A house of cards.

The original concept behind the HOUSEofCARDS, the Institute’s 2021-2022 award-winning project, was to construct a concrete building in a rural setting—new terrain for the Institute on all fronts. Concrete makes for an economical and sustainable building material, requiring little maintenance across its lifetime, promising longevity, and being weather resistant. Inspired by Henry Thoreau’s Walden, Gjertson hoped to create something to serve creatives living in or visiting Acadiana’s rural communities. “The concept was that it would be an artist’s studio—a cabin where you could go write your book or paint your painting,” he said. “So, then it was just a matter of finding somebody that wanted something like that.” 

The HOUSEofCARDS found its home in Arnaudville as many such ventures do, via the far-reaching network of the NUNU Art & Culture Collective—artist George Marks’s creative placemaking experiment that has been drawing artistic spirits to this rural hamlet just outside of Lafayette for almost twenty years. 

[Read about the local architects who participated in the 2021 Venice Biennale exhibition A South Forty here.]

Marks knew what Gjertson was looking for, and he knew a New Orleanian who, craving a quieter sense of creative community, had just bought thirty acres of old pastureland on the Prairie Basse along Bayou Bourbeaux. “Before we had a road in, before we had a well or water to mix concrete, George is like ‘alright we’re gonna start,’” laughed Hayden Reilly, who has now designated her property as the Honey Locust Artist’s Retreat. 

Reilly’s first priority at Honey Locust has been to heal the overgrazed land she’s acquired, a process that is ongoing. “It’s taken me a while to understand how I want to exist on the land, with the ecology—to try and remove what should be removed and replace it with natives, and to start to rehabilitate,” she said. “But I knew that I wanted to be able to host and invite friends and artists.” 

By partnering with Gjertson and the Building Institute, Reilly was able to delegate the task of getting her first piece of infrastructure established while devoting more of her own time to revitalizing the land itself. “It was a really mutually beneficial relationship,” she said. 

Structured as a studio class offered in Fall 2021 semester and electives in the Spring and Summer of 2022, the Building Institute invited upper-level undergraduates to apply, with an essay, to be part of the project. The course was also opened up to graduate students as an elective. In total, twenty-two undergraduate architecture students and seven graduate students contributed to the project—starting with the design process. 

“So the way it worked, these guys broke into two groups, and they each drew up a master plan for the whole property,” said Gjertson. They established the ideal location for the HOUSEofCARDS as hidden from the road, becoming visible as you round the corner along the edge of the property’s biggest pasture, windows looking out on the pond (which Reilly is currently in the process of restoring). In addition to practical and aesthetic concerns, the location was selected with energy consumption in mind—planning around the sun’s impact on the space. The students also envisioned future infrastructure for Honey Locust that includes up to five more artist studios, a common building for workshops and meetings, a central showering facility, spaces for plantings, and more. Then they started working on the building itself. “We had to figure out how to work with the angles, how that was really going to work,” said student Matthew Dufrene. 

Once the building’s “house of cards” design was settled on, “they got thrown into it,” said Gjertson. “They were working in software to detail all the steel around the windows, all the connections.” The original plans to use precast panels of concrete were shelved when the students determined that cast-in-place concrete would be more cost- and energy-efficient, reducing the associated burdens of transportation and allowing the students the opportunity to engage even more intimately with the material itself. 

Onsite, the first step in the building process was actually a demolition. An old, dilapidated barn was obscuring the view of a live oak from the studio site and was a hazard in itself. It also provided an opportunity to make use of salvaged materials and incorporate board-forming techniques into the design. The barn’s weathered wooden boards would ultimately provide the wood-grain texture cast into the building’s concrete panels. Using the salvaged wood, the students began constructing the scaffolding formwork in October 2021. Over the course of the semester, they installed insulation, tied rebar, and started hand mixing almost forty tons of concrete, before dying it a terra cotta red. “One student’s arm was red for months,” recalled student Christian Willis. 

When it came time to pour the concrete, the work unfolded in a highly coordinated choreography, which Dufrene described as a spiral. Teams were designated to mix the concrete and hand off the five-gallon buckets to students waiting on the lifts, who were at the same time nailing in the barn boards for the forming, before dumping it all in. “As it got higher and higher up, it just got harder and harder to pull up the concrete,” said Dufrene. 

“I think what was cool about the building process was that all the students got to experience all the different skills you need to build a house like this,” said student Gabrielle LeBlanc. “Now I know how to cut rebar, and put in installation. And in the beginning, we all experienced those different things, and then at the end, when we really had to kick it into gear and finish pouring the concrete before the end of the semester, we all had kind of developed our specialties.” 

“I think what was cool about the building process was that all the students got to experience all the different skills you need to build a house like this,” said student Gabrielle LeBlanc.

By the end of the year, the concrete was waterproofed, the roof placed. Final touches were made in the spring, including window installations on each wall, as well as in clerestories above. The interior includes butcher block countertops and a desk built using the rafters salvaged from  the old barn, as well as a bed—all constructed by students. The house receives electricity from the grid, although there are plans in place to someday transition to partial solar. There is a wall-mounted air conditioner, a refrigerator, an outdoor shower that runs on well water and an electric water heater, and a compost toilet—but no WiFi. The floors are, of course, polished concrete. 

When I visited in early July, the interior had been totally rearranged, the bed altogether removed and replaced by a wall of photographic scraps, sketches, and paintings. Since February, painter Jacob Broussard had been using the space as a studio while preparing for his summer exhibition at Towards Gallery in Toronto, Canada. “He needed a flat wall,” said Reilly. “So, I said, ‘we can build a flat wall for you, no problem.’ He’s been here every single day and has just been cranking out work.” 

The adaptability of the space is important, said Willis. “It has to be able to change according to what people need.” Gjertson said he envisions it being used for everything from visual arts to research to birdwatching. “It’s going to have an interesting history of use,” he said. 

Though Reilly is not actively accepting formal applications for residencies just yet, she has had a few creatives (funneled through NUNU) break the HOUSE of CARDS in since its formal completion in May 2022. Broussard, who has lived away from Acadiana for the past six years, wanted to come home to research a long-lost cousin who he’d recently discovered was an original member of The Mystic Krewe of Apollo de Lafayette—the oldest gay Carnivale organization in Louisiana—for a biomythographic collection of paintings titled Afters.

A sequence of word-of-mouth connections brought him to George Marks, who brought him to Reilly. “It’s been, like, kind of a dream,” he said. For Broussard—who hasn’t been living in the studio, but using it primarily as a workspace—the effect has been twofold: as a uniqely quiet place to focus in on his work, and a portal transporting him home. “I do think there is a lot of symbolic resonance returning to Louisiana,” he said. “And the property itself is so stimulating. I see like twelve different animals every day, or insects. I haven’t been away from Louisiana that long, but then when I come back, it's like the biodiversity of this place is so strange and eerie and beautiful.” 

One of the earliest overnighters at the HOUSEofCARDS was actually one of the students that built it—Willis recently proposed to his girlfriend on the front steps. It’s the kind of place the aspiring architects want to return to, partly because they built it to last. “You look at this and you get the dialogue of what went into it, and the process—it adds a soul to it,” said Willis. “We all put our soul into it. Everybody who worked on this project is encapsulated in it.”  

Learn more about Honey Locust Artist Retreat at honeylocust.org and about the ULL Building Institute at architecture.louisiana.edu.