Past: Ryder Henry: Housing Works

Ryder Henry's work explores an urban future through a lens of the past—views of a future that seemingly has already happened. Vintage cars and bikes line crushed-stone streets, a rocket shell has been converted into apartments, and turbines generate power. Nostalgia is everpresent. A sense of the "salad days." The skies are blue, the grass is lush, and the air is clean and warm. There is a calm that belies the intensity of the environment.

Henry works out these concepts first through sculpture. With an assortment of found cardboard, plastic, and various materials, he creates wonderous housing models based on an obsessive scale of 1: 213.333 and places many of these models in a city he has built in his home (which has nearly outgrown the room). Views of the city inspire the paintings.

In his paintings, he adds life absent from the model city. People here unload trucks, tend to gardens, ride bikes, bar-b-que, and socialize on rooftop decks and patios in an urban architecture that mixes the old with the new (which is also now old).

They offer a glass-half-full view of the future—not your typical Orwellian take. The works show an urban environment that is neither ideal nor oppressive—one that shows an evolution and a future that we can recognize as something not too different from our past and present.

A group of paintings entitled "The Fairgrounds" shows urban-agrarian housing works not dissimilar to Stuyvesant Town but with aquifers. The utopian community concepts are rooted in Le Corbusier's unrealized Radiant City.

Henry grew up in Austin, Texas, but has lived all over the world and his inventive architecture reflects his travels from Texas, Michigan, California, Rhode Island, to France, Lebanon and Cyprus, to where he resides now in Pittsburgh.