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USA
Southwest
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Houston, TX
Beer Can House - John Milkovisch
1912-1988
Home environment
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Information:
Built: 1968 - 1988
Near Memorial Park (the site of old Camp Logan, which housed black soldiers during World War I) lies a quiet working-class neighborhood known as the West End.
Drive down Malone Street on a breezy day, and you can hear the Beer Can House before you see it, the tinkle and chime of the remains of 50,000 beer cans, meticulously cut apart and fashioned into siding, streamers, and decorative pieces. "Live By Golden Rule," counsels a sign in the front yard.
The house's creator, John Milkovisch, who died in 1988, was a practical man. After retiring from a career as an upholsterer with the Southern Pacific Railroad, he turned his attention to his house and yard. Tired of mowing the grass, he began filling in first the backyard and then the front with concrete blocks, each inlaid with a pattern of marbles, rocks, or pieces of metal.
During some 20 years, beer-drinker John, who hated to throw anything away, filled a garage and attic with thousands of beer cans. Deciding that he didn't want to paint the house anymore, he took one look at the abundance of beer cans and began a project that put house painting behind him forever.
John cut each can apart, flattened its sides, and riveted the pieces together into sheets. Voila! He had aluminum siding for the exterior walls of his house.
"I'm pretty sure he knew all along what he was going to do with all those cans," says his widow, Mary. "But he certainly didn't tell me."
Mary Milkovisch made her own contributions to the Beer Can House. She drank beer. She inspired John. And she designed a festive little tree bearing a dozen yellow plastic lemons.
After cladding all sides of the house with beer cans, John still wasn't satisfied, according to his son, Ronnie. "He thought his utility bills were too high," says Ronnie. So he assembled the tops, bottoms, and pull-tabs of the cans into a shimmering curtain of streamers that dangle from the eaves and shade the front porch and rest of the house from the Houston sun.
John Milkovisch spent many an hour tinkering with his creation, embellishing it with mobiles, arches, and cryptic assemblages like the wheelbarrow he used as a boy, as well as "a ladder to the sky" - a wooden ladder anchored in concrete and decorated with wire stars. He built a redwood fence, drilled holes in it, and plugged the holes with marbles that glow in the sunshine.
"He did exactly what he wanted and didn't care what anybody thought," Ronnie says of his father.
These days, Ronnie Milkovisch maintains the Beer Can House. He has built a beer can fence and gate to keep out the disruptively curious, and has added his own ornamental touches: metallic stars, studded with colored marbles. "If I hadn't done it, no one would have, and I don't know if I could have lived with that," says Ronnie.
Contact The Orange Show Foundation, a preservation and education organization in Houston, for tour information on folk art environments in the area.
In 2002 The Orange Show Foundation, together with the Brown Foundation, purchased the Beer Can House with plans to develop the interior as a self-taught/visionary arts gallery, a workshop, and a bookstore. For their page on the Beer Can House, visit Beer Can House.
The information presented here is from "Whimsical Wonders and Fanciful Forms: Folk Art Houses of Houston" by Elizabeth Haywood with photos by Stephan Mayers; Texas Highways Magazine, May 1993
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Bibliography:
On DVD - Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations, "Miles and Miles o' Mo-Tex-Arkana", KCPT, Kansas City Public Television, 1996-2001.
"Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations" by Randy Mason, Michael Murphy and Don Mayberger, 2002.
"Whimsical Wonders and Fanciful Forms: Folk Art Houses of Houston" by Elizabeth Haywood with photos by Stephan Mayers; Texas Highways Magazine, May 1993.
"20th Century American Folk, Self Taught, and Outsider Art" by Betty-Carol Sellen, Cynthia J. Johnson, Neal-Schuman Publishers, New York, 1993.
"Raw Creation: Outsider Art and Beyond" by John Maizels, 1996.
"Self-Made Worlds: Visionary Environments" by Roger Manley and Mark Sloan, Aperture, New York, 1997.
"Fantasy Worlds" by Deidi Von Schaewen and John Maizels, Taschen, New York, 1999.
"American Self-Taught Art: An Illustrated Analysis of 20th Century Artists and Trends with 1,319 Capsule Biographies" by Florence Laffal and Julius Laffal, 2003.
The Folk Art Society of America has a few articles from back issues of The Messenger online. Spring 1988: The Drive To Create: Three Handmade Personal Spaces in Houston, by Susanne Theis, discusses the Beer Can House, The Flower Man's House and The Orange Show.
"Raw Vision Outsider Art Sourcebook" Raw Vision, Ltd., 2002
"Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations Coast to Coast Travel-o-Pedia" by Randy Mason, et. al., Kansas City Star Books, 2009. |
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