The PARDO HOUSE

is a house made by Cuban-American artist Jorge Pardo at Krabbesholm Art College, Skive, Denmark. The college needed a place for their frequent guest teachers to stay, and according to their longstanding tradition of commissioning artists and architects to do special projects and artworks for the school, they asked Pardo to make another one of his houses that are also sculptures.

We have stayed 4 times now in the Pardo House as invited guest teachers at the school, and each time we like the house more. The movement to join art and design has reached critical consideration since the turn of the century, and Pardo´s ideas have become mainstream to some degree. But in fact, I have seen his name shifting from the art pages back to the design pages of mainstream press such as the New York Times. A story of his house project for a wealthy patron in San Juan ran in the home and gardens section of the magazine last year.

Magazines, art departments and museums still insist on the simplistic definitions of things: design is for sale, art is for the soul, etc. ignoring the calling of interdisciplinary artists and untidy ideas. In a way, Pardo ´s premise was an advertisement of a style anyway, a career move more than a manifesto. But his houses are lovely, functional and resonant. Pardo´s houses have similarities to the Scandinavian ideals of modernist designer architects such as Saarinen and Jacobsen who wanted to design all aspects of a living environment, fusing art, commerce, decoration, architecture and design into one streamline style.

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Staying again in the Pardo House
this land is your land 06