The problem was the view.
“If you looked out the bathroom window, you looked onto a brick wall,” the artist Martin Prekop tells me. “There was a beautiful wood behind it, but you couldn’t see it.”
So he began covering that wall outside the main bedroom’s bathroom at the right rear of the house with mirrors that he custom cut to 2 inches wide by 8 inches long to match the size of the exterior bricks. Then he added more mirrors to the exterior of the house. And more mirrors. And more mirrors. Thousands of them. Until he’d covered nearly the whole exterior of the brown brick, split-level ranch house house at 897 Field Club Road in Pittsburgh’s leafy upscale Fox Chapel neighborhood.
“You never know how many bricks your home is made up of until you decide to put mirrors on every one,” Prekop joked to a gathering of Mattress Factory members at the house in 2016. “It is like an art project that never ends.”
Prekop tells me, “It took maybe 15 years total time to cover it.” The home became known as the Mirror House. (Though Prekop says, “I never called it anything.”) Having the mirrors follow the grid of the bricks gave the dazzling shimmer an underling sense of careful order. The house appears both bejeweled and as if it’s disappearing into the surrounding greenery. Sometimes it feels as if the house is watching you.
“We get notes in our mailbox all the time from kids saying they love the house and their father hates it,” Prekop told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in April 2023.
“Most often I hear the shocking statement that no one would ever buy this place because of what I’ve done to it,” Prekop told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1998. “As if I wanted to sell it! We’re not planning on leaving.”
But Prekop retired in 2018 after years of teaching art and leading colleges, and is aiming to move closer to his grown children and grandkids. So this spring, he has put the Mirror House up for sale.
An Exceptionally Ugly House
Martin Prekop and his wife Martha, a fiber artist and toy designer, bought the house in 1993. He had been a teacher and dean at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was relocating to Pittsburgh to become dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s school of music, drama, design and art.
“The house was an exceptionally ugly house,” the 83-year-old recalls. “It was this sort of nasty brownish brick. It was pink and green on the inside.”
But he bought it because “I could afford it. It was in a good school district. My youngest son was just starting high school. It was nice and big. It had a three-car garage, a very big garage, and I was looking for a shop.”
Prekop was too busy with his new job at Carnegie Mellon the first year after the family moved in spend much time on the house, which had been built in 1969. But the first thing Prekop did was turn the garage into a woodshop where he built tables and kitchen cabinets for the house—“half art and half cabinetry,” he tells me—and which would also serve as a studio where he made art.
He had been born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1940 and grew up there. He studied at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan (“That had a huge influence on me because it was a craft school and a design school”), then earned a master’s degree at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. He spent a couple years in England on a Fulbright scholarship. He was offered a couple teaching jobs there, but his wife Martha wanted to return to the U.S. So he taught for a couple years at the St. Petersburg Junior College and the University of South Florida in Tampa, before teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he became the head of the painting department, then grad school dean, then undergrad dean, then overall dean.
Outside of those jobs, Prekop made conceptual photos. A 1970 exhibition on the rooftop of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, included his photos of views from the rooftop arranged around the rooftop at the spots were each view was photographed. His 1972 series “Ruler Trees” photographed rulers wedged between aspen trees. Over the years, he’s also made paintings and sculptures. Prekop tells me, “The work I was doing in Chicago incorporated mirrored pieces.”
Inside Outside
“There is an inside outside refrain and response that goes on between the inside and outside of the house,” Prekop told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in April 2023.
As Prekop got settled into this role of dean at Carnegie Mellon, he began transforming the bathroom off the primary bedroom at the right rear of the house. “That’s the first room I attacked. I covered the walls. I covered everything with painted plywood,” Prekop tells me. He painted the plywood with a black and white faux wood grain, painted freehand following the grain of the wood. And he affixed little polkadot mirrors all over the walls.
The house’s interior was “really, really dark,” Prekop told TribLive in April 2023. He turned it into a custom-designed paradise for an artist and lover of the arts. He added skylights—eventually around two dozen in all—to fill the rooms with natural light. The house became mainly black and white, with accents of red and blue and natural wood. Furnishings included midcentury modern furniture designed by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The feeling is post-modern, like the flat geometric primary-hued abstractions of early Modernism revisited in a bigger, broader, more playful way, plus mirrors.
There’s a red and white checkerboard pattern on wall next to red and white front door, which opens onto a living room with working fireplace. White polkadots decorate the black railings of a central stairway—the dot motif rhymes with the mirrors and can feel a bit like film strips. The stairs lead up to seating area at the back of the house, with a mirror screen as room divider that connects to walls shelving about 3,000 jazz and classical records and hundreds of CDs. He listens to them via a 1960s vintage Klipschorn and contemporary Magnepan speakers.
An upstairs hallway, lined with picture rails to display art (opposite the laundry room), leads to an upstairs back bedroom on right. One bedroom served for a time as home to Martha’s orchid collection.
A dazzling dining room on front left has a table and chairs painted in black-and-white faux wood grain, that can also bring to mind a zebra. “It uses the organic nature of the plywood to give expression to itself,” Prekop told Pittsburgh magazine in May 2023. A pair of mirrored chandeliers hang over the table. The walls and ceiling, between four skylights, shimmer with rectangles and strips of mirrors.
That dining room connects with the woodshop studio. There’s a photo darkroom in basement. A 12-foot-tall room at rear left of the house (its boxy exterior is now clad in red steel siding) was built as art “staging space” and gallery, where he’s hosted half a dozen exhibits by other artists over the years. Though, he acknowledges that “the stereo has taken over” that room.
Downstairs at back is a library and home theater screening room with a big projection system, two leather seats, and a collection of hundreds DVDs and Blue Rays (he favors The Criterion Collection).
Out back is a deck and a yard with two fish ponds and meadow grass that grows tall.
A Living Piece Of Sculpture
Prekop began covering the house’s exterior with mirrors, “then purchased mirrors from a company going out of business and added mirrors inside,” Prekop told TribLive in April 2023. He made a “simple little jig” to cut 2-inch by 8-inch rectangles from a 12-inch square mirror. “I can cut them so there’s no waste,” he tells me. (Two 2×4 rectangles add up to the size of a brick.) “I put them on the house with double-sided tape and a glob of silicone seal.”
“I saw it as a piece of sculpture, a living piece of sculpture. It changed all the time. I did interventions in the trees—mirror trees, bottle trees,” Prekop tells me. Framed rectangles of blue, yellow, white and red climbed up the trunk of birches like paintings by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian paintings that had broken apart and run loose. (These days the interior is also hung with copies he’s made of “Mondrian paintings to scale out of Formica.”) “A lot of temporary sculpture in the trees and even in the house was to be photographed.”
“My photography practice is focused almost exclusively on projects of the house and around the house, in the backyard,” Prekop told Pittsburgh magazine in May 2023. He photographed the house with an 11×14 negative Deardorff camera that he modified to accommodate a custom 16×20 back that held paper instead of film. Rather than recording film negatives, the camera made prints directly onto the paper, each one unique. The darks and lights are often reversed, as in a film negative, making everything seem strange and radiant. Prekop tells me, “That was the only kind of photographs I did for like 10 years.”
The house sits on an acre and a half of land. For later artworks, he photographed sculptures that he made from rulers, and photographed rulers among the trees in the backyard, and incorporated rulers directly into assemblage paintings. Sometimes arrangements in the Mirror House or the way he exhibits photos (sometimes interspersed with mirrors) can call to mind film strips. His “Interval” paintings from the 2010s painted and cut black and red and white vertical stripes into wood panels. “They are based on the idea of marking time, as in a ruler,” Prekop told Trib Live in 2015. “And also with some concern I’ve had with music and rhythm, repetition and so forth.”
Prekop created a whole room installation painted with faux woodgrain and Adirondack chairs that he called “Prekops At Home” in 2003 for the Pittsburgh Biennial Exhibition at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. He tells me, “I built it to represent that house.”
Art And Life Coming Together
Prekop’s Mirror House is about a half-hour drive northwest from downtown Pittsburgh, where one can also find Randyland, a visionary apartment building and yard filled that creator Randy Gilson has filled with assemblage sculptures with the bright hues and sugar rush of a carnival.
“There are people who see this house that way, kind of an eccentric house,” Prekop tells me. Instead he suggests the Mirror House has something of the immersive artist studio, like minimalist sculptor Donald Judd’s spare Manhattan apartment and studio and Judd’s expansive Marfa, Texas, residence and studio. Or Dutch painter Piet Mondrian’s Paris studio in the 1920s, where you seemed to walk into one the flat primary-colored grid abstractions that he painted.
And there’s maybe some kinship with Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece 1937 Fallingwater house, located about a 90-minute drive away in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, known for its iconic cantilevered terraces that seem to float above a stream below.
But Prekop clarifies, “Mine comes from a long interest in Shaker furniture, this idea of art and life coming together.”
Prekop and his current wife Jesha Chen are moving near Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, to be near his youngest son, an artist who recently sold a painting to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and the son’s painter wife and their 2-year-old son, who’ve been priced out of New York City. “I should have done it five years ago,” Prekop says of his planned move.
The sale of the Mirror House puts Prekop’s creation at risk of destruction. “I sort of accept it,” he tells me. “The tree sculptures, they only have a three- or four-year life. They’ve changed over time. The mirrors do fall off. Every spring, after winter, half a dozen fall off.”
Prekop told realtor.com in May 2023, “I don’t expect it to stay exactly the same, but the parts of it like the mirrored components inside the house, I’m hoping they’ll keep that.”
“I don’t expect to miss the house much at all because I have done it and been here 30 years,” Prekop told Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in April 2023. “I am ready to go on to new stuff.”
Prekop resists defining a meaning of the Mirror House. But he allows it’s related to the Shaker merging of art and life into one. Before covid, it was a place to invite students to see what an artist’s home and studio were like. And there’s just the shimmering dazzlingness of the place.
What is it all about? “It’s really obvious once you see it. It’s very physical,” Prekop tells me. “It’s very beautiful when the weather changes.”
Sources:
Interview with Martin Prekop by Greg Cook, May 2023.
Jessica Adamiak, “15 Truly Bizarre Vacation Rentals,” Time, Aug. 5, 2014.
Alan G. Artner, “Prekop Gets Dean’s Post At Mellon,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 12, 1993.
Nicole Busing and Heiko Klaas, “Martin Prekop: Obfuscation As Strategy,” https://www.nextleveluk.com/article/obfuscation-as-strategy, 2012.
Carnegie Mellon University College of Fine Arts, “Professor of Art Martin Prekop Retiring from CMU After 25 Years,” https://www.cmu.edu/cfa/news-and-events/featured-news/2018/professor-martin-prekop-retiring.html, July 4, 2018.
Rosa Collucci, “The Mirror House is For Sale — Could You See Yourself Living Here?” Pittsburgh magazine, May 1, 2023.
Donna J. Domin, “Reflected Interest,” Trib Live, Dec. 17, 2005.
Ryan Hoffman, “The Mirrored House cited as ‘truly bizarre vacation rental’ by Time,” Next Pittsburgh, Aug. 18, 2014.
Bob Karlovits, “’Truly bizarre’ O’Hara house gives guests lots to reflect on,” Trib Live, Aug. 8, 2014.
Joanne Klimovich Harrop,”O’Hara couple opens their mirrored home for an ‘Airbnb Experience,’” Trib Live, March 11, 2022.
Joanne Klimovich Harrop,“Mirror image: Quirky O’Hara home for sale for $899,000,” Trib Live, April 29, 2023.
Mattress Factory, “RECAP // Factory 500: Martin Prekop’s “Mirrored House,” http://artyoucangetinto.blogspot.com/2016/01/recap-factory-500-martin-prekops.html, Jan. 27, 2016.
Donald Miller, “CMU dean uses whimsical touches with serious intent,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Dec. 26, 1998.
Kurt Shaw,” Art review: ‘Martin Prekop’ at Art Space 616 in Sewickley,” Trib Live, April 22, 2015.
Patricia Sheridan,”Buying Here: Artist’s house of mirrors in O’Hara priced at $899,000,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 23, 2023.
Tiffani Sherman, “Pittsburgh’s Mirror House Re?ects Artist’s Vision and Has Already Attracted a Buyer,” realtor.com, May 11, 2023.
Jan van der Marck, “Peter Davies, Roger Hendricks and Martin Prekop,” Artforum, December 1970.
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