Artist John David Mooney is explaining to a genteel audience in the ArchiCenter gallery that he had a much larger project on his mind when the invitation came along to design a dollhouse. It was 1981, and Mooney, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, was busy dreaming up ideas for the redesign of Navy Pier.
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He accepted, though the project stumped him at first. Not only would it be a radical shift in scale, but Mooney, who “had never played with a dollhouse, had no sisters, played with no girls,” had no clue as to what a dollhouse should be. When he tried to draw on his own experience, all he could dredge up were memories of archetypal boys’ activities: digging holes in the ground, building forts.
So that’s what he started with–a sketch of a hole in the ground. Then he began to add ramps or stairs leading out of the hole, thinking first about forts and later about tree houses, thinking that the dollhouse, like a tree house, should be a place that excludes everything else, a world apart. He did some quick studies of ramps leading into the sky, began to explore the relationship between planes and stairs, and that’s when he hit on it–the ultimate escape, a cloud house. “When I had this drawing, I knew I was almost home,” he says, pointing to a sketch that resembles a reclining harp–a horizontal line topped by a soaring, undulating curve.
As it turned out, the royal baby was a prince instead of a princess, and Mooney says the focus of the competition changed. Most of the commissioned houses were auctioned off to benefit the Save the Children Fund. Mooney, who jokes that he was more interested in “saving the artist,” managed to hang on to his. It won a sculpture award at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984.
