Project Description:

This large-scale installation project was created specifically to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the great fire that devistated Baltimore on February 7, 1904. (See History) This catastrophe was central in shaping modern Baltimore, and yet many local residents were surprisingly unaware of the history of the event. After surveying many sites downtown, where the fire actually occured, it was decided to design the project within the campus of the Maryland Institute College of Art, which had been moved two miles north of its original site because of the fire. Specifically, MICA's brand new building, the Brown Center, was chosen for both formal and historic reasons.

The Brown Center is an architecturally dramatic, state-of-the-art facility for digital and design programs at MICA. The building, which opened to the public just two weeks before the Great Baltimore Fire project was installed, features an exterior made up of huge glass panels, which are embedded with a tiny, translucent morre pattern. This gives the panels an opaque appearence during daylight hours, but allows the building to light up like a giant bonfire at night (one of the features that drew us to the site!). It also allows projected images to read on the surface much more clearly than clear glass would.

Historic images of the fire and its aftermath were collected, primarily from Jack and Beverly Wilgus' extensive collection of vintage stereographs. Short pieces of text and a few additional photographs were taken from Baltimore Afire, a 1954 history of the conflagration. The images and text were projected on selected panels of the Brown Center's facade, in a cascade of randomly changing photographs. In addition, the entire building's hallways, which run around the outer edges of the building, were lit red and orange to symbolically mimic the burning buildings of 1904. The Building was dramatically transformed each evening for two weeks, beginning on February 7th, 2004, the 100th anniversary of the fire.

One myth that endures about the great fire, is that miraculously, no one was killed in it. We found the endurance of this myth to be perplexing - even a bit disturbing - as there was at least one known victim, an unidentified African-American man whose badly burned body was recovered from the bay a few days after the fire. Though this victim was reported in the Baltimore Sun, he seemed to disappear from the historic record, perhaps because he was not a person of means; in fact it seems likely he was homeless. One hundred years later, lead funding for MICA's Brown Center was provided by Eddie and Sylvia Brown, an African-American couple, whose donation represents one of the largest philanthropic gifts ever by an African-American family. Indeed, the Brown Center is the largest institutional building in America yet named for an African American, for reasons of philanthropic generocity. This seemed to be an amazing symbolic turnaround, and one that mirrored Baltimore's dramatic economic and social shifts during the course of the 20th century.