Working with sculpture/installation artist Do-Ho Suh on "Falling Star" was Spurlock Poirier Landscape Architects of San Diego, which designed a low maintenance, New England-style cottage garden for the
perilously positioned "home."
Photo: Philipp Scholz Ritterman

This little home and landscape appear to have been transported from some fairy tale neighborhood by mysterious forces and plunked down atop the seven-story Jacobs Hall at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of Calif. at San Diego (UCSD). And while it inevitably calls to mind Dorothy's farmhouse falling on the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz, this little home and landscape are a commissioned art piece/sculpture called "Fallen Star" by Do Ho Suh for the UCSD Stuart Collection.

Do-Ho Suh was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1962. He earned a BFA and MFA in Oriental painting from Seoul National University, before coming to the U.S. in 1991, where he furthered his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Yale University.

Funding for Falling Star came through private donations and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts' program for Access to Artistic Excellence.

Fallen Star won the "Grand Orchid," the top award from the San Diego Architectural Foundation. Brilliant, dynamic and whimsical were some of the words the jury used to describe the installation art piece.