In a warehouse above a big-box furniture store off Interstate 94 in St. Paul, there’s a house being built. Not just any old house. A full-scale 2,000-square-foot replica of famed modernist architect Marcel Breuer’s mid-century modern gem, which he designed in the early 1960s for St. Paul artist and monk Frank Kacmarcik.

Artist Chris Larson walks through the split-level, wooden-frame structure — finished with white cardboard and purposely left bare inside — paging through photocopies of what its interior looked like when Kacmarcik, a one-time professor of art at St. John’s University in Collegeville, lived there. Kacmarcik and Breuer, who designed only one other house in Minnesota (in Duluth), struck up a friendship when Kacmarcik was on a committee that chose the Bauhaus-trained architect to design the St. John’s campus and church in the 1950s.

Raising his arms high, Larson gestures to where Kacmarcik’s impressive collection of books would have filled the walls of the “library.” And as Larson heads to the home’s entryway, a smile crosses his face when he’s asked how close in size the replica is to the original home, which sits on a bluff above the Mississippi River Valley in St. Paul’s Highwood Hills neighborhood.

“Down to the inch,” he says, squinting as he uses his fingers to show the tiny size.

Larson and a small crew have been building the house for the past month in preparation for this weekend’s Northern Spark all-night art festival in Lowertown. Earlier this week, they disassembled the house and started transporting it in sections on a flatbed truck to a spot outside the Union Depot where it will be elevated on stilts for Saturday’s 8:58 p.m. kick-off. Visitors will be able to tour the structure until 2 a.m. Sunday — when it’ll be set ablaze.

Larson, a St. Paul-based artist with a growing international reputation, calls the piece “Celebration/Love/Loss.” It has caught the attention of the New York Times, which recently sent a reporter to interview Larson.

And while the planned burning of the piece has sparked a buzz locally, too, there’s more to it: For Larson, it’s about honoring Breuer’s creation, celebrating it and opening the door to new possibilities.

“It’s not so much a sinister act; it’s a gesture or an action to suggest something,” the soft-spoken Larson said of the burn. “Maybe it’s a way to move. Breuer did that in a way. There was a movement before him, and he pushed things forward. … And to burn the house down, you have a foundation left over — the scarred earth. It’s just a suggestion for something to happen after.”

Steve Dietz, president and artistic director of Northern Lights.mn, the nonprofit behind Northern Spark, said he’s been looking forward to “Celebration/Love/Loss” since Larson first proposed the idea last year.

“It has these really important elements that we aspire to have as a festival,” Dietz said. “It’s profound and serious, accessible and fun. You can’t really have a better combination than that.”

‘A GREAT BUILDER’

Larson, 46, grew up on St. Paul’s East Side with a father who was in the furniture business and a stay-at-home mom who took care of him and his four siblings. He returned to the East Side as an adult and lives there with his wife and two sons, but when he was in second grade, the family moved to Lake Elmo.

“It was really rural back then,” said Larson, whose art later would be influenced by those rural surroundings. “I’d work on friends’ farms in the summer. When I saw barns and silos on the landscape, those objects became monumental.”

Larson discovered in grade school that he liked to draw. Kids thought he was cool because he could draw faces of KISS band members. But it wasn’t until his junior year at Bethel University that he fell in love with sculpture.

“The sculpture professor there, Stewart Luckman, was exactly what I needed,” he said. “I had a really strong work ethic growing up, but … that guy pushed me. Nothing was ever good enough and I wanted to make it even better.”

With encouragement from Luckman and an undeniable drive, Larson was accepted into the Yale School of Art. After earning his MFA from Yale in the early 1990s, he returned to the Twin Cities, where he made a name for himself showing his multimedia work and large-scale sculptures at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Walker Art Center. He went on to develop an international reputation with shows in Germany, Switzerland and Argentina. He’s also an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota.

A few years ago, he created a large bridge/observation deck for the Walker’s “The Spectacular of Vernacular” exhibit.

Walker chief curator Darsie Alexander points out that the Twin Cities has a “huge range of artists who have incredible talent” and calls Larson one of the stand-out figures with a national presence.

“For me, one of the signature qualities of Chris’ work is his imagining of this kind of bizarre architecture, which is sort of a hybrid between high-end modernism and homespun vernacular,” she said. “He uses these very simple woods, raw materials which often add this humble quality to his works, but they’re often incredibly sophisticated and elaborated constructions. He’s a great builder.”

Larson describes his interest in architecture as very “specific.” He once built a full-sized furnished “shotgun” house in his backyard, filled with hundreds of gallons of water that encased it in ice. He also created a smaller model of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco so he could get inside the head of the sect’s leader, David Koresh. His film “Crush Collision” is set in a house floating in water.

Then there’s the Breuer-designed high-art modern house in St. Paul. The Hungarian-born architect behind the striking Abbey Church at St. John’s and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art used concrete block walls, steel doors, a flat roof and strategically placed floor-to-ceiling windows for the home. Larson was drawn to the structure immediately and had been wanting to do something with the house, which he calls an “absolute treasure.” Northern Spark provided a perfect opportunity.

A FAMILY HOME

“So, why are you burning my house down?”

That was the first question Larson says he got from the Breuer house’s current owner, Chad Bogdan, who has lived there with his family for six years. Bogdan, who works in product design and development at Target, said he was familiar with Larson’s work, but had never met the artist before “Celebration/Love/Loss.”

“I felt more curious than anything,” Bogdan said when he first heard about Larson’s idea. “I thought it was very intriguing, and I had a lot of questions. I respected Chris’ work. I didn’t know a ton about him, but I knew he wasn’t just some kid.”

“Then I started to think immediately about how I was going to explain this to my kids, who are 5 and 9 years old,” he continued. “That parenting piece of me was like, it’s a traumatic burning of their safe place.”

Bogdan says all the conversations he’s had with his kids assuring them it’s just a replica of their home would have made for great reality TV.

“We explained to them that it’s sort of a celebration,” he said. “It’s hard for them to comprehend that it’s honoring it and it’s hard for them to understand letting go of modernism and these esoteric points of view on design and personal dwelling.”

He said being a part of the project has been very “flattering,” and he has provided Larson with access to the home along with copies of blueprints and other materials he thought might be helpful. When he first got a look at the replica a couple weeks ago, it made him smile.

“The intensity came for me when I went around the back,” he said. “The house’s courtyard is in the back and the way it’s contained between the capital L form of the house — it’s super intimate. That really grabbed me. Just the scale of it. Then when I walked into the space and I was in what is our family room — it was a weird thing. But it was really cool and very familiar. I felt like I was at home.”

UP IN FLAMES

As Larson works, Breuer is always on his mind.

“I would imagine Breuer would have loved to have walked through this thing because what all architects do is make these things, and in their head imagine what it’s like to be walking through a model,” Larson said. “I think it’s really difficult to understand space until you walk into the space.”

And what’s he learned about Breuer through the process?

“Simplicity and space and his view,” Larson said. “And really thinking differently about windows. Look at the front of the house and when you drive up to it and all you see is a brick wall with an opening… after you get inside you understand and value the relationship with the space — windows make the view so intentional.”

Larson will watch along with thousands of others on Sunday morning as his Breuer-house replica burns to the ground. But don’t expect him to get emotional when all his hard work goes up in flames.

“I don’t care about that,” says Larson as he looks at the replica. “It’s not about fetishing an object — it never has been for me.”

He adds: “I think when you do these things and you burn it down, what’s left is potential. Something has to happen beyond that action.”

While his next project probably won’t have anything to do with fire, it might be Breuer-related. Sitting on the floor at the warehouse near the house is a small pile of what appears to be junk. But the concrete chunks with wires sticking out of them are special to Larson. It’s material from the original Breuer house left over after a recent repair.

“It’s loaded with energy,” says Larson, who’s part of the McKnight Visual Artists Fellowship exhibition at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design opening June 14. “It was so clean and now it’s this wiry sculpture.”

Sounds like the beginnings of Larson’s next work of art.

IF YOU GO

What: Chris Larson’s “Celebration/Love/Loss” at Northern Spark, an all-night arts festival

Where: Lowertown St. Paul; Larson’s project is outside Union Depot, 214 E. Fourth St.

When: 8:58 p.m. Saturday to 5:26 a.m. Sunday; Larson’s project starts at 8:58 p.m. Saturday until it is set on fire at 2 a.m. Sunday.

Cost: Free

Info: northernspark.org

Amy Carlson Gustafson can be reached at 651-228-5561. Follow her at twitter.com/amygustafson.