Mr. Larson was planning something more than an ordinary house fire. He aspired to an inferno. To this end, he had hired a company called Hollywood Pyrotechnics Inc. to string up baggies full of denatured alcohol as an accelerant. And a custom print shop had donated a few tons of scrap paper (obsolete business cards, defective wedding invitations) to stuff the shell with kindling.

“I want to burn it so fast there’s no time to mourn it,” Mr. Larson said.

But then, for all the artist’s labors, it wasn’t his house. Mr. Bogdan had originally found it hard to get his head around annihilation. “It’s not a pleasant thing to see the capsule with everything that means the most to you in flames,” he said. But with a cup of potato juice for courage, and his wife and older son safe at hand, he declared himself ready.

A parade of onlookers circled the perimeter of the house for hours, in a kind of funeral procession, tapping on the cardboard walls and posing for trophy photos. But this crowd wasn’t exactly mourning the death of high modernism.

A typical heckler was Dr. Sarah Kesler, 42, of Minneapolis. “Thank God they’re going to burn it,” she said, “because it’s ugly and depressing. It’s a good example of a place I wouldn’t want to live in.”

You could say one man’s crowd is another man’s mob. For a time, Mr. Larson helped his crew of friends and art students slash diamond-shaped ventilation holes in the walls and ceiling. But before long, he was huddling in a small, enclosed chamber, or what would have been the mechanical room. “It feels really decadent,” he said. “I wish we could do it without the crowd.”

An assistant came by to ask where to stash the first wood pallets — more kindling. “Start in the kids’ bedroom,” he said, and then added, “That sounds awful.”

Mr. Larson retreated further into the chiaroscuro made by Breuer’s walls. “I just realized it’s like I’ve created my very own Crush Collision,” he said, referring to the railroad publicity stunt that turned into a catastrophe. The art had ended at seven o’clock when the final piece of cardboard went up on the wall. What remained, for Mr. Larson, was circus.