"Truth" Is an Honest-to-God House Erected at Houston & Wooster

In the arrogant, well-lit beauty of Soho a wall of white circles juts conspicuously around the corner of a nondescript brick building. Walk up Wooster, toward the wall, and a structure emerges; first the circles peek out, then a tan wall branded with the word "truth," next a slanted ceiling and, finally, two half-domes arching over the back of the roof. Standing on the southeast corner of Wooster and Houston, this amalgam of strange shapes and soft colors becomes a one-room house, erected in the middle of a parking lot and positioned below the "Lucky Brand" advertisement painted enormously on a neighboring building. A front wall of steel rectangles turns slightly at one corner to allow entrance to the house. Tan walls, textured with pebbles, reflect the light emitted by golden bulbs. A wooden table with blue legs splayed chaotically is in the middle of the room. In the corner, a dwarf of the table bears a golden sculpture of right angles. Light orange burns from a fixture of gold beams molded like a frozen explosion.

This is Tim Giblin's house, mounted on buckets of cement and pebbles. Recent rain had turned the floor to a sticky cement-and-pebble goo that sucks the bottoms of my shoes. The chairs haven't arrived yet, so people step purposely through the room, then jump out the side door and sit on lawn furniture arranged in the parking lot. It's the opening party for Giblin's art exhibit, the unveiling of this strange house and everything he's designed to fill it. It's also a housewarming of sorts: he plans to spend nine hours every day during the month of July sitting in his opus.

Giblin, 28, stands in the parking lot in a buttondown green shirt and brown pants, watching people through black, squarish glasses, tinted beige. He describes his work as an attempt to make eclectic the hard-edge minimalist style of the 60s. "If you've ever sat in an Eames chair for more than five minutes, you know it isn't very comfortable. What I've done is a little garish, a little less subtle."

What he's done is planted a house in the middle of downtown Manhattan and thrown a party in a parking lot. There's nothing hushed or dramatically cautious about Giblin's opening; the furniture store around the corner cultivates a more pronounced air of artsy pretense. Giblin has surrounded his elegant house with a feeling of celebratory casualness.

The barbecue fires up. Californication plays down Houston, moaning out of massive sound equipment rented for the occasion. The flimsy lawn chairs fill with Tim's friends and his mother's friends, who eat ribs and chicken and drink beer. Motorcycles come to spitting stops, cars double park. The crowd spooning potato salad onto paper plates glows, young and attractive and impressed. Women raise plucked eyebrows at the tables, ask about the wooden surfaces or the white curls making up half a wall. They wear skirts and leather-strapped silver watches. Their boyfriends mill through the room in slacks.

"It's from a burl, which is a growth on a tree," Tim says, explaining the wood used to make the smaller table. "It's a slice from that."

A young woman nods, takes a flier from the table. "Wild."

The house attracts only scant attention from passersby; a few women on bikes pause; one asks for the price of the table. ("Twenty-two," Tim answers, then muses as she leaves, "I probably should have specified 22 thousand, not hundred. That zero probably makes a difference.") An apartment resident even stops by to find out what's going on across the street. But for the most part, Manhattan looks up, nods at Tim sitting in his architectural anomaly and keeps going.

It's the people crowded around the grill who praise the unusual creativity they see in Tim's work. Even as they congregate in the parking lot, dancing occasionally, fishing through the coolers for the last of the beers, they still talk about the house and its artist. They boast about working with him in the past, tell stories of early, six-year-old paintings that resemble the work of professional artists. Everyone's eager to talk about Tim except Tim himself, who has a shyness that seems incompatible with a personality brave enough to create such a loud and obvious presence.

"I can't say, 'Come see me,'" he says, avoiding eye contact. The chairs have arrived?as well as a white marble desk with triangular legs and a strip of blue steel braced between them?and we're sitting under the exploding gold light fixture. Shadows of the steel-bar wall crisscross the tabletop. The last of the barbecue smoke weaves through the air. Beer cans are strewn across asphalt and the music whines, "I smell sex and candy..." Tim's mother circles the house a final time and says goodnight.

A friend handled the press releases and Tim, for the most part, stayed out of the event's promotion. And when he talks about the process of putting the house on display?pausing between sentences and words, betraying a slight anxiety?he expresses the idea of courage through his commitment to truth: that word, leaping from the side of the house, is also tattooed on his left arm. "I couldn't have done this without my commitment to my own truth."

Tim defines his truth as the execution of his artistic ideas. He points to the larger table, the slab of English Walnut glowing in amber light. "One day I had the idea for that table. That was my bottom-line truth of the day."

"Truth," located on the southeast corner of Houston and Wooster Sts., is open 9 a.m.-9 p.m. every day through July 31. Call 718-623-9391 for information.