The Enchanted Worlds of Charles Simonds

T he Little People erect their Dwellings on window ledges, in gutters, under chimney hoods, in any urban crevice hospitable to their designs. Since 1970, they have traveled across the globe, from the streets of Manhattan to Houston and Minneapolis, with outposts of their secret civilization in Amsterdam, Berlin, Shanghai, Venice, Zurich and beyond. They move from Dwelling to Dwelling, charting a clandestine path that anyone can follow if they know where (and how) to look. Yet by the time you find them, they have already decamped for the next territory. A tribe on the move – fugitive, subject to the whims of nature – they leave in their wake a trail of ruins.

These mysterious, archaic forms are the handiwork of the artist Charles Simonds, whose global network of fantastical Little People have captured the public’s imagination for more than half a century. Sotheby’s new home at 945 Madison Avenue, formerly the Whitney Museum of American Art (and later the Met Breuer and Frick Madison), hosts the longest-standing Dwelling in the world. Since its installation in 1981, it has become a pilgrimage site for art-world denizens and children alike. Much to the artist’s bemusement, it has achieved cult status among New Yorkers: an unassuming, blink-and-you-miss-it masterpiece hidden inside an architectural icon. Now, Sotheby’s stewards this beloved sculpture into its next chapter as Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist landmark reopens to the public on November 8, 2025.

Simonds built his first Dwelling in 1970 on a friend’s window ledge in SoHo. At the time he lived on the Lower East Side and would walk the streets in search of dilapidated structures and uninhabited niches. Using tweezers to position miniature, unfired clay bricks, he meticulously constructed Dwellings for the Little People; the process could take hours. Pedestrians would often flock around him, though sometimes he labored solo, unperturbed, an anonymous public figure serenely absorbed in his task. The quiet compulsion to create sparked his work, which served as proof that art might appear – and flourish – anywhere.

Born to psychoanalyst parents (feminist mother, Freudian father) and raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Simonds spent many formative hours at the American Museum of Natural History, infatuated with its life-sized dioramas. A childhood summer spent in the American Southwest spurred a fascination with the ancient art and architecture of the Ancestral Pueblo. His abiding interests in anthropology and the built environment led him to publish Three Peoples in 1976, a “fictive ethnography” that outlines three societies’ distinct relationships to time and space. Inspired by Edwin Abbott Abbott’s satirical novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), the text showcases Simonds’ gift for typological thinking, probing how systems of thought undergird and shape material reality, from domestic settings to civic rituals. While the contents of his ethnography might be fictional, the structures they convey are ambitiously and persuasively realized.

Often constructed on bulbous mounds of orange clay, Simonds’ structures are imbued with a sense of the primordial, as if their pattern has been honed across geographies and refined over successive eras. They evoke archetypal forms from disparate civilizations, including cliff dwellings and castle towers; some are elaborately conceived, replete with winding stairwells and circular enclosures, while others are simple, modest, even a bit stark. Each is marvelous and unique yet ultimately not meant to last. “They’re not precious,” Simonds says of his Dwellings. “I could build one again in a snap.” The majority of his Dwellings are intentionally exposed to the elements, like birds’ nests or anthills. This vulnerability is by design.

Perhaps it’s fitting that Simonds’ oldest surviving Dwelling resides within one of the most deliberately imposing buildings in New York City. When the Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer was selected to design the Whitney’s new building on Madison Avenue, he brought his learnings from the Bauhaus to bear with a brazen, dynamic design that many considered an affront to the staid neoclassicism of the Upper East Side and its venerable institutions. The building’s opening in 1966 provoked outrage from some neighbors; others, like the formidable architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, came to its defense, writing that it “grows on one slowly, like a taste for olives or warm beer.”

The Whitney curator Marcia Tucker invited Simonds to include a Dwelling in the 1975 Biennial, after the artist had declined participation in the inaugural edition two years prior. Ever the trickster, Simonds accepted – but refused to present his contribution in the building proper. Instead, a modest plaque in the exhibition listed a location elsewhere in the city, sending curious visitors and completionists on a goose chase that proved futile: by the time the Biennial was underway, Simonds’ sculpture, installed at the intersection of Prince and Mercer Streets, was likely already destroyed. A Dwelling first entered the museum during the 1977 Biennial: a sprawling, richly detailed environment situated on the slanted sill of the building’s famous cycloptic window overlooking 75th Street, with another constructed on a brownstone’s ledge visible cross the street.

Although that Dwelling was dismantled at the end of the exhibition, several years later, in 1981, Simonds was again invited to create a work for the museum, this time a permanent installation. Wary of any institution, even one as cooperative as the Whitney, he decided to station his artwork in the stairwell, often considered the secret “heart” of the building for its resplendent palette of materials. Situated between the first and second floors, it is easy to miss. But look up and a spill of orange earth catches the eye. Several rudimentary, rectangular buildings squat on the ledge, nearly camouflaged against the backdrop of concrete. An informational plaque indicated the presence of two additional Dwellings installed across the street, impossible to apprehend from a single vantage: one beneath the second-story window of 940 Madison Avenue (now an Apple Store), another under the same building’s chimney hood. A fragmented triptych that titillates as much as it frustrates, the three Dwellings serve as a critical reminder that art exists – and almost always originates – beyond the walls of any museum or cultural venue.

Simonds’ art defies institutionalization, always redrawing the terms of engagement, ownership and display. “That’s one of the reasons I work in the street, where my work belongs to everyone and is destroyed if one person wants to possess it,” Simonds said in a 2018 interview with the Brooklyn Rail. “It’s simply a gift, relieved of any monetary preciousness.” He has little interest in creating fungible artworks that add value to a portfolio or end up enshrined in an encyclopedic collection – which makes one’s presence here even more extraordinary. Other institutions have deinstalled their Dwellings or boarded them over during construction campaigns, yet these three sculptures survive. Their presence has been a source of enduring delight for generations of visitors.

Unlike the Minimalism de rigeur in the 1960s or the Land Art dominant in the 1970s – which was almost always about an artist’s virtuosic ability to manipulate the earth in pursuit of sublimity – Simonds’ work, in its diminutive scale and insistence on ephemerality, subverts the urge toward monumentality. “When I began, Minimalism, with its big, hard, erect forms, struck me as a comical caricature of ‘machismo’ compared to my soft, pink, vulnerable Dwellings,” Simonds said in a 2013 talk at the Museum of Modern Art. “The obsessiveness with which I make my Dwellings, almost knitting with tweezers, seems feminine next to the big boys’ toys.”

Fame arrived early for Simonds, including a front-page hatchet job from the conservative art critic Hilton Kramer, which triggered Simonds to eschew the claustrophobic orbit of the New York art world in favor of the streets. Yet for an artist who has never chased the spotlight, Simonds has received a remarkable amount of institutional recognition, from a large-scale installation in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s storied rotunda in 1988 to a site-specific takeover of Dumbarton Oaks, a DC-based research center specializing in the arts of Byzantium and the ancient Americas.

One of the camera-shy artist’s only portraits is an intimate 1974 short film by Rudy Burckhardt, which tracks Simonds on the Lower East Side as he constructs Dwellings, attracting the attention of neighborhood children and intrigued pedestrians. Recently restored and published by the Met, it features a shot of Simonds diligently placing bricks as a flaming car blazes in the background, flags of black smoke billowing in the breeze. Paradoxically, visitors to Simonds’ Flatiron studio – where the artist has worked for more than 45 years – are greeted with a wall of faces, mostly plaster casts of his own visage that he makes every year to record the passage of time. While it’s possible to trace how certain facial features have shifted or remained constant, the project betrays no hint of vanity, only the steady accumulation of a researcher gathering data.

There are, however, a few objects that Simonds has made that he considers precious. One is Life, With Thorns (2011), an exquisite porcelain sculpture completed at the Sèvres Manufactory in France, where he was brought to repair an artwork that cracked in transit to Paris for his 1994 retrospective at the Jeu de Paume. Porcelain is a notoriously finicky medium, delicate and difficult to manipulate without years of training. Over approximately 20 years at Sèvres, Simonds pushed the material, creating sinuous, lifelike branches adorned with thorns and delicately modeled leaves. The result is exceptionally intricate, a wraithlike, bone-white tangle that somehow evokes the gentle undulations of sea anemones or tree coral. His novice eye provided some distinct advantages at the workshop, particularly in his development of unorthodox methods. To achieve the seemingly organic curvature of his branches, he devised makeshift paper supports that produced impossibly elegant effects. “They said it couldn’t be done,” Simonds recalls with a gimlet-eyed laugh. When it was time to remove the paper armature once the branches had stiffened, he simply burned it away. The branches kept their form.

Many of Simonds’ projects fall beyond the remit of the art world. He runs workshops in psychiatric hospitals, which are not meant to yield public exhibitions. He worked closely with schoolchildren in rural Southern India, for example, and with Dwelling Munich (2017) he collaborated with groups of refugee children across the German city, inviting each cohort to design their own Dwellings and narratives. The goal across these extra-institutional initiatives is simply to spread the joy of creation to those who are often sidelined or excluded from art.

These days Simonds channels his own exuberant visions into Floating Cities, an ongoing project accompanied by a novel-in-fragments that reimagines communal living through highly reconfigurable architectural models. “If you wanted to live on an English countryside and I on a South Seas island, I could provide each of us with a barge,” Simonds once wrote, describing its guiding philosophy. “We could attach them and live as neighbors until the time that we no longer wish to be together, then we could detach and go our separate ways.” His Floating Cities propose a heady modularity, popular during the heyday of global utopianism in the 1960s when radical visions of communal living espoused by the likes of Le Corbusier and Ettore Sottsass challenged prevailing norms around domestic space and private property.

The cavernous back room of Simonds’ studio serves as the stage for this long-unfolding drama, a vast expanse of blue panels of glass patterned over a massive tabletop, where the artist adjusts his various “toys” in ever-shifting constellations of homes, factories, landscapes. To achieve a simulacrum of cloud cover, he dangles balls of cotton from an overhead lighting rack and shakes them until they blur into a convincing cumulus.

The Floating Cities began around the same time as the Dwellings. The 2024 publication About Time pairs an essay by scholar Herbert Molderings with excerpts from Simonds’ novel-in-progress. Unlike Three Peoples, which assumed a tone of faux-authoritative scholarly detachment, this narrative offers glimpses of consciousness from individual residents of the Floating Cities, swerving vertiginously between omniscient third person and free indirect style – a tactic that finds a parallel in the book’s swooping camerawork.

Simonds has grown comfortable with the devices of fiction: perspectival shifts, flashes of interiority. The result is an enchanting patchwork of vistas and memories, a bird’s-eye view of the Floating Cities that toggles between the tides of public history – sociology, anthropology, economics – and the more idiosyncratic rhythms of subjective thought. They are a reminder of the world’s deep interconnectedness, of the archival layers that reveal themselves to curious passersby.

Both the Floating Cities and the Dwellings use playful conceits to pose serious questions about the nature of daily life. What obligations do we hold toward our closest relationships and to the public good? How do we maintain these systems of care – and what happens when we stop?

No question is too small or insignificant for Simonds, who understands that these are the fundamental building blocks of reality. How we answer them determines nothing less than the world we inhabit.