Business Card Buildings

Artist ‘Sharon’ painstakingly creates tiny building replicas from a unique medium: business cards, packaging and even wedding invitations fashioned into wedding chapels. Sharon writes about her collection on her blog named: Tiny Buildings. Some miniature houses seem to be generic, but most represent actual buildings like this log cabin in Virginia, a vegetarian restaurant in Zurich named Hiltl or The de Young Museum. She produces building replica of places she’s visited and wants to keep a memory ‘souvenir.’ About her tiny buildings, Sharon wrote, “In the 1970s, when our children were young, my husband, James Mount, started a collection of tiny buildings - made from odds-and-ends cardboard packaging. The original idea was for them to be Christmas decorations - to be placed over tiny white lights on our tree, or to gather on a side table as a little village. Each holiday, James would add to our collection. A few were given to friends, but most rested in an attic-stored box through most of the year...escaping for Christmas, to our delight. Because the tiny buildings were made from familiar boxes, or restaurant business cards, or other pieces collected as we traveled and lived, they became miniature memoirs of happy times and places. Many years later, in 2000 or so, ten years after James' death, I started to add to the collection. I gathered cards from the many stores and restaurants and fun places that Jane and Madison, our now-grown children, and I visited, and gave them to each of them for Christmas presents. So, this is a continuing history of our wonderful, happenstance memoir medium.”