Local art guide Robert Boyd takes himself and readers on a photo tour of the outbuildings surrounding Nestor Topchy’s home “just south of the North Loop,” catching readers up on a few of the structures the artist has built since (or salvaged from) his residency at the legendary TemplO (earlier, Zocalo), the 6-acre arts commune he ran on a rented former truck depot at 5223 Feagan St. in the West End from the late eighties into the early aughts. And he finds much to impress, including the glass-walled tin-roofed structure pictured here, which Topchy pieced together from steel windows and doors salvaged from buildings in Houston and Argentina, and which fronts a pond on the acre-plus property. Topchy calls it the Crescent:

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Next to it is the Chapel Sculpturetecture, a much smaller metal-sided contraption filled with a stove, a sink, and a shelf of icon-portraits of mostly local artists, painted by Topchy:

“It really is a holy place,” writes the not-always-reverent Boyd. He’s talking about the tiny chapel here: “In the cool quiet of the afternoon, communing with this shining silent community of saints, I could feel it — at least until my reverie was interrupted by other guests entering.”

Moving on, Boyd includes pics of a metal-sheathed trailer dubbed the Archetapas Shrine:

and the TemplO-refugee OHM Home, a trailer office built out of packing crates:

Boyd doesn’t include any photos of a new shipping-container assemblage Topchy is constructing, meant as a smaller-scale version of the giant 10-acre artist compound forged out of dozens of shipping containers called HIVE he’s been promoting for several years. But he shows a drawing of the new prototype, which Topchy modestly labels the Multivarious Utilitarian Composition:

What Topchy’s built of that is incomplete, but Boyd says it works: “Right now it’s just a couple of containers with a dogtrot, but they are functional. One even has plumbing and a tenant. He plans to build a couple of MUCs on his property and rent them as studios to other artists (similar to Independence Art Studios up in Independence Heights).”

• ReTemplO [The Great God Pan Is Dead]
• Bringing Down the House [Houston Press]

Photos: Robert Boyd