How a Pretend Rat Duped Everyone (ft. Tier Zoo)
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_Special Thanks_
@TierZoo for contributing his wisdom!
+ Adam LeBarge for the Rat Hole Replica
+ Evan Montgomery for production and editing.
_Description_
In this video, we explore the unexpected intersection of art and urban life as we unravel the story of the Chicago Rat Hole-an accidental urban sculpture that has captured the imagination of a community and beyond. Located in a northern Chicago neighborhood, this seemingly mundane sidewalk anomaly has transformed into a symbol of curiosity, amusement, and cultural significance.
What is it and why has it become so famous? From its viral spread on social media to its comparison with iconic landmarks, this object reveals the thin line between accidental incidents and artistic creation, questioning conventional values and community in the architectural framework.
We make a replica of the Rat Hole to see what it would take and put ourselves in the position of an artist making the thing, and the art practices through history it relates to. That are the philosophical implications of the Rat Hole? Maybe considering its status as an indexical sign will unveil its deeper meanings.
Rats are multi-faceted symbols, maybe the perfect symbol for the city of Chicago. Join us in celebrating Chicago's newest landmark through a love letter to the Rat Hole, reflecting on the beauty and imperfections that define our urban surroundings.
Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments. Has the Rat Hole changed your perception of urban art and accidental beauty? What other unnoticed art lies beneath our feet?
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_About the Channel_
Architecture with Stewart is a CZcams journey exploring architecture’s deep and enduring stories in all their bewildering glory. Weekly videos and occasional live events breakdown a wide range of topics related to the built environment in order to increase their general understanding and advocate their importance in shaping the world we inhabit.
_About Me_
Stewart Hicks is an architectural design educator that leads studios and lecture courses as an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also serves as an Associate Dean in the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts and is the co-founder of the practice Design With Company. His work has earned awards such as the Architecture Record Design Vanguard Award or the Young Architect’s Forum Award and has been featured in exhibitions such as the Chicago Architecture Biennial and Design Miami, as well as at the V&A Museum and Tate Modern in London. His writings can be found in the co-authored book Misguided Tactics for Propriety Calibration, published with the Graham Foundation, as well as essays in MONU magazine, the AIA Journal Manifest, Log, bracket, and the guest-edited issue of MAS Context on the topic of character architecture.
_Contact_
FOLLOW me on instagram: @stewart_hicks & @designwithco
Design With Company: designwith.co
University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture: arch.uic.edu/
_Special Thanks_
Stock video and imagery provided by Getty Images, Storyblocks, and Shutterstock.
Music provided by Epidemic Sound
#architecture #urbandesign
The one time Master Splinter left the sewer
TMNT is set in NYC, not Chicago. Just sayin'.
@@dustinbird2090 They had to change it for TV, it's just a witness relocation thing.
@@dustinbird2090This was about Teenage Mutant Architecture Turtles. Very similar, but different they’re named things like Frank, Lloyd, and Zaha. Their weapons are Staedtler mechanical pencils and calipers. You can probably see why their ninja cousins became the better known mutant turtles.
Master Splinter's cousin. These streets aint playin.
Not a crossover i would've expected.
“No armor or strong weapons to retaliate with”
This had me in snickers 🤣
Here in Toronto we had a similar situation with an expired raccoon lying on the sidewalk near one of our busiest intersections - and for a couple of weeks Torontonians decorated the rigid rodent with various tokens and it became a shrine of sorts. Eventually the carcass was cleaned up by the city but our beloved trash panda will live on in our collective memory.
Sounds much like the Eugenian bagel beaver (RIP)
The raccoon was out for only 14 hours before the city cleaned it up. This happened in July, so the carcass would be a bit juicy if it was left out for a couple of weeks.
I remember that. 😂
From the story, it only happened because pest control and/or another service wouldn't pick up the raccoon when people originally called in concern about it. Due to this, people trolled city services with the memorial until they finally picked it up.
I remember a few officials getting angry that people were messing with it and how unsanitary it was but it did it's job in finally getting the work done.
@@toejammiepie....I need to know more. 😂
I used to use an identical "icon" rat when I taught my classes about the Black Death. I'd go to the store room and come back to the classroom, apparently stroking a small animal. Horror is the only way to describe when they thought I'd brought a rat into the room. I was a totally sadistic teacher, I'd choose a nearby pupil and call out, "Here! Catch!" as I threw the rat towards them. A few screams, followed by almost hysterical laughter 😂
According to parents, it was my most talked about lesson at home, and bless them, the pupils never spread the word, ensuring that I could play the same trick again and again 😁
Bless you for teaching and making a great impression on the students!
@@sunlitegodis Thank you
You're lucky. In some of the schools I've taught at in Japan, you'd probably lose your job doing that.
Oh well done! History in action.xx😂
I love these incidental sculptures in the concrete. My favorites are often human footprints. The way they tell the story is wonderful: usually the first two footprints are relatively aligned, normally spaced, etc, but the third print is almost always in a strange position, far from the second: unbalanced, uncertain, and carrying with it some measure of the surprise and dismay felt by the person who made it. I like to try to follow these prints sometimes to get a better sense of the particular stumbling panic-walk that caused them. Just something worth thinking about.
I'm really chuffed to find the rat hole gaining popularity since I left Chicago. I used to live just a couple blocks away and it's awesome to see such notoriety for what was a much more local inside joke just a few short years ago.
Lol I'm the guy who posted the first viral tweet about it. Sup. If anyone wants a plaster cast of the Rat Hole, I'm giving them away to anyone who donates $25 to Sarah's Circle, a shelter for homeless women in Chicago. Thanks again!
I love the fact that the words "Chicago Rat Hole" are so evocative, by themselves making you imagine all sorts of possible meanings for the phrase. And then you see it, and realize you never considered taking it absolutely literally.
Squirrel = Tree Rat
THE RAT HOLE!!
I clicked on this video thinking to myself "What mystery? A rat fell off a telephone wire into wet concrete," but it turns out the mystery lies in the process by which mankind ascribes meaning to environmental happenstance. We sure do like to infer intentionality from indifference and assign significance to literally insignificant things.
The rat hole is a bit like a negative landscape art - instead of "mankind" making an imprint into nature, which brings a sensation of something that looks structured out of the unstructured - it is a sense of unstructured into the structured, nature making its imprint into "mankind"s extensions that are cities. It is a reminder of the eternal of the temporary, how entropy is a universal principle.
Strange that there are no paw prints to show how the rat escaped.
There are tiny marks from it leaving, that's how we know it was a squirrel not rat. The body print from jumping off the roof is just way deeper and as such easier to notice.
And just because I watched way too many cartoons as a kid, when you mentioned replicating it, I imagined a guy with a sack full of squirrels chucking them at a slab of wet concrete. Glad you took the high road. :D
Where are the footprints that the rodent would have left escaping the "hole?"
The concrete was too dry to capture them. The terminal velocity hit was the only reason the body was captured.
Close up, there are a few shallow footprints/scratches.
8:54 oh my god, if you have the chance to see City by Heizer, it is incredible. My best friend and I went last summer and it was such a great day just exploring this vast piece of land art in the vast desert chatting about what it means and interacting with it
I consider the Chicago rat hole as a modern day imprint fossil, a piece of archeology that gives clues to how a specific organism lived!
RIP Squirrel, yet another artist whose genius went under-recognized during their lifetime
I was definitely convinced you were pulling our leg the whole time and the "rat hole" was made by a human as a joke.
This was a collaboration I never saw happening.
Loved this video! What a fun way to celebrate such a silly piece of street art.
One other notable Chicago artist who creates silly street art (and should be equally iconic) is Jim Bachor. His pothole tile mosaics have become world-renown, featured on CBS Sunday Morning, and his Instagram is always a welcome stop on the scroll. He just opened a new gallery... worthy of your visit!
And here I am, watching a video about a broken concrete slab in Chicago...
Yep I’m having one of those days as well.xx😂
The imprint is not the art. The art is the collective interaction with the imprint. The offerings, the fillings, photos, the backstories. The way we pretend to, or to some extent actually, worship or inflate the importance of something so mundane.
What a crazy time this was. I was getting so many texts from friends and family outside of Chicago asking if it was real and if I’d been. It got annoying pretty fast with people kind of going insane. I always felt bad for the residents. It was such a fun random thing to come across walking around one night when I first moved to the neighborhood. Never really thought twice about it until it got “mainstream” and now it’s gone. RIP Stucky. He believed he could fly.
The city removed the slab containing the rat hole. I wonder if they put it in a museum.
Got to do a follow up because that piece of sidewalk was saved for preservation.
Adam Labarge = young Theo Van in a parallel universe.
Thank you for explaining this I don't live in Chicago anymore and it just popped up on my Facebook one day
The level of over-analysis in this video is *chef's kiss*
Still closer to real art than Stable Diffusion
Love this crossover, never would I imagine the two coming together!
Stewart, do you have any recommendations for any books related to some of the topics you cover? I have been really enjoying your videos and would like to learn more
Solid visual interpretation & contextual exploration...
In order to view The Rat Hole, you must agree that you are not Anish Kapoor nor are you viewing it on behalf of Anish Kapoor
That Adam LeBerge guy is really something special
That was Fun!
Would love it if you did a video on
other object-shaped sidewalk holes, such as a gun-shaped hole in Richmond, Virginia, that was similarly enshrined by locals❤😊
Not a single reference to the hands down best ephemeral rat themed art piece: pizza rat
I wouldn't count on the squirrel surviving the experience. Wet concrete is bad for your skin.
A squirrel could survive that no problem. The wet cement would have softened the landing if anything. I also handles wet cement many times, washes/crumbles off relatively easily.
@@chrisclouds4182what about the chemical burn?
Rathole replica store is giving me a 404 error :(
Ugh, working on it. Sorry for any inconvenience.
I thought it was just because they sold out in 20 minutes... looks like I still have a chance :)
Are they sold out? It made most sense to me. lol - people love art and rats!
In front of my childhood home I used to walk around the block noticing all the different impressions in the cements. At the end of the front walk my mom put our family’s initials. In the right corner of our sidewalk are two sets of paw prints my siblings and I could never agree if it was cat or dog. Around the corner to the left the message Pam + Greg referred to the older couple whose granddaughter I played with in the summer. In the street just a ways further you can try to follow an unfortunate person’s path through the new concrete of the street, where the tried to backtrack and get out. What also interested me was how the sidewalk composition changed our house had new smooth gray, but the next two had a pinkish orange cement with chunky pieces of people sticking out, around the corner it turned into four small squares instead of one big square, to the right there was no sidewalk just massive four by fours marking the edge of the lawn. And the places where tree roots had begun to undermine the slabs were great scooter ramps.
Made a family pilgrimage in January to see the rat hole. It’s become iconic. Granted the pilgrimage wasn’t too far from the neighborhood my son lives in now but it was an odyssey nonetheless 😂
This is fun to watch! Nice 👌
@2:44 lets just take a short paws. 🤣🤣
This is an incredible video
The animation is hilarious!
Maybe like when painters paint over bugs on walls but maybe they pulled it out before it dried?
So... should I sign up for NordVPN OR get a replica rat hole? Ack, too hard of a decision.
I didn’t expect to hear the phrase “Rat hole” so many times today
Rat splat has such a great ring to it though
God bless Scabby!!
19 years of membership in IUOE Local 955. 🤘🏼
There's an annoying high pitched beep beep sound all the time (at least in the first minute of this video I've watched so far) that sounds identical to the beep my washing machine makes when it's done.
So wait is the squirrel thing real?
Ive never regretted buying art and i dont intend to start now. Looking forward to a great first 'impression.'
If the rodent survived, where are it's paw prints as it extricated itself from the wet concrete? I'm betting on an intentional impression in tempting wet concrete by a neighborhood teenager.
the pavement is made by pouring wet concrete directly on the ground? I thought it was like slabs or tiles. Learned something about Chicago today
wth where do you live where they put slabs
@@mr.b3168 Copenhagen. All of Denmark uses big tiles for sidewalks (:
@@pindebraende weird
@@mr.b3168 it's normal to me - if you are doing infrastructure work underground you can simply lift them up and put them back in place afterwards. Convenient for maintenance too.
Excellent video really interesting. I was just about to order my very own Rat Hole but the shipping was £137, I guess shipping a lump of concrete to the UK is pretty pricey 😂
Squirrel:
A rat with a furry tail!
😂
Awesome! After watching several of your vids, it's obvious you'd appreciate Amaranthine: How to create a regenerative civilization using artificial intelligence. It describes how to root civilization in aesthetics.
Seeing this in mid May and it only saying "1 month ago" i do wonder if this was posted on April 1st...
it was getting chased by another squirrel, mating season. You see them doing some Daredevilish stunts. I've been in Roscoe Village for 30 years, and well we don't have many hawks.
I have a strong negative feeling to the big metal bean sculpture, and always have. I wonder how many birds and other creatures have died from light refracting on it? How much hotter does it make the city? I guess it's more attractive than the Key Bridge memorial murals though, those are nightmare fuel.
5/18/24 just watched video and had to Google it, put in rat hole, and it was like 5th on the list. Also said City fixed concrete 4/24. I hope they cut it out and put a layer of clear epoxy over it and put it in a display stand. Looked like people would put change around it. Maybe an animal shelter could go in with the city and make the stand for the display case a donation box for the shelter.
Squirrel=Nut chewing mice
Dude, All I've learned is humans are fascinating.
I wonder how many people found this video by going down the “rabbit hole” that is the internet.
Cracks me up how Gen z will spend countless hours rendering and B-D printing to get a rough approximation, when plaster or silicone would be faster and more detailed
i like tier zoo's idea way more than my morbid brain thought some poor rat got cement rolled (i did think it was in the street not a sidewalk)
Just one more reason to visit Chicago.☺
I have doubts about tierzoo version. The pavement does not look like poured concrete in place, it looks like pre-made concrete blocks put there. What's more, there is a significant change of color around.
I suspect the birth of rat hole is much more grim and dark. A rat climbed in production form somewhere in a factory and concrete was poured over. Some blood got into cement around and it became more red. Than workers just installed the block.
The Rat Hole has officially been covered up.
Sadly, I saw on the news that the rat's hole has been filled in with cement. Rest in peace, my friend.
The tail(fluffy) does not look like a squirrel imprint but a rat.
add some drill holes then fill it fully with copper/bronze, like a real statue or plaque.
That or a clear resin, so it can still be 'sunken', at least visually.
Rat hole was my nickname in high school.
This would have been a good video if it didn't have a corporate shilling live read
Stewart, Why are petrol station canopies uniformly as they are?
0:55 dude was saved by the phone covering the face.
Can't help but think of the Sarajevo Roses
What makes you think the rodent survived? 🤨 If it had survived, there should be paw-prints as it scurried away. (I've got photos of a section of sidewalk in my town covered in numerous paw-prints.) In one comment, someone said it was too dry and Stewart said there are faint paw-prints, but if it had just jumped off of a roof into wet-cement, it would likely have BOUNDED out of the hole, leaving deep paw-prints, not just light surface-level markings. It seems more likely that the ostensible bird-of-prey snatched it up from the wet concrete.
I'm surprised it hasn't been vandalized; it seems so easy and likely that someone would have chipped it away by now. 🤨
What if it's not actually an imprint of a rodent but just a generic hole that happens to look rodent-like due to pareidolia? 🤔
Wait- I imagine the art sold in less than an hour? Link appeared broken, which means they’re probably all gone.
Wasn't this also the city where they had a memorial service for a dead raccoon?
How about the mirrored monoliths that showed up several years ago.
@ 11:10 Drew Binksy on YT has a great video on this but there is a temple in India where they worship rats and even eat and sleep with them in a temple - They believe that the rats are their ancestors and it's pretty wild. 😅
Good see the internet picking up the slack with new ways to overthink now with MatPat retired 😂😂😂
You are hilarious 😂
INTAGLIO is pronounced in-ta-lyo. Italian. Like "embroglio" em-bro-lyo
A bird could have grabbed the squirrel from that spot if no footprints were leading away.
IG vintage confirmed 😂
Omg I can’t wait to use my university’s resources to make my own rat hole.
So it is not a memorial for a "mysteriously disapeared" Police Informant?
1:38 .. Squirrels have no moral high ground, they are rodents as well, "Tree Rats" as it were!
becoming famous in a totally unconventional way
11:15 Our dude is trying to talk about positive associations with rats. Meanwhile, the most recent “year of the rat” was 2020. Anyone have any positive or negative associations with 2020?
Today the sidewalk slab containing the hole was removed while keeping it intact! If it’s clear what’s happening can you keep us in the loop? 👀
It turns out it was a Squirrel all along!!
Dun duuuun...
The tail looks like a rats. A squirrels is fluffy.
The rat hole was covered the day before this video was made.
The way you pronounce Bas Relief sounds like Bar Relief? Is like the "s" silent? So "Ba' Relief"?
0:28 Mexican money and candy
Did you ever take Advanced English and learn to despise a favourite Shakespeare poem by dissecting and over analyzing it?
I think you're over-thinking it. The rat hole is is funny. That's why people like it.
Much like the Pittsburgh Butthole Window. RIP to a legend.