Could an art project in a 117-year-old house be a solution to homelessness?

Artists behind the Seattle Demo Project alter doomed buildings with dramatic art installations, and hope to work with squatters to turn the buildings into transitional housing.

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If you happen to stroll by, the old house on the corner of 12th Avenue and Thomas Street looks like other empty houses waiting to be knocked down across Seattle: peeling gray paint, crumbling red shingles, rickety front steps that seem as if they’d melt the next time it rains.

But an eerie, yellow glow radiates through its windows every hour of every day: This is “When Lightning Strikes,” an art installation by the Seattle Demo Project, a group of artists and architects who’ve been treating doomed buildings like blank canvases since 2012.

Their current project, the 117-year-old house at 12th and Thomas, is a mess of contradictions.

It’s a property where squatters, a developer, artists and anti-homelessness activists tried to make a tricky alliance — developer Robert Humble of HyBrid Architectureallowed the Demo Project artists (some also work at HyBrid) to turn a house he plans to raze into art, but also tried to be responsible about the squatters living there, one of whom was pregnant.

“Instead of asking them to vacate, we flipped that around to empowering them,” said Rex Hohlbein of Facing Homelessness, who helped Humble talk to the squatters, suggesting that they stay and act as caretakers during the art installation. “The owner made a quantum leap of faith — to open the house up instead of having the police come in, boot them out, and then board it up.”

In the end, things didn’t turn out as planned. The squatters — a military veteran and his pregnant partner — were asked to leave. “I gave them the keys for six weeks or so under the condition that the cops weren’t called, the neighbors weren’t called and there’d be no trouble,” said Humble, who plans to tear down the building for a new apartment complex. “But they didn’t hold up their end of the deal.” (The former squatters did not respond to requests for comment.)

The squatters are gone, but their presence can still be seen — if you have the gumption to climb up the embankment the house is perched on and peer into it, you’ll see gorgeously scuffed hardwood floors, walls that have been kicked through and graffiti by the squatters (with an ace-of-spades theme), all illuminated by long tubes of fluorescent bulbs by the Seattle Demo Project. (There’s no sign inviting you up — but you’re allowed to peep through the windows if you find yourself drawn to the light.)

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