Architectural Fantasies: Artist-Built Environments

From Miami’s Coral Castle to LA’s Watts Towers, Architectural Fantasies explores over 60 dwellings across more than 30 states. These artist-built spaces allow one to step directly into the artwork, and range from scratch-built creations and modified structures to monuments, sites of devotion, and intricately decorated interiors. These fantastical, idiosyncratic buildings and sites straddle a space between art and architecture. While not always understood, these sometimes whimsical, sometimes reverential constructions are often conceived by the artist as a gift to the public; to inspire them to slow down and to open their eyes and their hearts to alternative spaces. Featured in this book are rare looks at singular constructions—buildings and spaces that have been created from scratch or modified in unusual and unexpected ways. Untethered to conventions, these structures push the parameters of what we would normally consider “architecture.” They may break through height standards, utilize materials in innovative ways, ignore ease of accessibility and norms and, disregard any attempt to maintain stylistic consistency among the various components. These provocative places unite function and fantasy. _ Jo Farb Hernández, Director Emerita of SPACES and Professor Emerita at San José State University, is an internationally recognized scholar of the work of self-taught artists, and an award-winning author, curator, and photographer. Hernandez has been particularly focused on the field of vernacular art environment builders for five decades – first in the US and, for the last 25 years, in Spain – and is one of very few scholars to dedicate their careers to this under-recognized group of makers. Notably, her series Singular Spaces: From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments, (Raw Vision 2013; 5 Continents Editions 2023), based on over 20 years of primary fieldwork, provides an encyclopedic treatment of the field. Fred Scruton was born in Lackawanna, New York, and received an MFA in photography from Pratt Institute. He worked for twenty years as a freelance photographer of artwork and architecture in New York City. Now an Emeritus Professor of Art from PennWest University, his work has been widely exhibited and reproduced in books and periodicals. Fred travels extensively throughout the United States to document self-taught, ‘outsider’ and ‘visionary’ artists and their art environments. Often befriending the artists, his process of ‘collaborative documentation’ typically extends over many years and repeated return visits. _