Architectural Fantasies - by Jo Farb Hernandez (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Jo Farb Hernández is Director Emerita of the Art Gallery and Professor Emerita in the Department of Art and Art History at San José State University; she is also Director and Chief Curator Emerita of SPACES - Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments-a nonprofit archives documenting art environments and self-taught arts (www.spacesarchives.org). She has worked in the museum field for almost fifty years, including service as Director of the Monterey Museum of Art and President of the California Association of Museums. An award-winning writer, she has authored or co-authored over thirty award-winning books and exhibition catalogues; Forms of Tradition in Contemporary Spain won the prestigious University of Chicago Folklore Prize in 2006, and A.G. Rizzoli: Architect of Magnificent Visions (Harry N. Abrams, 1997) was one of Amazon.com's "10 Best: Art and Architecture" books that year. Hernández regularly publishes articles for a variety of international art journals; she lectures widely at museums and universities internationally; juries national, statewide, and regional exhibitions; and has been a panelist for numerous governmental agencies, private foundations, and nonprofit organizations.

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.