Today Arch Daily offers a look into one architect's peculiar pet project: a once-abandoned home turned into a sculptural holding pen for vintage items usually only found in oddball thrift stores and attics. Dennis Maher, an architecture professor at the University of Buffalo, deconstructs and re-articulates old—dare we say it?—junk, and turns it into things like Frankenstein-ish dollhouses, abstract electronica art, and curious displays of knick-knacks, bird cages, and old-timey ephemera. The goal of Fargo House is to combine art, architecture, and civic activism, creating a constantly- volving space, one that has, in Arch Daily's words, "grown so much that the house has practically become a living organism." But there's something close to order in the jumbled space: after Maher hunts down his wares—in flea markets, thrift shops, Dumpsters, or his front porch, where his neighbors sometimes leave old stuff—he finds a place for it according to thematic rooms. Chests and closets go into the Wardrobe Room and electronics go into The Entertainment Core. The Room for the Image and Reflected Image houses "mirrors, cigar boxes, postcards, and medicine cabinets." Another look, below.
? On the left, a dollhouse conglomerate; right: The Entertainment Core. Maher's "center for the urban imaginary," a phrase borrowed from the project's official site, has earned him several awards and fellowships, as well as allowed him to exhibit his work across the United States. Last year, he was Artist-in-Residence at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.
· An Ever-Changing House: Dennis Maher's Story [ArchDaily]
· All Abandonment Issues posts [Curbed National]
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