Jo Farb Hernández: Artists as architects.

Kant, Architecture, and Fantasies

0:00Hello. For Emanuel Kant, an aesthetic experience required four conditions, disinterestedness, universality, purposiveness, and necessity. Architecture, as such, has always struggled with this, because its appreciation is fundamentally tied to a sense of its utility as shelter, symbol, status, want, and its designedness, evidence of its adherent beauty, relative to its purpose. Artist-made architecture of the sort documented in scholar, author, folklorist, and former director and curator of spaces, Joe Farb Hernandez's Architectural Fantasies, Artist-Built Environments, published by Tra Publishing in April this year, might square the circle.

0:38Here we have an extraordinary range of places and spaces that we can approach aesthetically in very Kantian ways. But what are these strange, discrepant heterotopias doing? What brings them about? Who are they for? And what place do they have in the world of architecture proper? If you want to, please support the A is for Architecture podcast by listening in and sharing it, of course, or by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me A Coffee. Links to these, to the book, and to Joe, are in the podcast description.

1:08A is for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture, and space.

Fifty-Five Years of Art Environments

1:15Hello, and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. I'm talking, delighted to be talking today to Joe Farb Hernandez. Joe, thank you for joining me. Pleasure. We're going to be talking about your, another amazing book, Architectural Fantasies, Artist-Built Environments, which you published with Tra Publishing, or TRA Publishing. Was it this year or last year? Yes, just in April this year. It's a brand new book. Brand new book. It's an exquisite, full-color book documenting wild places.

1:51Yes, 63 art environments. 63 art environments. Yeah, it's lovely. But before we get on to discussing that, Joe, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself? Yes. My name is Joe Farb Hernandez, and I have been studying this phenomenon of what we've come to call art environments for close to 55 years. And I started in the Midwest of the United States. I was in school in Wisconsin, and actually did my master's project on them back in the early 70s.

2:27Although I spent my career working in museums and then later teaching at the university and running the gallery, but this was always my kind of passion project, and I always would come back to it. And around 1999, for various more personal reasons, my husband and I bought a home in Spain, which is where his family is from. And we moved here, and just as we were kind of doing a little field trip, you know, in the area to see the environs of our new home, we passed Joseph Pujula, who was up in the trees about 30 meters high, building a tower.

3:14And I was like, stop the car, because, you know, I recognized right away that what we were seeing was an amazing art environment, and I had never seen any information about it at all. Although, like I said, I've been involved in this genre for decades already by that point. I ended up doing a book around 2005 that looked at a continuum of traditionality in Spain's material culture, going from very traditional to very idiosyncratic, and I used Pujula as my idiosyncratic guy.

3:56But I was able to find information on all of these other manifestations, but I couldn't find anything about art environments in Spain. And so I was like, oh, okay, I guess that's me. I guess I'm going to do that now. And so I started at that point, I was able to get a Fulbright a couple of years after that. And at the time, I thought, well, maybe I'll find 15 or 20 environments around the entire country. But that first book, which was published in 2013, included work on 45 art environments, and then 10 years later, I published a second publication that included 99 more art environments.

4:41And these are huge books, very encyclopedic, although I have to say that even when I was correcting galleys, I was hearing about new sites. So it's not completely comprehensive, but it's pretty damn close. But at any rate, I was lucky enough to get a nice feature article on my work in Spain in the New York Times. And Tra Publishing saw it and contacted me and asked me if I'd be interested in doing a book on the states on more architecturally focused sites, because the Spanish sites that I included were everything, gardens

5:20and grottos, and monumental sculpture gardens, as well as architecture. And so I was glad to go back, actually, to the states and do some work, since some of those sites I hadn't seen in over 50 years. Some of them, when I had originally been working in the states, didn't exist, because they just hadn't been started yet. So, yeah, so here we are with this new book on architectural fantasies in the states.

5:51It's not as comprehensive as it could be. We probably could have added twice as many sites, twice as many photos, twice as much text. But it is what it is, and we're happy to have it. There's a publishing balance, isn't there, between... There's that, yes, that money thing. Yeah, that money thing.

The Joy and Passion of Builders

6:12I like this phrase you use, this continuum of traditionality. I kind of want to ask you, to begin with, what in the early 1970s jumped out at you? Why did you notice these things? Was it a kind of reaction to, I guess, the awfulness of other things? Was it a reaction, a personal reaction to personal motivations? Yeah, what drove it? I think the reason that I keep coming back to these sites is that...

6:42When I pull up in front of them, they make me smile. You know, they just... They give me a lot of pleasure. And the passion that these builders bring to what they're doing is just mind-blowing to me. And the fact that, I mean, I came out of an art family, so to speak. And, you know, I don't have an art degree, but I have adjacent degrees. And as I say, worked in the art biz for decades. And always kind of resented the fact that people would think that the only place you could see art was in a white box, you know, either in a gallery or museum or...

7:22And I would see as I was an early curator, a young curator, that a lot of my colleagues needed to see the artist's resume before they could think about whether the work was any good. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, wait, let's actually look at the work first instead of looking at the paper first.

7:44And I just thought that that was kind of the wrong way to approach it. And I loved the fact that out in the middle of a field or a forest or on the middle of an urban block, you're going to round the corner and this thing is going to confront you. And because this isn't a quote-unquote movement per se, like we would think about Impressionism or any other kind of ism, there's really very little, if any, contact between one artist builder and the next.

8:16And so each of these is completely unique, completely idiosyncratic. And although we do see certain congruencies, like, you know, they use materials that are available to them and that kind of thing. But for the most part, they're just wildly different from each other. And so to me, it's really exciting that they're kind of pushing the boundaries of what we think art can be, what we think architecture can be. They're ignoring recognized movements. They're ignoring conventionality.

8:51And maybe the little subversive 1960s part of me really likes that, you know.

Follies, History, and Detritus

8:57Yeah, for sure. I want to come back to this phrase, the continuum of traditionality that you talked about. As I wrote to you in my prompts, it seems to me to be a phenomenon of the 20th century. Am I right in that? Or in your work, have you been able to trace a coherent thread, if a thread can be coherent? It does seem like a mixed metaphor, but a coherent thread that connects these back into a kind of a mode of construction that has a longer and deeper history.

9:27My work has been basically on contemporary sites, what we would describe as contemporary, the work that is here now for you to see or has just very recently been destroyed. But we find, if you go back a little bit, I mean, in Spain in the 17th and 18th centuries, there were parks, royal parks that included follies. There were follies in England and Ireland that the landed gentry would put up these kind of fake ruins or fake other kinds of structures on their lands to provide interest and curiosity.

10:03There were pleasure gardens and parks and grottoes that simulated nature. So some of these we still see, like one of the sites in the book, the Dionisio Rodriguez sites, is exactly about mimicking nature with concrete. You know, we're making these concrete, these concrete beams look like logs, so much so that there are lichens on them and mold and broken branches and those kinds of things.

10:35And so there is a history of this kind of work that goes back. But I would also say that certainly the kind of post-industrial detritus that we find swamping us everywhere now certainly adds to the availability of resources for these builders now. And so I would warrant that there's probably more of them now going on than there were back in the day when it was just the landed gentry or the noblesse that we're doing it, the nobility that we're doing it.

11:11But you don't get the sense to go, again, back to what you were saying before about the disconnection between these artists. And we'll talk about some of the houses, some of the buildings and some of the artists, I hope, as we go on. But you don't get a sense that there was an overarching kind of force here, that it was about not just the abundance of materials in a neoliberal society fixated upon wastage as a mode of capital accumulation, but also a kind of discontentedness with the pressure of conformity that comes in contemporary and modern societies.

11:45I don't think so, because all of these really are about creative expression, personal creative expression. And so sometimes they're about politics. If somebody has a beef about something, like Jeff Ellersich's site in the book, he is bitching about all of these things that he alleges happened to him and his family. But more often than not, excuse me, they're about a person's faith or about a person's family or about a person's life.

12:19And in fact, other commentators have described these things as a three-dimensional CV, that everything that is of interest to people, they throw it on these sites. And in some ways, they think that that's legit, because it's really what's important to them. And the other thing I would say is that it's important to remember that unlike other kinds of site-specific pieces or public artworks that are bought and paid for by a museum or a foundation or a donor of some kind that is sited in some lovely place or not so lovely place, these guys are building on their personal property.

13:09You know, this is their home that they're building on, or this is their home they're building, and it's their yard and their farm and their, and so because they're so involved in it and they're seeing it every day or they're living in it, actually, they're passing it a million times a day. And so they have a chance to review it all the time. And so it's constantly in flux at the same time that it's constantly complete, which is a really interesting dynamic, I think. And not something that we tend to see.

13:40I mean, usually, you know, as an art historian, when a painting is done, the painting is done, it goes on the wall, and we talk about the painting as it has been completed. But we can't do that in that same way with art environments, because, as I say, the builder might tell us that, yes, it's done today, but tomorrow we'll make just this one little change. And then the next day they're making another change again. And so it's really, I think, the only time it really stops is when the artist passes away, which is how these tend to stop, or very rarely the artist kind of gives up and leaves, which tends to be because of illness.

14:31I really like this idea, and I would quite like to understand it more in some of the works that you describe.

Incomplete Homes and Permitting Battles

14:39I was thinking about it in terms of architecture as a distinct practice, in which there is a set of drawings or designs produced of a thing that will be produced through a construction and bureaucratic process, technical process. And then it will be completed, and then it will be completed, and the ribbon will be cut, and that building is done.

15:04And that's fascinating in itself. It's much more like the kind of fine art approach. And then there's this strange thing, which is the home, which also is subject to architecture, but which is always an incomplete activity. The making of home is always partial, and it's always emergent. And talking about completing your house is a bit like saying you've completed your garden. It's like, well, how? You've stopped everything growing at a certain point?

15:37So I find that kind of interesting, and it seems to me that these buildings, in architectural fantasies, these buildings fit within that kind of ethos. That is quite a distinct and certainly a very 20th, perhaps even postmodern idea. Is it about the unknowability of things, a kind of rejection of the idea of completion and of finishedness? I don't think that they take it to that kind of conceptual level, really. Most of these builders don't identify either as artists or as architects.

16:08There are generally no plans. There are no blueprints. That tends to mean there are no permits. And that may not necessarily be because they're rebelling against the government, although there's some of that, of course. But I think part of it is that they just don't have a sense, as they're engaging in the process, that it will become as building-like as it ultimately becomes. Because many of these things start as a whimsy.

16:39You know, they start, they're building a birdbath or they're building a little, a low fence around their garden and back. And then it's like, wow, that looks nice. I'm going to do some more of that. Yeah, yeah. Success breeds success. And they also learn through trial and error what works and what doesn't. One of the guys in my Spanish project built this, you know, probably story and a half building, not realizing that he needed to put some kind of infrastructure in there or those stones would fall down.

17:14And they did. And he learned. And since then, he's built several more buildings on the same site. And they're all, you know, they're standing because he's learned how to do it, right? He has had no architecture training, no engineering training, anything like that. But, you know, they're kind of learning as they go and they're increasing as they go.

17:41I think that, you know, when sometimes we run into situations in which the government just can't stand it, what is going on with these things. And so sometimes the makers go back and they say, well, it's not a building, really. It's just sculpture. And so, you know, you don't need a permit for sculpture here, right? Sometimes they spend literally decades fighting to have the government back off. And sometimes they're lucky and the government understands what they're doing and says, okay, I'm giving you guys a pass.

18:16Or I'm giving you a pass because this is cool and it's bringing people to our town.

18:24And so I don't think that they're necessarily consciously confronting or challenging the conventionality of architecture. Although I think that in reverse, some architects are challenged by their work.

18:45And of course, I can't speak for the field as a whole, but I think that some, I found that some architects just, they dismiss it completely. It's, it's too much for them to absorb, you know, within the framework that they've been taught and, and they just kind of write it off as kitsch or as a dangerous accumulation of cast offs, something like that. But others I found actually go, wow, you can do that. You know, I never thought about doing it that way.

19:16And I mean, we even see, like, for example, Rodia, who built the famous Watts Towers in Los Angeles, had the, at the time that he built these, these things, the tallest tower at the West was the longest slender reinforced concrete tower in the world. And later architects went, oh, I guess you can do that. And so then they started doing that. But, you know, so I think it's sometimes not knowing what you can't do, lets you do something different and interesting and innovative.

19:52Yeah, I like this. I want to come back to this idea of the uninterrogated kind of character of it, because there are other environments within your book that are decidedly intentional. And the one, the section on sort of houses that are just doing art, for example, Horn House, Jim Horn's House, sorry, Jim's Horn House, not Jim Horn's House, Jim's Horn House by James C. Phillips, being, you know, an eminent example. It's not about dwelling. It's definitely a performative piece that is doing or saying something aesthetic in any case.

20:26But I wanted to come to this idea of, that you mentioned earlier, and you mentioned the word spiritual, which I thought was quite interesting. And a lot of the pieces, a lot of the buildings, a lot of the structures seem to me to be orientated towards a cosmological spiritual dimension that then sort of reveal themselves to be architecture along the way. Sort of a bit like Stonehenge, which was quite clearly, I think it's quite clearly anyway.

20:56Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it was just a barbecue pit. But I think it was meant to be some form of spiritual thing for early Britons. And yet now we kind of think of it as an architectural environment in a way. So I'm kind of interested in this cosmological thing. But I'm also interested in the very terrestrial quality. And again, to go back to what you said, the way that these buildings seem to be embedded and located within their territory through the materials that they have to hand.

21:27So I kind of like that tension. And then on the other hand, you have this idea of it being sort of populist. It's folk. But on the other hand, they're decidedly not fitting in. So I kind of like these tensions that exist within these works.

Beyond Folk Art and Vernacular

21:41Have you, in the book, talked to these ideas? I have a degree in folklore. So these are decidedly not folk art. Because when we talk about folk art, we talk about a community of some kind, whether it's based on geography or vocation or religion or what have you, that understands the parameters. So that if we're talking about a community of quilters, everybody can look at a quilt and go, oh, yeah, that's a good quilt.

22:11Look at those stitches are even. And the way they put it together is really well. The pot, you know, the potter, that's a really good pot. It's got thin walls. There's no cracks. It's not warped. But the barn that we, you know, that we see on the side of the road, the vernacular architecture, it's like, it's well-proportioned. We understand that it's put together well. There's none of that with this kind of material. This is completely idiosyncratic. It's completely personal. much more akin to contemporary art than to any kind of folk tradition, although some of these people may have learned some of their skills in a manner that would be through oral transmission as well as other ways.

22:54But I think that there is, in some ways, in some times, I think there is a tension between what they're doing in the here and now and what they expect this to bring them in the future. It's not completely rare for some of these artists, also builders, makers, to also build their tomb, their own tomb. Because I think after a certain point, they realized that more than being a plumber or a farmer or a factory worker or whatever it was that they did, this, in fact, will bring them a sense of immortality.

23:39And so I think that that, although maybe it's not voiced, certainly it's more voiced with those who actually build their own resting places. But I think that there is a sense of, I'm doing this now because it gives me pleasure, gives me satisfaction, and I'm doing this as a gift to the public, although they may not necessarily appreciate it as a gift.

24:09But there is that tension, I think, that you're right to call that out, between kind of the here and now and what we might call something more spiritual. Yeah. But I don't know that, I mean, in the States, much more than in Spain, kind of strangely, there are numbers of these sites that are much more religious. And they tend to be more evangelical or more Catholic, as opposed to something that's kind of more spiritual in a less organized fashion.

24:49As I say, Spain, one always thought of it as a very Catholic country, but I see much more kind of much more personal expression here that doesn't rely on the iconography of the church, the images of the church, any of the churches, to make, to tell their story. You call this, and obviously it's in the subtitle of the book, Artist Booked Environments, you call them art. So there is obviously an implication that these things are aesthetic objects, and intentionally so, or not intentionally so.

25:25In what way is it art, and in what way are they architecture at the same time? I guess what I'm asking you to do is a very complicated question, which is to define art and architecture. Well, in some ways, I feel that it's my fault for using that term, because most of these people don't originally identify themselves as artists, or certainly not as architects. They have other priorities, and it's not about trying to link themselves into what we would consider the mainstream of art or architecture.

26:03As I mentioned, it's, as I mentioned, it's really a personal creative expression.

26:08But that doesn't mean that they're oblivious to the aesthetic values of their work. As I mentioned, you know, the fact that they're physically living with these sites, or living in these sites, meaning that they're constantly confronted by them. And so they're constantly open to the possibility for different changes and making decisions about what next steps will be.

26:30So I'm not going to parse the difference between art and architecture. But just to say that these people are opening up new paths for us to approach both of those fields. And that's one of the things I find so exciting about it. I like this idea of them opening up architecture, and this being challenging to architects. And also, it's seductive. I mean, it's Instagrammable. They're very photogenic, definitely.

27:00Yeah. That's the old word for it. It's a better word for it as well. I wrote in my notes, too, that there's something situated in a kind of situationist kind of way of thinking about all of this. That they're sort of challenging the idea of the spectacle, the urban spectacle. And obviously, as you have eloquently and extensively explained, this isn't an intentional approach to things in many of the projects. And you can certainly see that, for example, in the rather exquisite, what I think is rather exquisite, Prophet Isaiah Robertson's Second Coming House.

27:32This is not anything other than an incredibly personal kind of approach to things. And likewise, there's another one, Reverend Herman Don H.D. Dennis and Margaret Rogers Dennis, Margaret's Grocery and Market, which is in Mississippi, which again, as you see, it's like someone's got a pot of paint and got out of control in a very nice way. They happen to have a good eye for colour. But there are other ones which do seem more decidedly to kind of approach contemporary culture and look it in the eye.

28:09And to be saying, you've got your Guggenheim museums and you've got your Capitol buildings and you've got the latest dreadful building, the Obama Center by Todd and Billy Tseng. Oh, my God, yeah. Horrifying. And I think they're great architects. And his article, her article on slow architecture is one of my favourite articles on architecture. And then that. Yeah, but hey, we're going to have a 250 foot tall arch in Washington, D.C. So probably be painted gold, too. The mind boggles.

28:40The mind boggles. But there are other ones, like William Billy Blevins' trips, the minefield cemetery. And I'm sort of working my way through because there's so much in the book. There's so many extraordinarily wonderful things in the book, which it's sort of more than one mind can take. I have to say my children have enjoyed reading the book. Oh, good. Enormously. Kids love these places. Kids love these places. Yeah, or Gary Brewer's Deck House.

29:11These seem much more directly to kind of contest some of these ideas. These do seem to be decidedly to take an attitude to the urban, which is, I guess, critical.

Public Reception and Community Identity

29:26So I think one of the things that we haven't really touched on is that although I keep insisting that these are about personal creative expression, at some point, they realize that there was a public face to their work. Not always, because some of them, as you'll see, there's a chapter in there on interior environments, so that if you've passed it on the street, you wouldn't know that there was something totally insane going on on the inside. But the response of the public starts to become important, and sometimes it's important because the public is completely offended.

30:00The neighbor across the street does not want this thing going up across from their home, and they're going to do everything they can to make sure that that doesn't happen. But sometimes it's because people will come in, especially people from the outside coming in, who don't have to live across the street from it, and give the maker such kudos that then that becomes another part of the driving force to what they're doing. And we've seen situations in which, you know, all of a sudden the artist, the builder is putting out benches so you can sit there and look at from what they believe is the perfect vantage point to enjoy the work.

30:47Or they're somehow trying to accommodate a visitor, even a visitor that they may never meet, that they may not speak the same language. But they realize that this is actually part of what they're doing. And as I say, it becomes another part of the impetus, the motivation for how their work continues. Do you get a sense from the artists themselves that at the point that that recognition is recognized by themselves,

31:21that their practice changes, that their output changes? Sometimes. Yeah. Sometimes. You know, as I say, sometimes the response is so negative that it's just they're putting their heads down and they're like, damn it, I'm doing this. You know, I don't care what they say. I'm just I'm going to do what I've got to do. And usually, you know, if somebody were to come up and say, hey, have you thought about putting this over there or adding this thing over here or, you know, they're they would be like, yeah, no, thanks.

31:58They're they're they're there. They still have their vision, even if the vision is constantly changing and, you know, they will be polite. They will accept donations of materials, certainly, but they really have their own personal narrative that they're trying to tell. I like the fact in the book that there are numerous cases where distinct cultural identities are articulated through the making of the art building, the art space.

32:39And you see that there's an... I'm going to try and remember its name. It's a space in Philadelphia. The Magic Gardens. Yeah, Philadelphia's Magic Gardens by Isaiah Zega. And then there's the one immediately after it in the book, Olyami Dables Mbad African Bead Museum in Detroit, where it's quite clear to me that there is an expression of, I guess, discontent or, again, critique of the homogenous nature of public space. And these artists and their communities that work with them, quite clearly it must be communities because some of them are really, really big and you couldn't stick all of that mosaic down on your own, are quite clearly trying to create authentic spaces for their self-expression.

33:25Sort of free spaces, I suppose, or in a Foucaultian sense, heterotopias, where by entering into this space, you move from one form of public into another form of public and therefore have to take on a kind of, adopt that identity. I don't know if that's overcomplicating things, but I do like this idea, certainly, of the way that this affords distinct cultural identity. I don't, I think that that tends to work more in the religious sites, the sites that they are pro-offering as sanctuaries or grottos, that kind of thing.

34:06So Zega started as a means to help himself heal from various situations that he'd gone through in his life. But what happened with that one, which was interesting, was kind of the opposite of what you're suggesting. Not that he was necessarily trying to originally create a cultural space for the people in this neighborhood. But in fact, the people in this neighborhood, once the space became threatened, realized that this was so important to them that they needed to take this on as something that helped them identify with their community and with their neighborhood.

34:48And so it has become, I mean, it's now run by a nonprofit. He passed away at the end of last year or earlier this year, forget which.

35:01But it has become very emblematic of this whole part of the city, which is, Philadelphia is a big city in the eastern part of the states. And but yet this this now is very emblematic of this of this part of the community. Dobbles, I think, he also was he was resisting. He had he had some issues getting a higher education and then he worked with a museum for a while and realized that no matter what was going on,

35:36he was being asked to accept the kind of Western civilizational ideas of how works are are discussed and interpreted and and shown, displayed in in art museums. And so he decided that he needed to do it in another kind of way, just like Dr. Smith does down in Indiana or in Louisiana. And so I think that in both of those instances, the community then comes to them as they see.

36:14Manifest the kinds of concerns that they might themselves have. So I think it kind of is happening slightly the opposite of what you're projecting, that it didn't start out like I'm going to make a cultural center, guys. Let's, you know, help me out here. But rather that people responded to what they saw and thought and realized that it it also spoke to their concerns and their interests as well. That's really interesting idea. And obviously standing back from it, a kind of an obviously true one, particularly for.

36:47Well, I was going to call it folk art, but I think you would correct me on that. Do it.

36:53Just art? Yep. Just art. OK.

Maintenance, Ruins, and Weather

36:57You've mentioned already architects. What is their reception of these, generally speaking, by critics pre kind of the Instagram age, pre the relentless consumption of the world as image? How have they been encouraged? How have they been challenged? And outside the ones that have become established and have become cultural icons in their own right, ironically becoming the cultural spectacle that many of them probably were. Fighting against. Well, yeah, certainly riffing on, certainly riffing on.

37:28Right. My guess is that these buildings come and go, like they're sort of the ebb and flow, as you say, with the lives of the artists that make them. I guess broadly speaking, we've talked about how they come to pass. How do they get sustained? And how are they sustained within the logic of the profession of architecture or the profession of urban development? I think it's telling that the way that I learned about most of these sites is by word of mouth. I mentioned that when I started working on the Spanish project, there was there was no book I could go to.

38:03And the only thing that I was able to find were very rarely, very anecdotal, very superficial newspaper articles or, you know, maybe a little magazine piece. And they tended to be rather derogatory. They tended to consider these makers as slightly on the less, you know, as my English neighbor would say, one sandwich short of a picnic kind of guys.

38:34And so I think that's one of the reasons that they also shied away from getting involved with the media and with the larger cultural community, the mainstream cultural community, because they were dissed, you know. And so there was really very little support for that kind of work. So when an artist, a maker, a builder, an architect of these kinds of spaces is no longer with us, nine times out of 10, it falls to the family to deal with.

39:18And nine times out of 10, family members don't have the same kind of skills. They don't have the knowledge. They don't have the desire. They don't have the time to deal with maintaining it. And so unless somebody is going to step up or a foundation is going to step up or a college or a university is going to step up, we tend to see that these start to fall into ruin. And it is, I don't want to use the word enhanced, but it's amplified because a lot of the times when they're working, they're not going to the luxury lumber store to get their first quality piece of lumber to use on this, right?

40:04They're using secondhand materials, maybe thirdhand materials that have already been used. They've already suffered some water damage. There is often in the life of these sites, vandalism, there's theft, in addition to regular problems, you know, as a result of the weather, et cetera. And so we really do see that this is, in some ways, a losing battle to maintain these, even though it breaks my heart with every single one that goes down, because as I say, they make me smile.

40:44And I want for future generations to be able to have that joy that I've gotten from them. But there are very few ways around the world that people have found to be able to maintain these.

41:00You know, France has a good program in which they are able to designate them on certain national registries. The states does as well, but although they can get them on some kind of form, they don't throw money in that direction, right? And so, yeah, and so I think that that's one of the reasons that our documentation is so crucial, because, I mean, in my Spanish book, the first Spanish book that I published, already by 10 years after it was published, it was published in 2013.

41:37And already by 10 years after that, a full quarter of the sites were gone. And, yeah, I haven't counted up yet from my more recent book in Spain, and we'll see what happens here with the works that are in this book. Some of them, we weren't able to, I was, you know, I worked with this fabulous photographer, Fred Scruton, to document the sites as they are now, or as they were in the most recent years at the height of their beauty.

42:12But in some instances, we had to go back and get not as good archival photographs, because the sites aren't there anymore for us to go take a good photograph of. I was thinking about what you were saying, that sort of the motivating drive of these artists is the cause of them, and is the cause of their growth and maintenance. And if that's not shared by the folk that come afterwards, who might be motivated by other things, quite often by land value, then this will fall down. I remember a few years ago, very distinctly, going past some medieval castles in Scotland,

42:47and realising, with quite a jolt, that the reason that they were ruins was because the owners had sold the roofs. It wasn't that they had fallen down because of Vikings or anything. It was simply that the owners' motivation shifted, and their motivation very frequently moved towards money in the emergence of capitalism in the 16th century. And so they sold the roofs. They sold the lead off the roof. And then once you've done that, everything falls down. I mean, it doesn't even have to be that blatant, because if they don't have the money to fix the roof, ultimately, the ceramic, this is a ceramic tile roof.

43:27So ultimately, the ceramic tiles, you know, the weeds will come in, and the roots will come in, and they will pull up the tiles. And then the water will come in, and they will hit the wooden beams, and they will, you know, start to disintegrate. And the beams will cave in, and pretty soon, that's it, right? Yeah, so nature will do its thing, and water will always win in the end. But the point I'm trying to make is that there seems to me, at the heart of all of these things, an intention to be temporary, an intention to act in the moment,

43:59to represent in the moment the values or the appetites or the desires of the artist, and their imagination and their aesthetic sensibilities and their skills and technological know-how and access to materials and all of these things and money. And when that goes, the building goes. And that what we see in these artists' fantasies is simply an accelerated process that we see in all buildings, that all buildings are only as good as the intention to maintain them persists,

44:34which I quite like as an idea, that you've got to kind of gird your loins, you've got to lean into it, and you've got to try and dig down into the motivation of the artist in these cases to try and understand why they maintain them, if you are to maintain them yourself. The thing that is interesting, though, is that many of these artists, builders, think the work will be there forever. Oh, do they? Yeah, because, you know, this is what I do, right? I've been spending so many decades doing it. And so it's like, okay, well, we need to have a conversation.

45:05What do you want to have happen to this? In fact, that's really the question. And more than once, they've said to me, well, no, I'll be here forever. You know, I'll be here with this, taking care of it forever. I'm like, wait, I don't think you understand what I'm actually trying to ask you, but they can't go there because they put so much energy into it, decades of their lives, that they can't imagine that it wouldn't be there forever, you know?

45:36Yeah, I've got this horrible feeling that that's what's going to happen to the small terraced house that I live in, that my wife and I and our children have put a lot of effort into. And I wouldn't say to make it spectacularly smart, either. It's a bit of a creative space, shall we say, generously. And at a certain point, if I ever want to upsize, which I do, I'll say, no, but we've put our heart and soul into this.

Defining Vernacular and Individuation

46:01Right. Is this a form of vernacular architecture? If vernacular architecture is understood in the kind of Amos Rapoport or Henry Glassie, or, you know, the kind of classical sense of a manifestation of a community's identity manifest in space, their mutual values and cultural and social forms, political forms. Are these buildings like that? Because from what you said at the beginning, that individualism seems to characterize them. But maybe that's the vernacular we're dealing with, that these are the vernacular of an individuated, post-war, slightly wigged out,

46:38slightly weirded out generation of people. And I guess following that question, connected to that question, is, is anybody doing it now? So let me start with the last question first, which is that, yes, there are people working still, and even a few... But is anybody starting them now? It's hard to know. Because how are you going to know that they're monumental until you're 10 or 15 years or 20 years down the road, right? Because it's just starting out as some little thing, right?

47:09But in answer to your first question, I don't consider these vernacular at all. I mean, to me, vernacular is something that tells us information about the community, right? It tells us about the larger cultural and historical narratives of the community in which these works are cited. And we have a sixth sense of how they're supposed to look, right, of what the roof is supposed to look like, what the proportions are supposed to look like, what the stair treads, how high the stair treads are supposed to be,

47:42how, you know, the height, all the different materials that are being used. And that's why we're able to recognize, you know, half-timbered buildings in Western Europe. We're able to recognize adobe buildings in the American Southwest where, I mean, because it becomes a conventional style that people recognize, much like folk art, and are able to identify as theirs, or if not theirs, then from where it comes, right?

48:18So that's why I say that, in many ways, I think that these are much more akin to contemporary art, because, I mean, you might want to say that there's a thread of subversion that runs through the world. And every once in a while, someone will pick that up, and they'll build something crazy. But I don't know. I think it's kind of pushing it. I think that it's just, you know, different people have different ways of wanting to express themselves

48:50if they have the wherewithal to express themselves. And there's no real connection with what's going on around them. You can't infer from what you see from any of these buildings what the vernacular in that community is going to look like. There's no connection.

Lessons for Young Architects

49:13As a last question, what can architecture learn from these buildings? What could a young architect, hungry to make their name in the world, what could they learn from this? If you were to point out some examples from your book that you think perhaps might be most illustrative of, that as well would be great. One of the things that I always fought against when I spent 20 years in the university, right, teaching art students, running the gallery,

49:44and it would make me crazy that they would say, they're doing a series of blue paintings. Okay, and tell me about this blue, right? Oh, well, I've heard that blue sells best. It's like, well, no, wrong. This isn't why we make art, right? This is not what it's about. You need to reach into yourself to find your own voice, your own visual vocabulary with this. And so I think that one important thing that these sites teach us

50:15is that art and architecture shouldn't be constrained by the academic language that we've developed of different kinds of genres of these really rigid borders between different kinds of parts of art history or architectural history or whatever, the different kinds of categories. Human beings are creative, period, right? And it's probably what makes us different from every other species, that we're able to invent things the way we do.

50:48And because we're different, we each have a different sense of what works for us, of what we appreciate, what we don't appreciate. And that's okay. And I think it's also good that budding architects maybe keep that in mind and realize that they don't have to necessarily conform to what they've seen happen before, but to think about other ways of treating materials and space and take their own steps.

51:18Because that's how they're going to break through the pack for sure if they're making something that is theirs, their personal work. And it reflects really the reality of human creativity much more than if you just try to keep yourself in your little box. Indeed it does. Jo, that's a great point to finish. Thank you so very much for speaking with me. Thank you, Ambrose. Pleasure.

51:47Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. Wallpaper expert William Morris said that and it's a nice thought, and true perhaps, to the folk in Jo's great book. Thank you to Jo for the lovely and generous conversation and to Elizabeth Campbell at Tra Publishing for setting this in motion. See the podcast description for links to the book, to Jo at her website and to pecuniary means of supporting the podcast. And thanks for listening.

52:22Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.