When the visual artist Dennis Maher, 48, acquired his 1890s duplex in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2009, it was slated for demolition. The relatively unassuming wooden building in the city’s historic Fargo Estate neighborhood, with a gable roof and two stacked front porches, had sat unoccupied for a year and was scheduled to be replaced by a parking lot. Maher stepped in, and for $10,000, the house was his.
It was a dramatic beginning for what would become a spectacle of a different kind. Maher, who is also an architect and a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, had been searching for a home that could double as a testing ground for his projects. Before acquiring the 2,500-square-foot space, he was known for creating temporary installations with discarded building materials — objects he relished for their stories and precisely because they’d been cast aside by others. But, he wondered, what if he made longer lasting works that he could live among and sustain?
The result is a continuously evolving assemblage project known as the Fargo House. Inside the building, Maher has arranged his collections of salvaged construction debris and secondhand objects — including architectural miniatures, dollhouses, busts and antique toys, mostly sourced from flea markets and estate sales — into what he calls an “architectural dream world,” where oddities and curiosities surprise visitors around every corner. In some areas, Maher has cut through walls, floors and ceilings, creating new vantage points; the process of adding and subtracting is constant. “I’m interested in stirring our architectural imagination,” he says.
The house was, by comparison, a clean slate when Maher found it. The building had fallen into disrepair, and many of its decorative wood elements, including intricate wainscoting, had been lost to looting. There was no water supply and the gas lines had been cut. Buffalo at the time “was a very different place,” Maher recalls. “One could throw a stone and hit an empty building.” (He runs Assembly House 150, a nonprofit art, design and construction incubator in a former church a couple miles southeast of the Fargo House.) But inheriting a blank canvas offered him artistic freedom, he says: “What I’ve tried to do from day one is think about all those less redeeming pieces and highlight those through different projects.” Though the space is now his home, it’s also something harder to define, a place across between a gallery and a fantastical all-encompassing artwork.
The first room you enter, just off the main hallway — which is still covered in the home’s original wallpaper, printed with small drawings of colonial houses — is anchored by a table that was once the altar of a church. When a new object enters the house, it sits here, atop the altar, in what Maher calls “purgatory,” until he finds it a home. Dollhouses that Maher has collected for the past 20 years are mounted to the walls: vintage kit models, Victorian originals and others built in vocational trade classes. Some extend into the bare floor joists above, poking through what was previously a ceiling. “Certain rooms,” the artist says, “can look like little neighborhoods that you’re moving through.”
In the adjoining room, lined with shelves and more dollhouses, Maher stores his collection of books that themselves contain collections of found objects. He’s long been drawn to homemade logs filled with whatever miscellany their previous owner was obsessed with — matchbook covers, cigarette wrappers, pieces of crochet and lace, or photographs of covered bridges from across the United States. These volumes tend to be the last dregs of estate sales, passed over many times, but to Maher they’re deeply personal. “This was somebody’s life,” he says.
The Fargo House periodically opens its doors to admirers. Maher has hosted sketching workshops with architecture students from the University at Buffalo as well as multicourse dinners. Occasionally, he’ll hold exhibitions for visiting artists in his first-floor gallery. He’s currently planning an event with a violinist from the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. In fact, it can be hard to remember that the place is also Maher’s home. His bedroom, which he calls the Wardrobe Room, is dominated by found closet parts and screens and resembles a walk-in diorama. A bed is tucked into a corner, almost like an afterthought. “The house is intended to shock one into a sense of wakefulness,” he says. “So comfort has a very different role here.”
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