Americans have been wonderfully impelled for varied reasons to render small buildings and structures. From the mid-19th until the mid-20th century, mostly anonymous persons have with purpose and skill created the buildings of their real or imagined communities.
Range and types are richly varied: houses and churches, stores and factories, carousels and Ferris wheels, bridges and follies, castles and capitols and grand civic places, Grant’s Tomb and Independence Hall, an ice rink and a bowling alley and columned temples, gas stations and stables and barns, and seventeen documented early actual buildings of Queens New York. Not dollhouses, birdhouses, or architect models, the buildings shape another type of impulse and outcome. While some are based on real buildings, with others likely to also spring from an actual but unidentified structure, most seem to have been made for the sheer pleasure of creating even small a place of one’s own.
The structures show much about American buildings -- extant, lost, imagined, or interpreted -- as well as about craft, problem solving, values, and imagination. Moreover, they conjoin three significant components of national life:
history, architecture, and folk art.
The juncture is as unique in American material culture as revelatory.
The buildings are all within a private collection, gained happily and obsessively since 1985. All are by every sign American in provenance if not in architecture.
Learning & Wondering offers a first description and explication of this distinct form of American material culture, as rich in range and expression as curiously unaddressed and unstudied by the academic curatorial community. Learning, information, and surmises have come from 30 years of gathering,
thinking, and looking.
A Delighting Town builds 200 of the structures into a place with all the right buildings in an architecturally engaging townscape. Who hasn’t wished to rearrange or make their own swell town?
Types of American buildings are familiar and surprising in equal measure:
Capitol & Civic, Churches, Commercial, Nonesuch, Rides & Circus, and Houses.
Known & Real reveals any information conveyed or gathered about a small number of the structures.
Descriptions and takes on the buildings -- from varied articles to the film
Rendered Small and the performance work Family Secrets -- are conveyed on
the Films & Articles & Song Cycle page.