melbet An ‘Architectural Dream World’ Filled With Hundreds of Dollhouses

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 porchesmelbet, 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?

ImageA corner of what Maher calls the City Wall room is covered with model houses of various scales.Credit...Jordan Taylor Fuller

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 cross between a gallery and a fantastical all-encompassing artwork.

ImageA diorama of miniatures is built into the fireplace mantel.Credit...Jordan Taylor Fuller

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But then, after Winfrey, a campaign surrogate, changed the subject to Harris’s own gun ownership, the vice president reached for a different kind of message entirely.

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