This site contains information on outsider architecture and was created by audiovisual artist Jennifer Stock
in response to a 2010 grant trip funded by the Jerome
Foundation.
Unsanctioned, untrained, and unaffiliated, a working-class postman named Ferdinand Cheval built the structure pictured at right in his backyard in Hauterives, France from 1879-1912, his self-titled "Ideal Palace." Cheval used only a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and a monumental collection comprised of found objects: fossils, sea-shells, and eroded stones discovered on his 32 km postal route, which he traversed on foot daily. These long rural walks required by his job became an opportunity for intense meditation on the landscape, and it was on one of these very walks that Cheval formulated his initial conception of the Ideal Palace. After tripping on a large stone, he became fascinated with the way it had been warped and sculpted by weather patterns. This seemingly insignificant incident sparked an obsessive collecting habit, one that would drive the next 33 years of Cheval's life. Carrying these stones in his pockets, eventually in a basket, and then finally in a wheelbarrow, Cheval amassed the raw materials he used to build his visionary structure.
East facade of Le Palais
While this might seem like a one-of-a-kind story, there are a surprising number of structures worldwide that share strikingly similar attributes to Cheval's Ideal Palace, all loosely grouped under the heading of "outsider" (or sometimes "visionary") architecture. Intrigued by a simple object, like a bottle, stone, or a piece of broken ceramic, the outsider architect often begins a collection without any idea of building or creating. The collection overflows and eventually becomes so massive that the collector is forced to find an outlet. At this point so-called outsider architecture is born: an ordinary home is covered in intricate mosaics made from pieces of broken plate, or built entirely out of soda bottles (see images at right). As such, outsider architecture can be viewed as a series of singular building projects, vernacular environments created by self-taught artists and architects who convey highly idiosyncratic visions of a personal paradise. Whereas most homeowners in western society rely on professional architects to shape their environment, often viewing the house as a commodity, the builders represented here use hand-built projects to fulfill their unmediated desires for visionary domestic space. The buildings are not utopian in any social or collective sense but serve as personal utopias, often with a playful or child-like bent.
Above:
La Maison Picassiette, a home entirely covered in mosaics made of broken plates, crockery, glass, etc.
Chartres, France
Left:
"Grandma Prisbrey's" Bottle House, lit from within at night
Simi Valley, California
Characteristics of Outsider Architecture:
Having surveyed hundreds of sites worldwide, I found some striking commonalities:
1) Works-in-progress
With many of these buildings it is often ambiguous as to whether or not they are finished (some appear that they could never be finished). A building process based on collected materials encourages the idea of a perennial work-in-progress. As the architect's collection grows (more stones, more bottles, etc.) the building or structure grows.
2) Spontaneous
Because of the additive nature of the projects, they are sometimes called "spontaneous architecture." The sense is that they spring up out of the landscape in highly differentiated and fantastical forms. Because they are built as the builder accrues the materials, formal elements often emerge out of the materials themselves. In most instances the outsider architect does not work from a blueprint or plan.
3) Embellishment
There is a high degree of embellishment in these buildings; the iterative process of collecting and displaying lends itself to baroque configurations. In short, there is no such thing as "too much" for an outsider architect. The buildings celebrate profusion, eclecticism, and a multifaceted approach to the formation of personal space.
The Watts Towers, Los Angeles
Le Palais, Detail of the East Facade
On my recent grant trip to France, I focused on two outsider architecture sites: Le Palais Idéal by Ferdinand Cheval, mentioned previously, and Picassiette's House in Chartres, France.
Le Palais Idéal
Le Palais Idéal is architecture without function; though it is modeled after a palace the structure is uninhabitable and acts more as a monument. Le Palais brings together a highly personalized landscape comprised of fluid forms and primitive sculptures. Cheval references many styles of architecture, predominantly the medieval castle, the Hindu temple, and the Arab mosque. On the interior are what can best be described as cavities, small grottos and caves that are accessed by winding tunnels and serpentine stairways. The facades have narratives, with the north façade representing life, the west façade death, and the east façade life eternal. Cheval's choice of materials like fossil and eroded stone seem to reference the origins of the world, and indeed the inchoate and roiling surface of Le Palais emphasizes the act of creation. Out of this waving, multifarious surface the sculptures emerge, a combination of animals, people, and mythical creatures, all bordering on grotesquerie (see pictures at right). The statues have simplified faces and bodies; this lack of detail forms a contrast to the highly embellished surface of the building. The surface patterns on the building seem almost cellular, once again a reference to an abstract creation process where basic elements seethe and struggle to coalesce.
Ultimately Cheval turned the act of architecture into a cosmological endeavor; his varied iconography is an attempt to encapsulate a universe. He ignores the grid sensibility of conventional architecture (and along with it grace, symmetry, "polish"), and allows organicism, asymmetry, and the muddy, messy patterns of nature to triumph. Not only do his sculptures reference creation myths, but his building style is a metaphor for creation itself.
I'll leave my description with a quote from Cheval, who, as might be guessed, was known to have a very energetic spirit. Cheval claimed that as he walked on his postal route he "thought of Napoleon I, who said that the word impossible ought not to exist. Hands full of the future..."
La Maison Picassiette
In keeping with Cheval's profile as the humble postman turned outsider architect, Raymond Isidore, the creator of the well-known "Picassiette's House" in Chartres, France, was a groundskeeper responsible for the upkeep of the cemetery for the city of Chartres. Between the years of 1928 and 1964, Isidore, known as "Picassiette," or "Collector of Little Pieces" worked on building colorful mosaics that completely covered both the interior and exterior of his home and grounds, including the surfaces of objects, furniture, garden structures and walls. Isidore had a firm determination that his family's home would act as an expression of himself and not conform to the ideals of an architect, thinking of the architect as someone who imposed a foreign will on him, arbitrarily tying his family to certain ideas of structure and form. He constructed the home and mosaics without any preliminary design, changing it as it took place before his eyes, guided solely by intuition.
To form his domestic space, Isidore collected little pieces of broken plates, marble, porcelain, and ceramic, and created painstaking mosaics with them over the course of many years. Isidore's insistence on covering nearly every aspect of his home environment with mosaic, including items such as his bed, bedside table, and chest, conveys an obsessive control over his environment. A home interior is ordinarily a curated affair, with its aesthetic derived from elements culled from a variety of sources, but Isidore's interior enforces his own sense of color and patterning over every available surface.
Interior Courtyard of La Maison Picassiette
Detail of one of Isidore's mosaics
Part of Isidore's motivation stemmed from spiritual sources. He believed in being mystically guided, and he admired places of worship. One wall of Isidore's garden has a recreated mosaic of the cathedral in Chartres, for example, along with other cathedrals, mosques, temples, and other religious architecture. Working quite literally in the shadow of Chartres, it is easy to imagine that Isidore's mosaics were inspired by stained glass he saw in the cathedral, deploying similar methods of abstraction, patterning, and coloration.
Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi is famous for having said that "God's architecture has no straight lines." While very much an insider architect, Gaudi's buildings, with their playful mosaics and swirling, multi-faceted surfaces, share a deep kinship to the overall sensibility of outsider architecture. Gaudi was greatly inspired by natural forms, examining grasses, roots, shells, and flowers for design ideas. The usual straight lines and walls of conventional architecture cannot accommodate nature's variety, and so Gaudi innovated the use of many flowing forms to break out of architecture's normative grid. While Gaudi's ideas were frequently considered eccentric in the architectural world, these same ideas might be considered more of a "norm" in works of outsider architecture. One look at the whirling and surging surface of Le Palais Idéal, or the colorful circulation of natural forms in the mosaics of Picassiette's House, and one captures the essence of outsider architecure: a freedom from constraint which allows for imaginative and eclectic energies absent from customary building styles.
Interior of Antonio Gaudi's Sagrada Familia
Note: All photos by Jennifer Stock, except
images of La Maison Picassiette by ILLUSTRIA
When I was eleven, my family stumbled upon the house pictured here in Wheeling, West Virginia. An example of outsider architecture that profiles the obsessive collecting tendencies of Le Palais and Picassiette's House, the house offered a colorful jumble of the owner's holiday-themed collection at both front and back. My mother wrote a poem inspired by this house, an evocation of the impulses that underlie outsider architecture.
Special thanks to: Eleanor Savage and the Jerome Foundation, Paul and Barbi Schulick, Geremy Schulick, Denton Chase, Orianne Dutka, Lisa Schneider, and Sarah Nelson Wright.
