ABSTRACT
This chapter examines folk art environments from the point of view of heritage. Folk environments are built spaces created by non-professional artists or architects, often peculiar characters living in the margins of society. The chapter argues that the logic of folk art environments has much to tell archaeologists and heritage practitioners about value, emotion and temporality, which are all fundamental principles in the production of heritage. These spaces are all guided by similar utopian ideas and free creativity. The chapter explores folk art environments through five themes that are common to all of them and that directly impinge on the question of temporality regarding recycling and montage, biography, maintenance and care, organic growth, and entropy. Modernist architecture, too, is a tool for colonizing the future, against which Pallasmaa offers a fragile architecture open to the sensuousness of matter, ageing, weathering and decay.
