Ponte Tower

The tower was designed to house high end luxury condominiums but has since fallen into a state of complete neglect and is now a vertical ghetto. The original intent for the architecture was to allow light into both the exterior and the interior sides of the condos, but so little light actually reaches the bottom that it feels like a dystopian nightmarish bottomless pit. At the ground level trash has accumulated over the years and has become a garbage pit almost three stories tall.

Ponte Tower from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Karl Junker House

Detail upon detail upon detail... It would probably be overwhelming to actually live in a house such as this... One of those incredible life-works of an eccentric mind.

Translating Emoji into a Giant Light Show

Another great one from the Creator's Project.

Ancient Chinese texts and social media meet in a new giant light show at the Beijing National Aquatics Center. "Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light at the Water Cube," an installation created by artist Jennifer Wen Ma and lighting designer Zheng Jianwei, uses a computer program to translate I Ching and the collective mood of the Chinese people into a stunning real-time light display on the building's exterior.

The Junk King

Only in Austin... I have no idea where in Austin this place is, but I'd love to see it in person. It reminds me a little bit of being a kid on my grandfather's farm. He was a junk hoarder on a massive scale. After my grandfather died they towed 39 cars and trucks off of his property in various states of decomposition.

Vince Hannemann, A.K.A. the Junk King, has spent much of his life constructing the Cathedral of Junk in Austin, TX.

In 2010, the city of Austin requested a building permit and Vince was forced to tear down nearly half of his creation.
Despite this traumatic event and with the help of many supporters, Vince was still able to keep the Cathedral alive and continue its legacy.

Multimedia Designer and Architect- Muti Randolph

It's often difficult to tell what you're looking at when you see this person's work. He works with lighting, architecture and projected imagery to create very strange spaces.

Ancient Iranian Cliff Architecture Still Utilized as Homes

I don't know much about these images, but the architecture pictured here is apparently 700 year old dwellings in Iran that have been carved into the side of a mountain. I love the fact that they are still utilized as homes to this day... With doors, windows and electrical cables fitted into the openings in the rock. If anyone knows more than I do about this architecture, please comment. I would be happy to update the post with more information.

Architecture

I think architecture might be the single biggest influence on my artwork ever... Maybe except for line... But the discussion of line is for another day...

I love to look at architecture. But more specifically, I love to look at architecture that has an organic quality. I have always loved architecture in which the construction and development has more to do with the way a plant grows than architecture that is consistent with a pre-exsisting blueprint... Architecture that adds new areas as the lack of space deems them necessary... This type of architecture grows from a single point rather than any overarching plan. There are lots examples, but I want to start with my first memory of being fascinated with this... It was one of those psychedelic black light posters from the 1970's and it was called "Tree House"... I was about six years old and I could never stop looking at this poster every time I was in a Spencer's Gifts shop at the local mall... The house depicted was a labyrinthine Gothic mansion built as a tree house in this old and gnarled tree... There was no rhyme or reason to the structure. It looked as if it had been added onto over and over until it seemed to take on a life of its own. It was forced to work with the existing tree rather than against it.

The next example was something I discovered when I was about eighteen. I was a beginning art student at a community college and found an issue of Art in America that someone had left in the room. There was an article in it about a house built by a folk architect named Clarence Schmidt from the mountains around Woodstock, New York between the late 1940's and the late 1960's... He started with a one room cabin built into a mountainside, and then he just kept adding on and never stopped. The house grew into this seven-story monstrosity before it finally burned down in the late 1960's... I was amazed that something like this actually existed, built by one person from salvaged wood and doors and windows over the course of twenty years. It reminded me of that old black light poster and I still wonder to this day if the artist who designed the poster had seen or was influenced by that house? I am hugely influenced by both.

I suppose there is no talking about this subject without some mention of the Winchester House. I do find the story of the Winchester House amazing and the continual building process is very much in keeping with what I have been talking about, but the organic, almost plant-like growth doesn't seem all that apparent in the structure itself. There is just something that is a little too clean about it... I have never been there, so I might change my mind if I am actually go to the house.

My last semester of undergrad art school at UT Austin, I was fortunate enough to visit Italy for a summer session (which I am still paying for in school loans, btw). It was amazing, I was bombarded by historically famous architecture on a daily basis: The Pantheon, Brunelleschi's dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, the Colosseum, etc... But, ironically, the thing that I found the most amazing was the medieval Italian hilltowns. They came about more as a security measure than anything else. After the fall of the Roman Empire when the country was in a state of chaos, people were building these walled cities on the tops of hills as a form of defense in the lawlessness of the time. The architecture of these cities have a very similar organic ad-hoc feeling that Clarence Shmidt's house did. Most of them have evolved over hundreds and hundreds of years; adding on as space is needed... And because of the hilly terrain, the existing geography must be taken into consideration. There can be no neat and clean grid-based layout of streets.

By the way, the photograph above was scanned from a book called Architecture Without Architects, which is an amazing book about this very topic...

I guess the subject of labyrinthine architecture is simply not complete without some nod to the all time master,Giovanni Battista Piranesi... In the 1750's, he made a series of prints that were based on these fantastical endless cavernous dungeons he called "Prisons"... His "Prisons" series was such an influence to me that I spent the latter half of my undergraduate career making paintings and drawings that were so completely enamored by his prints that they turned out to be some combination of his fantastic architecture and some rotting decrepit fun house. I don't have any images of those old paintings, they would be fun and rather embarrassing to show...A great example of a Piranesi print is this one from the year 1750.


And then, of course, there are the great Art Nouveau architects from the early 1900's... Victor Horta and Antonin Gaudi were among those who brought back a sense of the organic and the curvilinear into an increasingly angular and modular architecture that was a result of the industrial revolution...

But after that, it's interesting that you didn't see that kind of organic architecture come back into play on a commercial level until the 1980's... It seems that all of the calculations needed to make a curvilinear piece of architecture was just not feasible on a wide scale until CAD programs made all of the thousands of calculations possible. Frank Gehry is a great example of organic architecture that is the result of of the digital age. And so now, yes, we are able to make something that has that plant-like growth that I had talked about earlier according to a blueprint... One that is organic and hand-drawn, but is calculated and manufactured down to the tiniest degree.



Anyway, I just thought I would talk a little bit about the architecture that I consider influential to my work.