Bart Prince:
Building Outside the Box By Emmaly Wiederholt
When most people think of a house, they think of a place to come home to at the end of the day. Hopefully it is nice enough to provide an element of relaxation and leisure. Many a luxurious house is even adorned with art and décor, arranged under the careful guidance of a designer. What few people think of is the box constituting the house itself. And then there are those, like internationally renowned architect Bart Prince, who never thought of a box to begin with.
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hen Prince was in kindergarten in his native New Mexico, he describes drawing and designing fantastical structures. “What is that?” his parents and teachers would ask. “It’s a house,” he’d reply to their incredulous looks. From those imaginative beginnings, Prince, who resides in one of his own structures in Albuquerque, has built a life designing architectural art and thinking outside the box. “Usually folks come to me because they’ve seen my work and they’re attracted to something that isn’t the usual. If somebody comes to me and says, ‘I want one of these,’ I have to tell them I’m not interested,” Prince explains. “Each building is designed for a specific person on a specific site. I start over every time, always with a fresh slate. I don’t want to copy others or myself.”
He continues: “I let my buildings grow from the inside out. Rather than start with a preconception for a shape or form and then try to figure out how to stuff things into it, I let the building unravel. I wait until I have all the information on the site and the client and then let the idea grow. No two buildings can ever be alike because no two situations are ever alike.” He describes how he once had two commissions at the same time that looked identical on paper. They were both for couples who both asked for the same square footage, number of bedrooms, and more. Yet, because the sites were different — one was for a house in New Mexico and the other was in Mendocino, CA — you couldn’t imagine two houses more different. “If a client expected what they would get, then I didn’t do my job. That’s what art is — bringing out what others don’t see,” notes Prince.
Sheri Crider, who curated The Human Drift — an architectural art exhibition at Albuquerque’s SCA Contemporary Art in 2015 — comments on the audacity of Prince’s work: “His interior spaces are works of art and his structures are sculptures; it’s never just a house.” “I hear from clients for whom I created homes years ago, and they’ll get in touch and let me know they recently noticed something else about their structure they hadn’t noticed before,” says Prince. “That’s what a piece of art ought to do; it ought to keep on giving. A great symphony or great painting can be returned to again and again.” Thus too with Prince’s out-ofthis-world architecture, which, no matter how familiar the viewer, always begs another look.
For more information visit bartprince.com.