New Mexico architect Bart Prince has created an incredible body of work over the last 35 years. The son of an ad agency owner, Prince studied with Bruce Goff (the twentieth-century's primo imagineer of organic dreamscapes). But Prince never copies Goff; he approaches each assignment with a fresh idea, and delivers a knockout work of art with quiet consistency.
Prince doesn't enjoy the jet-setting superstar status of a Frank Gehry, but Gehry's status as architect-du-jour has reduced him to a level of self-caricature that Prince eschews.
He still lives in Albuquerque. The iconoclasts don't live in New York or Los Angeles; they live in the hinterlands and manage to outshine their peers. Prince doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry as of August 2007. Somehow I suspect he doesn't care.
Some people look at this kind of architecture and scratch their heads. Others become downright hostile. That's fine; if your comprehension of architecture ends with standard 90 degree angles and gabled roofs, you won't understand Prince.
But if you've ever dreamed of living inside a sculpture, inside a dream made real, you'd love inhabiting one of Bart Prince's spaces.
Check out some of his work here.
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