This is a Skyscraper Robot Mashup of Miami’s Most Iconic Art Deco Architecture

August 4, 2016

Miami Robot. By artist Joel Kuntz

Contemporary artist Joel Kuntz’s work often explores ideas about urbanism, architectural style, and iconography. He addressed all of those themes in his Globobot Series, of large graphic prints and 3D figures, created by mashing together simple line drawings and cutouts of the most recognizable buildings from major cities around the world, transformers style.The results are person-shaped miniature towers, or robots, that somehow still look remarkably like the cities they’re based on.

New York’s Robot is a futuristic gotham topped by One World Trade Center’s spire. Paris is a gnarly gargoyle combining Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Paris Pantheon, etc. with an ancient hump (The hump looks like the pantheon, a temple-like Dome commission by Napoleon as his tomb), all wrapped in a daringly translucent little cocktail dress. Of course this ‘outfit’ is really just the more modern great glass pyramid of the Louvre.

And then there’s Miami. Here it is in neon rainbows. The Miami robot is mostly but not entirely a big pile of art deco stuff scattered around South Beach. Kuntz has squeezed in one or two post-modern and contemporary works too. See you if you can recognize which ones. Check out the rest of Kuntz’s  robot-city-mashups over at his website, here.