Sven Hauth Cuts Familiar Buildings Into Floating Fragments

Some of the best art starts with a problem. For Hamburg-based CG artist Sven Hauth, the problem was perspective.

He was wandering around eastern Germany, pointing his camera up at buildings, and kept running into the same annoying issue. Vertical lines collapsing into awkward, pinched geometry. Instead of fixing it, he decided to just get rid of the ground.

The result is Kiel Fragments, a series where Hauth slices buildings from his hometown into self-contained volumes and floats each one in open sky. Hotels, apartment blocks, plain midcentury facades. All untethered, precise, and a little unreal.

A Lot More Than a Clever Crop

Each fragment is carefully rebuilt. Hauth cuts a chunk out of a building, then digitally reconstructs the parts his camera never saw. Undersides, back walls, hidden edges. Everything gets closed off and refined until the piece reads as a complete object from any angle.

In his own words: “The converging lines of the vertical vanishing points made it hard to arrive at anything visually pleasing, and I kept thinking I should just isolate the interesting parts to make them float in mid-air.”

Buildings Without Their Context

Once you take the sidewalk and the neighbors away, the buildings stop really being buildings. They start behaving more like modular sculptures, hovering against flat skies with the weightlessness of paper models.

There’s something quietly interesting going on here. So much of what we think of as a building’s character is really just its context. Lift it out of all that, and what’s left is geometry, color, and a surprising amount of strangeness. A beige apartment block you’d walk right past becomes, mid-air, genuinely fun to look at.

See more of Sven Hauth’s work on his website. Used with permission.

Artist: Sven Hauth Project: Kiel Fragments Location: Hamburg, Germany

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