Starting with an idea to produce images that made the sky look “broken,” the artist discovered that something which is normally considered an eyesore became the perfect grid for the project: utility wires and poles.

“A week or two later,” Hyner said in an interview with My Modern Met, “I took a photo of an electrical pole in my neighborhood and knew instantly that I could fill the spaces with sky photos to achieve a stained glass look.” Hyner filled each cross section of sky between wires with its own image, making a collage of the heavens containing morning and evening light, wildlife, and various clouds.

“In the end, I might use anywhere between 15 to 30 different photos,” he explains. “That includes photos of moons, suns, birds, and jet streams that I later use to accent the piece. Some smaller sections of these images aren’t even skies at all, but rather textured gradients I make to fit the image.” His process includes intensive selection and hours working with photo editing software.

“New sky selection tools in Adobe Photoshop help, but they don’t get me all the way there,” Hyner explained in an interview with PetaPixel. “Once that step is completed, I comb through thousands of photos… and pull the images that might go together. Then it takes maybe a week or two of trial and error, testing various skies, moving shots around, deleting the whole thing, starting again, going outside for a walk, and then finally finishing. It can be a brain-scramble, but I love seeing the puzzle come together.”

Fortunately, Hyner had plenty of his own material to draw on for his stained-glass creations, having taken sky shots around the world for almost a decade in his movie-making work. Since getting his first Canon camera in 2014, he’s amassed thousands of atmospheric photos.

“I spent a few months in New Zealand and Fiji working on a film I wrote, so I had a lot of time to shoot the most stunning skies imaginable. They pop up in a lot of my work,” he said.

Hyner’s new series also helped him escape the stagnation of the COVID-19 shutdowns. “When I start pulling in photos, I try to have some foundation to build upon,” he adds. “For instance, with ‘Party Skies,’ which was made during the height of the pandemic, I was daydreaming about tropical climates, so I knew I wanted to bridge three island photos of mine at the bottom and work my way up to the sky.”

While his art has earned him a decent following on social media, Hyner tries not to take his work too seriously. “Ultimately, I just make images that I want to see. I tend not to ascribe meaning to any of them,” he says.

His stained-glass sky art (as well as his other work) is available on his website and Instagram profile.

The post Photographer Splits the Sky into Stained-Glass Masterpieces first appeared on Dornob.

“Monka Apartments” offers a beautiful example of this process in the medieval town center of Torún, Poland, which has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A centuries-old Gothic granary with beautiful bones offered an interesting possibility for conversion to housing, but its layout presented a few challenges. Originally designed with industrial usage in mind, the building features numerous large round-topped windows through which sacks of grain were once moved in and out of each level, but the ceilings are low, and the internal rooms lack access to natural light altogether.

Architect Pawel Tatara teamed up with the firm Znamy Sie to design nine new apartments on the second, third, and fourth levels of the building, with the ground floor being occupied by Monka Restaurant. The two knew they wanted to preserve as much of the historical structure as possible, with minimal modern interventions being made, but the client wanted the residences to have a bright, airy, and decidedly more contemporary feel.

Many developers would have simply inserted single-level apartments into each floor, but the results would have been dark and dreary, especially toward the center of the building. This team chose to remove some of the floors and ceilings to create multi-level lofted apartments instead. The result is a mix of apartment sizes and styles, with some smaller units mostly occupying a single floor, a few with lofted bedrooms, and a few more spacious ones stretching all the way up into the building’s gabled top floor.

Because most of the original structure was left intact, each unit is entirely unique, enjoying its own individual character. To both enhance this uniqueness and unify the apartments while ensuring that daylight streams all the way into the building, the architects added a colorful steel volume to the interior of each one. These “cubes” contain the bathrooms and divide the space between the living areas and bedrooms. Both the color of the cube and its geometric motif, inspired by the stained glass windows of the Cathedral of St. Janów, are unique to each unit.

“Due to the unusual history of the city, the architectural detail has become the inspiration for the project,” says Znamy Sie. “Nine apartments were designed on three floors. On the second and third floor, there are two-story apartments with mezzanines. On the fourth floor there is a one-level, but with locally high ceilings illuminated by roof windows. As a result, higher and better-lit living spaces were obtained. The project refers to the unusual character and climate of the city of Torún. Each of the apartments is completely different, which is largely due to the irregularity of the old building but above all from the individual detail.”

“Certainly stained glass windows will create a unique atmosphere in the interior, becoming a non-obvious element that changes in the direction of the sun’s rays. In the apartments, the historic features of the building have been confronted with modern materials and elements of interior design.”

The post Heritage Granary in Poland Transformed Into Modern Apartments first appeared on Dornob.

Harnessing some of its most captivating original features, including a set of majestic stained glass windows, dramatic vaulted ceilings and open spaces, exposed brick walls, and wooden ceiling turnbuckles, this revamped holy house does a great job of paying tribute to its past while serving an entirely modern purpose.

Now encompassing six bathrooms, seven bedrooms, and a few large public areas, the church has been lovingly converted into a contemporary eclectic home by American designer Linc Thelen. Thelen created a fluidity throughout the new home by leaving the 25-foot-high lower level of the building open-plan, allowing the living area, kitchen, and dining room to all blend seamlessly into one another. He wanted to preserve the essence of the building’s heritage by keeping the stunning golden windows and other original features he believed would bring character to the space while still making it feel like a livable and loveable residence.

Most of the interior adheres to a color palette of black, white, and gray, while the stained glass adds splashes of red, green, and yellow to the mix, with accessories and fixtures featuring additional gold accents. The lower level also contains a separated master bedroom, bathroom, and closet, while the upper level houses the other bedrooms, a playroom featuring a custom-made climbing wall and sliding barn door, a game room, and a nursery. The ultra-macho game room has actually been built in the church’s old bell tower, allowing for further fantastical thinking when the inhabitants are deep in their leisurely element and overlooking downtown Chicago.

Meticulous care was taken with the redesign in order to to work around a few major challenges that arose in the process, including the installation of proper of heating and cooling systems and the owners’ request for an isolated additional room to accommodate their growing family. The home was designed playfully in order to portray the personalities of the owners, providing them with a luxurious suburban home in a vintage farmhouse design style. The occasional modern twist keeps the space functional but leaves enough of a unique aesthetic to spark some really interesting conversations among guests!

After entering through a pair of wooden blue double doors, visitors ascend a short set of steps and walk through the entrance hall, emerging in an open space consisting of raw materials, canvas-like white walls, staggering volumes, and brass accessories. In charming juxtaposition to these elements are the vestiges of the old church: thick wooden beams, a black quartz chimney, and of course, the whole holy exterior. The wallpapers tend to feature bright prints or geometric shapes, while the floors are adorned with colorful ceramic tiles. A few of the church’s nooks and crannies have been turned into reading corners and other creative crawl spaces, adding allure and curiosity to every possible living space and ensuring that every feature is used to its fullest potential.

The post Chicago Church Transformed Into a Residential Dream first appeared on Dornob.