This sculptor, as a kid, must’ve been building castles in the air at school! While other kids normally stop, he continued doing so, well not in the air but in the sand instead! Meet Calvin Seibert, a 57-year-old artist currently residing in New York, who claims to be a sandcastle architect…a claim adequately substantiated by his incredible sand works.
Calvin’s eye for detail and fertile imagination were quite evident as a child. Growing up in a ski resort in the Colorado mountains, there were no beaches to go to. But, such was his love for sand that he built sandcastles on the sand piles he found at neighbouring construction sites! When he stepped into his teens, he started frequenting the beach with friends, at times, for a week at a stretch.
Calvin Seibert The ArtistIn the 1960s he chanced upon the pictures of the French Ski resort in Flaine, a raw concrete building, designed by Marcel Breuer, a modernist architect. This ignited his imagination and he thought of becoming an architect. That’s probably when he got introduced to brutalist architecture that flourished between 1951 and 1975, a style favoured by the likes of Le Corbusier, who designed and built some marvellous buildings in India using béton brut material. This is French means raw concrete.
However, Calvin started to have strong reservations about becoming an architect. He explains why in his own words, “My relationship with physical things was much more artistic and sculptural.” Good thing, because had he chosen the architecture line, there would be no sandcastles for us to fawn over. Of course, his works, though short-lived, are no less than architectural marvels.
Calvin’s passion for sandcastles took a serious turn when he moved to New York in 1979. He joined an art school and started building sandcastles on nearby beaches, such as Coney Island. He worked as an artist’s assistant to earn some money before he decided to be on his own, building sandcastles.
