Bizarre buildings Part 1: Weird, Cool, Techy, Arty

Beauty of the bizarre in architecture tells us how laterally the human mind can think

The thing that makes architecture a true fine art is ‘weirdness’. Like painting or sculpture, a truly innovative building that wows us with its idiosyncratic design and construction makes us sit up and take note of what must have been going through the architect’s mind while she or he conceived of something so outlandishly beautiful. In fact, lateral thinking that goes into creating an elevation gives architecture its true charishma. It isn’t just about following the beaten track. Here is a list of some interesting and out of the world creations that are baffling in their design and execution. There are so many such buildings around the world, but when you add scale to the wierdness it becomes something truly extraordinary. The buildings are in not particular order, so pick what you think is the weirdest. 

In the next part of this series, watch out for some skull-cracking concepts. Watch this space next week.

Device to Root Out Evil

This work by American artist Dennis Oppenheim has had a history of controversy. With it’s steeple buried in the ground, it makes a clear remark regarding religion. First exhibited at the 1997 Venice Biennale, it was later moved to Harbour Green Park in Vancouver, Canada in 2005. Not surprisingly, the city parks committee voted to remove the sculpture, and at the time of this post it was installed at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Canada. In September of 2004, John L Hennessy, President of Stanford University, made the unprecedented decision to reject Device to Root Out Evil, a sculpture that had been commissioned by the President’s Panel on Art by the American sculptor Dennis Oppenheim.  Hennessy feared a potential controversy because the sculpture is an inverted church.  In a statement, Hennessy said the piece was “not appropriate” for the campus. The artist maintains that his interest is in exploring the dialogue between architecture and sculpture.  Device to Root Out Evil “withdraws functionality from architecture.” To those reading religion into the work, he answers that “Turning the church upside down makes it more aggressive, but not blasphemous.

Forest Spiral

The Hundertwasser house ‘Waldspirale’ (Forest Spiral) was built in Darmstadt between 1998 and 2000. Friedensreich Hundertwasser, the famous Austrian architect and painter, is widely renowned for his revolutionary, colourful architectural designs which incorporate irregular, organic forms, eg onion-shaped domes. The structure with 105 apartments wraps around a landscaped courtyard with a running stream. Up in the turret at the southeast corner, there is a restaurant, including a cocktail bar.

The Longaberger Basket Building

The Longaberger Basket Company building in Newark, Ohio might just be a strangest office building in the world. The 180,000-square-foot building, a replica of the company’s famous market basket, cost $30 million and took two years to complete. Many experts tried to persuade Dave Longaberger to alter his plans, but he wanted an exact replica of the real thing.

Cubic Houses, Rotterdam

The original idea of these cubic houses came about in the 1970s. Piet Blom has developed a couple of these cubic houses that were built in Helmond.The city of Rotterdam asked him to design housing on top of a pedestrian bridge and he decided to use the cubic houses idea. The concept behind these houses is that he tries to create a forest by each cube representing an abstract tree; therefore the whole village becomes a forest.

House Attack

Erwin Wurm (born 1954) is an Austrian artist born in Bruck an der Mur / Styria. This bizarre structure is another one of his architectural expressions that is steeped in humour. 

Solar Furnace 

A solar furnace is a structure that uses concentrated solar power to produce high temperatures, usually for industry. Parabolic mirrors or heliostats concentrate light (Insolation) onto a focal point. The temperature at the focal point may reach 3,500 °C (6,330 °F), and this heat can be used to generate electricity, melt steel, make hydrogen fuel or nanomaterials. The largest solar furnace is at Odeillo in the Pyrénées-Orientales in France, opened in 1970. It employs an array of plane mirrors to gather sunlight, reflecting it onto a larger curved mirror.

Nord L B Building

This building in Hanover, Germany, occupies an entire city block and serves as an important linking element between the various activities which define the neighbouring quarters of the city: retail, commercial, residential, cultural, sport and leisure. Through varying heights a building emerges which gently integrates itself in the existing fabric of the city. 

Hole House

Officially known as the ‘Inversion’ project it was the work of two Houston sculptors Dan Havel and Dean Ruck who were offered the building to work with for a short period of time prior to its demolition to make way for a new Art League Houston building.  Havel and Ruck created a large funnel-like vortex beginning from the west wall adjacent to Montrose Blvd. The exterior skin of the houses was peeled off and used to create the narrowing spiral as it progressed eastward through the small central hallway connecting the two buildings and exiting through a small hole into an adjacent courtyard.

Paucescu House: HQ, Association of Architects

The building is the headquarters of the association of architects from Romania. The old building was called ‘Paucescu House’ (built in the second half of the nineteenth century) and in 1914, with the last arrangements at the Royal Foundation (1914), part of Paucescu house was demolished. Thereby, the building area was reduced considerably, but even in the new form, it remained a remarkable one. During the communist regime, the Paucescu house sheltered the Directorate of State Security. After 2000, the Union of Architects came into possession of the building. Everyone expected the palace Paucescu to regain its brilliance by restoring original style. What happened then is a different story. There was the question of the total demolition of the old building. Instead, the solution was not a restoration, a reconstruction, nore a preservation but simply keeping a piece of the old building and incorporate it into a new approach.

The Chapel of the Holy Cross

The Chapel of the Holy Cross is a Roman Catholic chapel built into the mesas of Sedona, Arizona, which was inspired and commissioned by sculptor Marguerite Brunswig Staude. Richard Hein was chosen as project architect, and the design was executed by architect August K. Strotz, both from the firm of Anshen & Allen. The chapel is built on Coconino National Forest land; the late Senator Barry Goldwater assisted Staude in obtaining a special-use permit. The construction supervisor was Fred Courkos, who built the chapel in 18 months at a cost of US$300,000. The chapel was completed in 1956.

Stone House

This amazing building Stone House was built in Fafe mountains in Portugal. Two stones connected together have made a strange but beautiful-looking house.

Errante Guest House

There is not much info about this bizarre Errante Guest House built in Chile but it looks absolutely amazing and unusual.

Aragon Pavilion

The Aragon Pavilion has been designed by Olano y Mendo Arquitectos, from Zaragoza. It covers an area of 2,500 m2 and is 25 metres high. The pavilion is spread over a basement floor, ground floor or enclosure, first floor, second floor and terrace. Aragon Pavilion’s interior exhibition space is (without the square/enclosure) is 2,774 m2 (+135 m2 in the cavities of the columns). The pavilion takes the form of a typical Aragonese wicker basket achieved by intertwined panels of glass and micro-concrete with white glass fibre, providing the interior with a large quantity of natural light.

The Eden Project

The Eden Project is a visitor attraction in Cornwall in the United Kingdom. Inside the artificial biomes are plants that are collected from all around the world. The project is located in a reclaimed Kaolinite pit, located 1.25 mi (2 kilometres) from the town of St Blazey and 5 kilometres (3 mi) from the larger town of St Austell, Cornwall. The complex is dominated by two huge enclosures consisting of adjoining domes that house thousands of plant species, and each enclosure emulates a natural biome. The domes consist of hundreds of hexagonal and pentagonal, inflated, plastic cells supported by steel frames. The first dome emulates a tropical environment, and the second a Mediterranean environment.

La Pedrera 

This undulating beast is another madcap Gaudí masterpiece, built in 1905-10 as a combined apartment and office block. Formally called Casa Milà, after the businessman who commissioned it, it is better known as La Pedrera (the Quarry) because of its uneven grey stone facade, which ripples around the corner of Carrer de Provença.

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nice

A monumental and beautiful building in Nice, France, which holds a host of famous works of both French and international modern artists. The design of this building is considered legendary because it appears so appropriate for what it houses.

Watts that but a triumph of the human spirit!

Sam Rodia built the Watts Tower in LA single-handedly. So, what's the big deal? For starters, the tallest tower is 30 metres high and he made it with basic tools without any machinery. It took him 34 years to finish his dream project

The Watts Towers

Sam Rodia at work on the towers

We hear about the hard life of the artist, the most common being the life of Van Gogh who suffered many tragedies while on his way to changing how art was perceived by the world.

Improvisation with tiles, ceramics on the structure

A Van Gogh-like figure in the world of architecture is Simon Rodia, or as he is popularly known, Sam Rodia. He is special because he had very little formal education and, certainly, none in architecture. By day he was a construction worker and in the evening he worked on creating the now famous Watts Towers, an American heritage site.

The funny thing is, despite the enormity of his creation very few people have actually heard of him. The fact that the Beatles used a photo of him on the cover of their classic album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, did not push him into the popular consciousness and he continues to be a figurehead in non-mainstream architecture-art.

The entrance to the towers

Rodia was born in Serino on February 12, 1879, in Italy and, like many Italians of the time, he emigrated to the United States when he was 15. He lived in Pennsylvania until his brother died in a mining incident and then he moved to Seattle, Washington, where he married Lucia Ucci in 1902. They soon moved to Oakland, where Rodia’s three children were born. Following his divorce in 1912, he moved to Long Beach and worked at odd jobs before finally settling in Watts in 1920. And in 1921 he started building the Watts Towers all by himself! This masterpiece would be completed only in 1954.

He toiled for over 34 years on creating what seemed to many to be the obsession of a mad man. He was at the receiving end of vandalism by his neighbours who did not understand the passion with which this many went about his work. After finishing his day job, he would collect whatever scrap or discarded materials from the site he worked at and used it on the Watts towers. The ingenuity and resourcefulness that he displayed while creating these amazing expressions of architecture is seen to be believed. Right from broken tiles to bottles to anything that could be used as ‘bricks’ went into the towers.

Note the use of soft drink bottles

In 1921, Rodia purchased the triangular-shaped lot at 1761-1765 107th Street in Los Angeles and began to construct his masterpiece, which he called ‘Nuestro Pueblo’ (meaning ‘Our Town’). For 34 years, he worked single-handedly to build his towers without benefit of machine equipment, scaffolding, bolts, rivets, welds or drawing board designs. Besides his own ingenuity, he used simple tools, pipe fitter pliers and a window-washer’s belt and buckle.

Construction worker by day and artist by night, Rodia adorned his towers with a diverse mosaic of broken glass, sea shells, generic pottery and tile, a rare piece of 19th-century, hand painted Canton ware and many pieces of 20th-century American ceramics. Rodia once said, “I had it in mind to do something big and I did it.”

The tallest of his towers stands 99½ feet and contains the longest slender reinforced concrete column in the world. The monument also features a gazebo with a circular bench, three bird baths, a center column and a spire reaching a height of 38 feet. Rodia’s ‘ship of Marco Polo’ has a spire of 28 feet, and the 140-foot long ‘south wall’ is decorated extensively with tiles, sea shells, pottery, glass and hand-drawn designs.

After finishing the towers in 1954, he retired to Martinez when he was 75. A few years after the Department of Building and Safety ordered that the towers be demolished. A group of concerned citizens, calling themselves ‘The Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts’, fought successfully to save the Towers by collecting signatures and money and devising an engineering test in 1959 that proved the Towers’ strength and safety.

In 1978, the Towers were deeded to the State, which undertook extensive restoration of the three main towers. In 1985, continuing restoration responsibilities were given to the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and currently both the Towers and the Watts Towers Arts Center are under the operation of the Cultural Affairs Department. While the Towers fall into no strict art category, international authorities and the general public alike have lauded them as a unique monument to the human spirit and the persistence of a singular vision.

Today, the Watts Towers have become a cultural melting point. Each year, thousands of people are attracted to the Towers’ site for the Simon Rodia Watts Towers Jazz Festival and the Watts Towers Day of the Drum Festival.

The beauty of the Watts Towers is that it has no real ‘use’ besides just standing tall in its multi-hued, multi-textured near primal beauty. Which is why, it would not be wrong to call the Towers a marvel of architectural-art. It is almost impossible to believe that one person could not only design but also build a 30-metre high tower. 

QUICK FACTS

Detail of a column

a. It took Sam Rodia 34 years to build the Watts Towers. He did it single-handedly without machines

b. The Watts Towers installation consists of 17 major sculptures.

c. They are constructed of structural steel, covered with mortar, adorned with a diverse mosaic of broken glass, sea shells, generic pottery and tile, a rare piece of 19th-century, hand painted Canton ware and many pieces of 20th-century American ceramics

d. It was built without machine equipment, scaffolding, bolts, rivets, welds or drawing board designs. Sam used simple tools, pipe fitter pliers and a window-washer’s belt and buckle

e. The tallest tower is 30 metres high. The other towers are 29.5 metres and the next one is 16.76 meters high. 

• More stuff of the Watts Towers from the official website