Norway, like all Scandinavian countries, has always taken pride in trying to live in harmony with nature, instead of conquering it, and its old turf roofs are a perfect example.
Houses with their roofs looking like small meadows may seem a little strange in these modern times, but until the late 19th century, turf roofs were the most common type of roofs in rural Norway. Nowadays, inhabited turf-roof houses are very rare, as the Norwegians have turned most of them into museum exhibits.
A bike shop owner in Germany attached over 100 bicycles to his shop’s façade in order to draw attention to his business.
Alreadythe owner of one of the most popular bike shops in Atlantsberg, north-east Berlin, offering over 1,000 bicycle models from both children and adults, Christian Petersen came up with an original advertising idea to get even more exposure. Somehow, he managed to get 120 bicycles attached to the front of the shop. Now, bike lovers can spot his business from a mile away.
It’s a good thing this bike shop is in Germany, if someone did something like this in my country, those bikes would probably get stolen in one night.
Some of his works may not even look like real houses, but Terunobu Fujimori is one of the world’s most acclaimed architectural designers. His unconventional works have been displayed all around the world, and, believe it or not, people actually want to live in his houses.
A historian by trade, Terunobu Fujimori started designing buildings late in his life, when he was 44. He was asked to design a history museum for a family from his local village, near Nagano, who had ancient ties to that place. He decided to build something completely uncobventional, in order to avoid being criticized for lack of originality, and his creation was a success.
Since then, Terunobu Fujimori has been delivering one fascinating house after another, at a rate of a house per year. Using his knowledge of Japanese architectural history and his designer talents, Terunobu Fujimori manages to create unique buildings that are ecologically sensitive and energy efficient.
The way Terunobu Fujimori designs and builds his houses is as unconventional as they look. He simply takes a tree stump and starts hacking away at it with a chainsaw, until he gets a rough model of what he plans to build. Then he invites his clients to his Too-High Tea House, standing 20 meters into the air, on two forked tree trunks, and shows them his designs. If they don’t like them, he simply shakes the house until he gets a positive answer. Galleries have offered to buy his tree stump models, but he always refused to sell them.
Although he relies on professionals for the structural and electrical installations on his houses, he handles most of the interior design, with a team of friends. He never pays them for their work, as that would be labor.
Inspired by the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, Reg Miller transformed his old shed into a pirate themed retreat that earned him the title of winner in the Shed of the Year 2010 contest.
Reg Miller, or Jolly Reg, as he’s come to be known, built his impressive pirate shed from scratch. He has some old muskets and swords, and since his partner didn’t want them in the house anymore, he figured the best place to store them was the shed. After seeing his first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie, he decided he was going to build his very own pirates’ den.
Jolly Reg did it all himself, using anything from recycled pieces of wood to fixtures and fittings he found at car trunk sales. He spent years working on it, but his pirate shed is still a work in progress, as he is always adding new things. So far he has set up a Koi fish pond, complete with palm trees, and decorated the shed with barrel seats, pirate flag pole and even a real life parrot.
The 65-year-old would-be pirate managed to beat over a 1,000 other candidates and snatched the grand prize at UK’s Shead of the Year 2010 competition. He’s now 1,000 pounds richer and has a hefty supply of wood-maintenance products from the contest’s sponsor.
Constructed in1896, and used to store the gas that supplied Vienna, these four giant gasometers are now used as modern and original living spaces.
Remnants of the industrial age, gasometers all over the world have been demolished, or simply abandoned and left at the mercy of the elements. But the people of Vienna thought it would be a shame to just wipe these once useful structures off the face of the earth, and came up with a way to give them new meaning.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Vienna’s gasometers were the largest in the world, each 70 meters tall and 60 meters across. Now, they are some of the city’s most coveted living and office spaces. After natural gas started being used to power Vienna, the interior of the gasometers was completely removed, leaving only their brick shells The idea of transforming them into living quarters appeared as the result of a design contest, calling for new ideas on how to reuse old structures. Now, the gasometer apartment buildings incorporate the ideas of four architects, including the translucent roofs, the interior garden and the eco-friendly terraced structure.
There are currently 1,500 people living in this gas tank city within a city. They are known as the Gasometer community.
On the border of a nature preserve, near Salzburg, Austria, lies one of the weirdest looking homes in the world – the Voglereiter Auto Residence.
Designed by Markus Voglereiter, this unusual home looks a lot like an old Volkswagen Beetle. It might look funny to some of you, but transforming a 70’s style suburban home into car-shaped house was no joke, especially sine it required creating two separate dwelling for parents and children, while implementing efficient heating and insulation techniques. Not to mention respecting legal building and design codes.
But in the end, Markus Voglereiter managed to create a unique residence, both on the outside and on the. The interior of the car-shaped house also features auto-themed styling, like the springs on the metal staircase. All in all, a fascinating structure, the Volgereiter Auto Residence has already become somewhat of a tourist attraction.
The newly opened Inntel Hotel, in the Dutch town of Zaandam is now the main eye-catcher of the town center, due to its bizarre design, resembling a number of stacked houses.
Inntel Hotel is the brainchild of Dutch designer, Wilfried van Winden. Many of us see hotels as temporary homes, so he tried to emphasize this idea by designing it to look like a bunch of traditional Zaan houses, stacked over each other. The result of his vision is both unique and familar, and definitely stunning.
One can identify almost 70 houses in the design of Inntel Hotel, most of them green and one blue, right at the top.
via Dezeen
When it comes to architecture, one thing is for sure: you don’t have to build something like Burj Khalifa to draw attention. That definitely helps, but this lovely teapot gas station proves you can do it for cheap.
Known as the Teapot Dome, this architectural jewel is located in Zillah, Washington, and was built almost 100 years ago, as a monument to the Teapot Dome Scandal, which involved a number of important American figures.
Until a few years ago, before it went out of use, the Teapot Dome was considered the oldest gas station in America, but now it’s just a local monument that definitely needs preserving.
Ever since I started this blog I’ve been amazed at what amazing things ordinary people can achieve, if they put their minds to it. And this old Russian craftsman is just another perfect example.
Vladimir Filippovich must have really wanted to be a king, and live in a palace. His desire was so strong that he used his exceptional craftsmanship to transform his home into a breathtaking castle, worthy of being compared to actual royal residences. But human subjects are often traitors who stab you in the back, when you least expect it, so Mr. Filippovich chose to rule over 13 subjects, from the animal kingdom, 11 dogs, and two cats.
His amazing-looking palace is rather noisy, with all his courtiers barking most of the time, but their loyalty and selflessness more than makes up for that. This goes to show you that, with the right skills and a lot of patience, pretty much anyone can be a king and even build their own little kingdom.
via PhotoPolygon
Opened in the early 1900s, this Victorian toilet has served visitors of Scarborough Beach, for decades, but it’s now become one of the most popular houses in the area.
Tracy Woodhouse and Graham Peck decided the public toilet would make a great house, as soon as they heard the lease for the building was available, five years ago. They found an architect who’s housing design maintained the original design and character of the building, so the authorities gladly approved the project.
They’ve spent around $53,000 reconditioning and refurbishing the old public toilet, and even worked on it themselves, in their spare time. After top-to-bottom rebuilding, their house is now the talk of the town. Their lounge is where the men’s bathroom used to be, and their bedroom stands where there once was the ladies room.
Friends often make fun of the couple, saying they live in a lavatory, but they don’t mind, and actually become amused themselves. But what matters most is they now have a cozy house of their own, with a spectacular view over the North Bay.
The two expected people to be amused, or even shocked, but one thing they didn’t expect was to receive offers for their toilet house. So far, they have three.
via Daily Mail
If you thought Miguelin, the giant baby at the Spanish pavilion was awesome, than the British pavilion’s Seed Cathedral will blow your mind.
By far the most popular structure, at the Shanghai Expo 2010, even before it was officially opened, the Seed Cathedral is a six storey high cube-shaped structure, pierced by 60,000 thin acrylic rods. Each 7.5 meter long rod sways at the slightest wind movement, adding the dramatic effect of the design.
Just like fiber optics, the acrylic rods draw in the light from the outside, and illuminate the inside. At night, the artificial light, on the inside, is projected to the outside, making the Seed Cathedral glow.
But Britain’s awe-inspiring building isn’t called Seed Cathedral, for no reason. On the inside, each rod has one or more seeds encased in it. Designed by Thomas Heatherwick, this architectural wonder has already won the hearts of its visitors, who have nicknamed it “The Dandelion”.
Photos via QQ
Tito Ingenieri, from Quilmes, Argentina, claims he has spent the last 19 years collecting bottles and using them to build an environment-friendly house.
Now, we’ve seen impressive bottle-made structures before, like the Bottle Temple of Thailand, or the house of plastic bottles, near Iguazu Falls, but none as impressive as Tito Ingenieri’s bottle house. I know it doesn’t look very stylish, but the man did spend almost two decades of his life working on it. During this time he collected 6 million non-returnable glass bottles, and asked his neighbors to save their bottles for him.
Mr. Ingenieri says his unusual home also acts as an alarm, when the waters of a nearby river are rising. The southern winds blowing into the necks of the glass bottles, makes a whistling sound. He also adds that he can teach anyone who’s interested in building a bottle house like his. If that’s you, check out his website for contact information.
via Treehugger
This is not the first bottle house featured on Oddity Central, but it’s definitely the most impressive looking.
After finding these pics on several spam sites that posted no link to the original source, I spent quite a while trying to find some info. Finally I discovered the photos were uploaded by someone on Instructables and were of a family building a plastic and glass bottles house, somewhere in Mexico. That’s about everything I was able to find out about these photos, but what’s that they say? A picture is worth a thousand words?
Some people just can’t stand living in a normal house and Pierre Cardin is one of them.
As the story goes, Pierre Cardin was looking to buy a nice house on the Cote d’Azur, but was horrified by all the unoriginal designs that he had seen and that didn’t match his avant-garde fashion designs . That one day he stumbled upon a construction site, where an architect by the name of Antti Lovag was building a bubble-house for some industrialist who happened to have died. Cardin was thrilled to acquire the almost finished residence that finally satisfied his exigent taste.
Not everyone liked Lovag‘s creation when it was finished in 1990, many went as far as to call it Crazy-house, but now it has become a historic monument.
I guess the Dutch have a thing for colorful infrastructure, because the famous Yellow Brick Road is also found in Holland.
This blue building is set in the Delfshaven district, in Rotterdam and it used to be one of the towns least interesting buildings and one of the most unnoticed by the public. The administration asked an artistic firm to freshen the place up, or it would be demolished. They chose to paint the place blue and the deal with the neighborhood is that it will stay this way until the community comes up with a new plan for the area.
Funniest thing is the blue building has become the most photographed building in Rotterdam. That’s how important 2 layers of paint can be.
