Think the old woman who lived in a shoe had weird taste in housing? It turns out she was just ahead of her time. Buildings can look like all sorts of things, even…

AN IGLOO

(Image credit: City Profile)

Crouched on the Parks Highway about 180 miles outside of Anchorage, Alaska, is a hulking, four-story igloo. Its dome can be spotted from an airplane flying at 30,000 feet. Built in the 1970s, the igloo was meant to give tourists a chance to visit a “real” Alaskan igloo. Igloo City, as it’s known, has been a convenience store, a gas station, a makeshift triage clinic for a man attacked by a grizzly bear, and an emergency airplane refueling stop (a small plane once landed on the highway and and taxied in for gas). But other than part of the ground floor, the igloo itself has never been used. It was supposed to be a motel, but the couple who built it forgot something important: building codes. The structure never passed inspection, and its owners went broke.

…THE WORLD’S LARGEST CHEST

In the 1920s, the High Point, North Carolina, Chamber of Commerce built its first building-size chest of drawers. Twenty feet tall, the chest served as the Chamber’s Bureau of Information and helped to promote the city’s image as the “Furniture Capital of the World.” In 1996 the chest was augmented, making it 38 feet tall. In 2010, upset with the city’s refusal to help with the upkeep of the landmark, Pam Stern, the building’s owner, had the chest measured for a giant bra: 20 feet of silk, Spandex, and underwiring. (Get it? A chest of drawers.) HanesBrands, Inc., maker of Playtex bras, sent engineers over to take the chest’s measurements. Whether the city will permit the chest to wear the bra remains unknown at this time.

…A CHICKEN

(Image credit: Flicker user Brent Moore)

A 56-foot tall chicken head juts from the roof of the Kentucky Fried Chicken at the corner of Roswell Street and Cobb Parkway in Marietta, Georgia. Locals use it as a landmark when giving directions: “Turn right, after you pass the Big Chicken.” The architectural whimsy, built in 1963, was a Johnny Reb’s Chick, Chuck and Shakes fried-chicken restaurant until 1966, when the owner, Tubby Davis,  sold it to his brother, who turned it into a KFC. In 1993 the chicken suffered wind damage and might have been demolished were it not considered too important to be axed. Reason: pilots use the building as a reference point when approaching Atlanta and nearby Dobbins Air Reserve Base.

…A NAUTILUS SHELL

In 2006 a young family in Mexico City decided to ditch their conventional home and build one more in harmony with nature. From above, their new house looks like the perfect spiral of a nautilus shell. From the lawn, it looks like a soft-serve ice cream sundae. The frame for the building consists of  steel-reinforced chicken wire that’s covered in a two-inch layer of stucco. Stained glass bubbles in the walls sparkle like sunlight on water. A stone walkway spirals from room to room on a bed of live plants, creating the sensation of floating above the ocean floor. The bathroom’s sandy walls and blue tile offers user the illusion of being underwater. Family members say the Nautilus House makes them feel “like a mollusk in its shell, moving from one chamber to another.”

…MR. ROBOTO

(Image credit: Oran Viriyincy)

In 1986 Thai architect Sumet Jumsai designed the new Bank of Asia in Bangkok to reflect the computerization of banking going on at the time. Result: the $10 million, 20-story building looks like a giant LEGO robot. The “robot” has two antennae that serve as lightning rods, and glass eyes with louvered metallic lids that serve as windows. Jumsai wanted the building to “free the spirit from the present architectual intellectual impasse and propel it forward to the next century.” The inspiration for what has been called a post-high-tech miracle? His son’s toy robot.

…AN EGG

(Image credit: vercruysse frederik)

The owner of a European ad agency wanted to add an office next to her lakeside home in Belgium, and hired the design firm dmvA to come up with something organic-looking that could be built without cutting down a single tree. Local authorities refused to issue a building permit because city council members thought the design was too weird: The building -nicknamed “the blob”-  looked like a giant white egg. To get around the council, the designer turned the egg into a mobile unit so it would qualify as a work or art, not a building. The structure consists of a wooden frame covered with a polyester skin and an ultra-modern grid of niches molded into the interior for storage. The interior features lighting, a sleeping shelf, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The pointy end of the egg (the egg is on its side)opens up to create a porch. After the project, known as the Blob VB3, was completed, the unique structure appeared in a Belgian newspaper under the heading “Art skirts building regulations.” The next day, some at the building council showed up to warn the owner that if the egg was placed near the house, there would be consequences. Dubbed the “rovin’ ovum” by its fans, the Blob VB3 went on the auction block in 2010. (No word as to whether anyone has the huevos to buy it.)

…A HOUSE ON STILTS

Architect Terunobu Fujimori has a weird way of getting approval for his unique designs. He invites clients to join him in his tiny Takasugi-an -his “Too-High Teahouse.” Perched 20 feet in the air, the 30-square-foot private teahouse in Chino, Japan, balances on two forked tree trunks that resemble spindly chicken legs. Once clients have climbed the ladders to the house, he shows them his hand-drawn plans. “If they don’t like my design, I shake the building!” he says with a laugh.

…A PEACH

The 150-foot-tall water tower outside Gaffney, South Carolina, was built to catch the eye of motorists speeding by along I-85. It looks like a gigantic peach. In 1981, when the tower went up, the local economy depended on peach orchards. Townspeople wanted it known that Cherokee County, where Gaffney is located, grew more peaches per year than the whole state of Georgia (the “Peach State”). Macro-artist Peter Freudenberg studied local peaches for many hours and used 50 gallons of paint in 20 different colors to make the peach hyper-realistic. Features include a 7-ton, 60-foot-long leaf, and an enormous vertical cleft in its backside, leading to the nickname “Moon over Gaffney.”

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The article above was reprinted with permission from the newest volume of the Bathroom reader series, Uncle John’s 24-Karat Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

Looking at some of the most beautiful libraries in the world, like the Wiblingen Monastery Library in Ulm, Germany seen above, is truly fascinating. But if you’re like me, it might also make you feel depressed about the sad state of your town’s library.

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That’s right, if you’ve always wanted to see the stunning Indian landmark, you’d better make plans to see it soon because experts are warning that it could fall down in as little as two years thanks to a crumbling wooden foundation. Cracks are already showing up in the monument’s marble walls.

Have you seen the Taj Mahal? If so, is it worth a visit in your opinion?

Link Via Flavorwire

Feast your eyes on some fantastic old architecture in New York City. The Trinity Building was built in 1904-1907. It is flanked by the U.S. Realty Building, constructed at the same time (making them the original “twin towers”) and the older Trinity Church, rebuilt in 1800. The Trinity Building has classic Art Deco detailing that gives it a timeless look. The three buildings have all been photographed extensively over the last 100 years, which you can see at Dark Roasted Blend. Link

There isn’t too much info on all of these amazingly weird buildings over on Bored Panda, but the name of each building is there if you want to learn more about the places. For example, this is The Crooked House in Poland.

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BuzzFeed has a great list of cool hotel rooms, and while most of them have stunning interiors, I have to say that this cow-shaped room is the one that really caught my attention. It’s apparently in Belgium, but I couldn’t find much else about it. Anyone care to fill me in?

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Baubotanik, or botanic architecture is the art and science of creating structures out of growing plants. A program at the University of Stuttgart in Germany explores the possibilities of this new architecture.

The architects begin with stabilizing elements—iron rings, polyester bands, steel grids—and environmentally-appropriate plants that are designed to grow around the armature, becoming stronger at structurally-critical junctures. “Plants have learned to carry heavy loads,” says Ferdinand Ludwig, the team’s biologist and botanist. “We want to explore what is possible when trees are re-thought as building support structures.” After a period of natural growth, the reinforcing elements can be removed, and the structure is comprised entirely of plant elements. By leveraging the “constructive intelligence” of organic forms, Baubotanik architects have designed a pedestrian bridge, a bird-watching house, and a willow pavilion.

Read more about these projects at Garden Design. Link -Thanks, Claire!

Skyscrapers are a huge investment to build, are placed on pricey urban real estate, and contain lots of rental space, so you might be surprised that any are completely unused. Some are victims of poor planning; others are abandoned when the area suffers financial decline. Some of the older towers are unsafe due to age or toxic materials. The building shown here is Michigan Central Station in Detroit, built in 1913. See twelve such empty buildings at Web Urbanist. Link -via Rue the Day

Foolproof advertising is when your entire building brags about your product -and it’s visible from far away. Still, it may tend to limit your customers when you sell the location. Mental_floss takes a look at ten such attention-grabbing buildings from this milk bottle ice cream stand to an 85-foot chest of drawers! Link

Last summer David Byrne of The Talking Heads converted an entire building, the Camden Roundhouse in London, into a musical instrument! He connected every pipe, pillar, and beam to a keyboard, from which you can make them vibrate and produce their individual sounds. This is one only of several large and different musical instruments made out of structures such as silos, a tower, a synagogue, and more at Dark Roasted Blend. Link

(Image credit: Mark Obstfeld)

Have you ever wondered what the inside of a nuclear reactor looks like? BibliOdyssey has a collection of posters showing cutaways of existing reactors around the world from the magazine Nuclear Engineering. The reactor shown is in Dorset, England. Link

Located at the Corner of Bedford and Grove in Manhattan, the Friends apartment building houses many New Yorkers who pay way too much money to brag about living in the Friends apartment building.

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This projection show was presented by The Darkroom, a motion graphics company in Aukland, New Zealand. This performance was at “a secret festival in the North East of England.”

– via mymodernmet

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by arbyn.

Web Urbanist just put up a nice collection of art installations on buildings. They’re all great designs, particularly the tentacle piece above:

An artist calling himself ‘FilthyLuker’ installed inflatable octopus tentacles in the windows of an unnamed building in June of 2009, making it appear as if the building is being devoured by a bright green kraken that somehow emerged from the sea and got stuck inside.

Does anyone know where this building is?

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NuFormer is a company in the Netherlands that creates amazing, 3D projection displays on buildings. Basically they manage to sync up the projected image with the building just so, and then they can make it look the building is collapsing, like water is flooding down the roof, like ghostly lights are dancing in the windows or twirling around the columns.

I’ve honestly never seen anything like it, and I hope I can see it in person sometime. (The goofy pop music in the clip does detract from the cool factor a bit, though.)

– via monstersandrockets

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by gregs.

I’ve always been obsessed with tree houses, probably because I never had one. That being said, I couldn’t stop looking at these bizarre structures at the very tippy-top of the trees. For more cool tree houses, check out the rest of those on the Now That’s Nifty post of Amazing and Awesome Tree Houses.

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I have always found skyscrapers to be so majestic, and beautiful. Here are some soon to be finished skyscrapers, as well as a few still in the design phase.

International Commerce Centre. West Kowloon, Hong Kong. Estimated Completion: 2010. Apparantly, this building was going to be even longer, but they were forced to scale it back, since city ordinances don’t allow buildings that are taller than the surrounding mountains.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by notoriousnicholas.

Abandonments can be amazing to visit, but are all the more fascinating when they are located on the edges of the known world. One of the things that sets antarctic abandonments apart from other abandoned towns and cities is the fact that the remoteness of their location keeps them preserved like few places in populated regions ever are – providing a frozen-in-time (forgive the pun) picture of what life was like when their inhabitants left or perished in the cold.

Does Antarctica have the most ghosts of any continent? On a per capita basis, the answer is yes. While the South Pole and environs doesn’t have a permanent population, there are on average 2,500 people living there during the year — approximately 4000 in summer and 1000 incredibly hardy ones in winter (source). While no complete necrologies exists for the Antarctic, at least 268 people have died there since humanity first decided it was a good place to visit. So if the ghosts divvie the work evenly, each one only has to haunt 9.68992 inhabitants.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Urbanist.

“Designed for the Hudson Yard area of Manhattan, Eric Vergne’s Dystopian Farm aims to provide New York with a sustainable food source while creating a dynamic social space that integrates producers with consumers. Based upon the ‘material logic of plant mechanics’, the biomorphic skyscraper is modeled after the plant cells of ferns and provides space for farms, residential areas, and markets. These organic structures will harness systems such as airoponic watering, nutrient technology and controlled lighting and CO2 levels to meet the food demands of future populations.”

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

This cool building in Osaka, Japan actually has a freeway going through it.

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