World's Strangest Buildings

[M II A II R II K]

World's Strangest Buildings


By Karrie Jacobs



Read More: http://www.travelandleisure.com/arti...st-buildings/1

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Between all the bubbly novelties that went up in pre-Olympics Beijing, and Dubai’s feverish invention over the past decade, nothing should surprise us. Except that some buildings still do. And these eccentric edifices, breathtaking in their strangeness, are worth a detour—if only to ginger up your worldview a bit. Still, how can any building be considered strange anymore? Sure, we’ve had time to digest the CCTV headquarters in Beijing, the one that looks like a huge Möbius strip, and we’ve acclimated to the implausible height of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. And yeah, we’ve shrugged off our share of goofball novelties, like the Pyramid Arena of Memphis or the Eiffel Tower of Las Vegas.

- Sometimes strangeness is a function of amazing architecture where we least expect it, like the Selfridges Department Store in dowdy, downtown Birmingham, England, that effectively out-Bilbaoed Bilbao. “The mother of all magic mushrooms” is how Jonathan Glancey, architecture critic of the Guardian described it, perfectly capturing its hallucinatory character. More often, the truly strange buildings are the outgrowth of an obsession: the stranger the obsession, the stranger the building. Take Korean politician Sim Jae-Duck, for example. He has spent his life campaigning for clean and beautiful toilets in his home country and around the world. A few years ago, he tore down his own home in the town of Suwon and replaced it with a new house shaped like a giant toilet.

- The house, a showplace of toilet wonder, is named Haewoojae, which means “a place where one can solve one’s worries,” Korean for sans souci. And then there are the projects by architectural visionaries, like the Austrian free spirit Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who attract clients and major commissions despite the fact—or perhaps because—their approaches to design are completely outside anyone’s frame of reference. You stare at their buildings and marvel that they ever got built. Whatever the variety of strangeness, we’re truly grateful for these buildings. We think that it’s an honor to make this list and that it’s an extraordinary building that can shake jaded observers like ourselves out of our complacency.

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Selfridges Department Store, Birmingham, England






Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, Canada






The Bar Code Building, St. Petersburg, Russia






Ramot Polin Apartments, Jerusalem, Israel






Columbus Lighthouse, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic






Bioscleave House, East Hampton, NY






Oriental Pearl TV Tower, Shanghai, China






Spittelau District Heating Plant, Vienna, Austria






Elbe Philharmonic, Hamburg, Germany






The Atomium, Brussels, Belgium






Kansas City Public Library, MO






Container City II, London






House Attack, Vienna






Fuji Television Building, Tokyo






Edificio Mirador, Madrid





Museum of Contemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro






Druzhba Holiday Center, Yalta, Ukraine






Solar Furnace, Font-Romeu-Odeillo-Via, France






Cube Houses, Rotterdam, Netherlands






Lloyd’s Building, London






Kunsthaus, Graz, Austria






Office Center 1000 3 a.k.a. Banknote, Kaunas, Lithuania






Blur Building, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland






Agbar Tower, Barcelona






Cybertecture Egg, Mumbai, India






The Church of Hallgrimur, Reykjavik, Iceland






Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo






Montreal Biosphere, Montreal






Wonderworks, Pigeon Forge, TN, and Orlando, FL






Haewoojae, Suwon, South Korea