{"id":71688,"date":"2025-08-16T02:37:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-16T02:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/71688\/"},"modified":"2025-08-16T02:37:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-16T02:37:14","slug":"weird-buildings-is-an-homage-to-placemaking-with-a-twist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/71688\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Weird Buildings’ is an homage to placemaking… with a twist"},"content":{"rendered":"

What makes a building weird? A lot of us have accused our own homes of bizarre noises and quirks we\u2019re forced to live with. But that\u2019s all par for the course. A truly weird building, according to Imogen Fortes, was built to amuse, to stop us in our tracks, to force us to reimagine what architecture<\/a> can be \u2014\u00a0or all of the above. Her new book Weird Buildings, published by Hoxton Mini Press<\/a>, celebrates 100 years of offbeat architecture that falls in the category of \u2018functional and fantastical\u2019 thanks to its apparent desire to be something else: an Indian fisheries department shaped like a fish, for instance, and a glassy series of waves rippling along a Danish fjord.<\/p>\n

\u2018They ignore the conventional architectural script,\u2019 says Fortes. \u2018Many rebel against the rigid logic of right angles, rectangles and the restrained. Instead, they stretch and curve, bulge and tilt. Many feel sculptural and more like living organic organisms than static objects, and are as much about form as function.\u2019<\/p>\n

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The Wave. Photography \u00a9 Finbarr Fallon. <\/p>\n

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Inntel Hotel, The Netherlands. Photography: Pixelbiss, Alamy. <\/p>\n

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The Twist. Photography \u00a9 Patrik Bloudek. <\/p>\n

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Mirrorcube Treehotel, Sweden. Photography: \u00a9 Hufton+Crow-VIEW. <\/p>\n

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The Big Duck, New York. Photography: Randy Duchaine, Alamy. <\/p>\n

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Drina River House, Serbia. Photography: Shutterstock. <\/p>\n

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Taipei Performing Arts Centre. Photography: \u00a9 Finbarr Fallon. <\/p>\n

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The Basket Building, Ohio. Photography: Andre Jenny, Alamy. <\/p>\n

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Fish Building, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India. Photography: Exotica.im\/Universal Images Group via Getty Images. <\/p>\n

Readers will likely have experienced at least one track-stopping construction. Fortes gives credit to established world class buildings like the Flatiron in New York<\/a>, the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing<\/a>, the Centre Pompidou \u2014\u00a0along with Gehrys, Gaud\u00eds and Zaha Hadids that millions have had the pleasure of visiting. She gives pages over to some incredible \u2014\u00a0and incredibly exclusive \u2014 British holiday homes by Richard Woods, MVRDV and Charles Holland, who collaborated with Grayson Perry on the baroque fairy cottage House for Essex. But she pays special attention to buildings with alternate functions. In the Nordics, there\u2019s an Icelandic church, a Swedish sauna and a seed vault in northern Norway. And the US shows off what it does best: brake-screeching roadside attractions like Ohio\u2019s Basket Building, the Tea Pot service station in Washington and Idaho\u2019s Dog Bark Park Inn.<\/p>\n

\u2018They encourage us to approach the everyday with curiosity and a willingness to live just a little more playfully,\u2019 says Fortes.<\/p>\n

That said, there are several \u2014 the mind-bending Crooked House in Sopot, Poland, comes to mind \u2014 that you might not relish living in.<\/p>\n

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Casa del Acantilado. Photography: \u00a9 Luminar Neo.<\/p>\n

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Teapot Dome Service Station, Washington. Photography: Mark Kiver, Alamy.<\/p>\n

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Konieczny\u2019s Ark. Photography \u00a9 Olo Studio.<\/p>\n

Read next: A new hotel in the Algarve\u2019s wild west tells a different story<\/a>
\nWith this remastered Gaud\u00ed courtyard, Barcelona gets a new secret space<\/a>
\nThe Moore Miami begins a phased opening with its flagship restaurant<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What makes a building weird? A lot of us have accused our own homes of bizarre noises and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[463,56173,449,458,459,64,63,460,134,56174,56175],"class_list":["post-71688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-architecture","tag-architecture-book","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-starchitects","tag-weird-architecture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}