Category:
Architecture
This was the finishing touch to Fuller's Dymaxion House.
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Problem: Quality housing is too expensive for the average person.
Answer: The Dymaxion House!
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Carrabelle is a small town about 20 miles from Apalachicola. It is also home to the world's smallest police station
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Murals are usually large works of art or paintings used to hide an unsightly wall. But Artist Rufus B. Seder has taken murals to the next level. His Lifetile murals are "movies for a wall". Lifetiles don't use electricity, moving parts or tricky lighting. They are optical illusions, with flair. You can
read more about Lifetiles, but I recommend
watching the video.
Be the envy of every other survivalist and have your own converted cold-war Atlas-F missile silo home! You too can live in complete cold war safety and luxury. The converted missile launch site is marketed as a getaway, luxury home, and in my opinion is every survivalist’s dream. The property includes its own private runway, 2000 square foot luxury home above ground with master suite, a private airstrip, and a hangar/garage. Below ground, past the 2000 lb. blast doors and three feet of reinforced concrete built to withstand brutal missile assaults lies two additional stories of space in the converted control room where you will find two additional suites with luxury marble Jacuzzi baths and an escape hatch to your private hangar.
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Apparently this theater was never constructed, but it's an interesting idea. Though anyone with a fear of heights would want to avoid the ceiling seats. From the
Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1901:
A Globe Theater Which is Really a Globe
Many theaters have been called "The Globe," which name, as describing their shape, is a misnomer, but a Kansas City man has planned the real thing in a globe theater, for the interior is spherical. The great advantage which this ingenious man, Lloyd Brown, asserts for this theater is not only that the stage will be visible from all seats, but what is said on the stage may be heard equally well in all parts of the house. The acoustic properties of a theater are as important as the stage properties and are harder to obtain. Frequently persons sitting back under gallery or balcony are unable to hear the players.
The seats in this "globe" theater will begin at the stage, which will occupy the usual place, and rise gradually, going backward on the interior of the sphere until the highest point is reached. There will be only two rows of seats all around, and the upper hanging ones will be suspended on steel beams.
From the Feb. 9, 1948 issue of
Life magazine:
Young Man Stands on Head Before 48 State Capitols
For years sensitive citizens have loudly deplored the antique ugliness of the country's older state capitols. Now a hardheaded young Chicagoan named John G. Nichols, who appears upside down all over these two pages, has discarded words for drastic action. To illustrate his monumental distaste for the architecture of most state capitols he has managed to have his picture taken standing on his head before all 48 of them... He stood on his head in rain, snow, slush and mud and often had a terrible time getting people to take his picture. "They thought I was crazy," he explains modestly.
The CasAnus was designed by the Dutch artist
Joep van Lieshout. He
writes:
This house takes its shape from the human digestive system. While CasAnus is anatomically correct, the last part has been inflated to humongous size. CasAnus is made to function as a hotel, including a bed and a bathroom.
If you stayed there, you could say "This place is crap," and not necessarily mean it in a pejorative sense.
Also by van Lieshout, along similar lines, is the
BarRectum (aka Asshole Bar):
The bar takes its shape from the human digestive system: starting with the tongue, continuing to the stomach, moving through the small and the large intestines and exiting through the anus. While BarRectum is anatomically correct, the last part of the large intestine has been inflated to a humongous size to hold as many drinking customers at the bar as possible. The anus itself is part of a large door that doubles as an emergency exit.
via
corporeality.net
Old amusement park attractions are inevitably weird.
Consider the Crazy House once to be found in Felixstowe, UK.
These old postcard images come from the Flickr set of a fellow who uses the handle
Photoaf.
The house was part of a Butlin's Amusement Park. For the history of the founder, Billy Butlin, eventually knighted for his recreational achievements, visit
here.
Wouldn't you have loved to experience this park during its heyday, some seventy years ago?
A businessman has built an upside-down house in Trassenheide, Germany. He says that it's meant to be "an experiment for the senses." Not only is the house upside-down, but so is everything in it. You enter the house through the attic and ascend to the ground floor. I assume the plumbing fixtures are just for show and don't actually work.
Pics can be found
here,
here, and
here.
All original content in posts is Copyright © 2008 by the author of the post, either Alex Boese ("Alex"), Paul Di Filippo ("Paul"), or Chuck Shepherd ("Chuck"). All rights reserved. The banner illustration at the top of this page is Copyright © 2008 by Rick Altergott.
Category: Architecture, Bathrooms, Futurism, Inventions