Bizarrchitecture

Going up, then down, the number of steps is different....
"I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check."
—M. C. Escher

When a building is shown to have been built in a way that would either be impossible to build or is just plain ridiculous. Things like upside-down pyramids or buildings in the shape of something that is obviously not a building (for example, restaurants shaped like their signature food).

Can also apply to vehicles too. Compare Alien Geometries, Not Drawn to Scale, Benevolent Architecture, and Malevolent Architecture. Taken to the extreme, this can result in a man-made Eldritch Location. If looking for M. C. Escher, head on down to True Art Is Incomprehensible by way of the stairwell which goes upward until it loops on itself. Also note Zeerust, as the decades around the middle 20th century contain several prominent real-life examples.

Common variations include:

  • Giant Objects: Buildings that look like giant versions of everyday items; most commonly a store that is Shaped Like What It Sells.
  • Jumbled Buildings: Jumbled assortments of walls, roofs, windows and doors;
  • Strange Orientations: Normal buildings with odd orientations (Leaning Tower Of Pisa being a Real Life example);
  • Unlikely Foundations: Regular buildings with unlikely foundations (such as stilts).
Examples of Bizarrchitecture include:

Anime and Manga

  • Rotte's mansion in Astarotte No Omocha, the building looks like some sort of giant randomly assembled toy castle, and to seal the fact that her name is supposed to be Rotte and not Lotte, Rotte's room consists of a giant "R" attached to the main mansion. [dead link]
  • Bleach--
    • Kuukaku Shiba's ever-moving house is an instance of Unlikely Foundations.
    • Also from there, Las Noches is a palace the size of a country, and Szayel has the ability to mess with the corridors (at least in his section of the castle) with a central console in his room. It also has at least one room filled with pillars that do not reach up to the roof and serve no discernible purpose.
    • Ichigo's inner world is a city that is completely sideways while the clouds drift down. Despite being his own inner world, it seems to bother Ichigo.
  • Digimon
    • The upside-down pyramid from the first season is an instance of Strange Orientations. The pyramid made a reappearance in the sixth season, Xros Wars.
    • In Digimon Savers, there's a mansion situated upside down on the bottom of a cliff. Oddly enough, the inside of the mansion is right-side-up.
  • The Medical Mechanica factory in FLCL looks like and works as a giant steam iron.
  • Seen in Yu-Gi-Oh when inside the pharaoh's mind.
  • In Blame, it's pretty much all you see, as most shots are primarily of the characters' surroundings and not the characters themselves. The scale of many shots is mind boggling, and the architectural style jumps all over the place, mainly because the place in question is a Dyson sphere called the City with an inner surface at 1 AU and an exterior at about 8 AU. Therefore, if a building can be built, it probably has been built in The City.
  • Yu Yu Hakusho

Yusuke: What freakin' architect designed this place? Who the hell thought this would be a good idea?

      • Suzaku, as it turns out.
  • The dueling arena in Revolutionary Girl Utena. Ohtori Academy in the movie is an example of Jumbled Buildings.
  • In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Dio's Palace has a tropic island in the lower floors, and a MC Escher-esque main room. It turns out to be the work of the Stand user Kenny G. Once Iggy takes him out effortlessly, the palace turns back to normal
  • Ronin Warriors: Talpa's palace contains an Escherian room.
  • Iria: Zeiram The Animation has skyscrapers that look like giant parasols on one planet (which may be justified, as there is apparently some hazardous precipitation on that particular planet, although the specifics are glossed over). Two vehicles (at least) feature what look like parasols with the open sides sandwiched together. One is a 4-seat craft that appears to have this as the drive housing, and the other is a space liner that has this as most of the hull (which means it could also be needed for the drive to work).
  • In a xxxHolic Non-Serial Movie, Watanuki et al visit an eccentric's house that's more like a (very deadly) funhouse, with fun features like never-ending hallways, trap doors leading to other trap doors leading to other trap doors, and stairs that can't ever seem to decide which way is up.
  • In Ghost Hunt they encounter a house very similar to the famous Winchester House, but with a much more sinister reason behind its construction.
  • In Howl's Moving Castle, the castle looks like a giant heap of old machinery bits, doors and windows, roofs shaped like crabs' heads and walks on giant mechanical "chicken legs". Miyazaki sure has a strange imagination.

Comic Books

  • Silver Age Batman comics used to have all sorts of Giant Objects building, which was also reflected in the '60s TV show: the Batman: Black and White story "Urban Renewal" has a writer/photographer documenting the change of the city's architecture to the more Gothic style and attempting to start a preservation movement for the older buildings.
    • In Arkham Asylum: Living Hell, it's established that Humpty Dumpty caused a huge accident involving all the novelty buildings, causing the Sprang Act to ban that sort of thing from the Gotham skyline.
  • Titans Tower, or the "T-Building", from Teen Titans; brought over into the cartoon, as seen under Western Animation.
  • The Emperor's Tomb in ABC Warriors; one section is a direct homage of Escher's Relativity.
  • Doctor Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum looks like an ordinary New York brownstone on the outside, but the inside is much bigger, and parts of it looks like M. C. Escher was the lead contractor.
  • Edifis' house in Asterix and Cleopatra.

Fairy Tales

  • Fairy Tale examples include the witch that lived in a giant Gingerbread House, and the old woman who lived in a giant shoe.
  • Older Than Steam Unlikely Foundations: Baba Yaga's house sits atop outwards facing chicken legs, often walking in circles...


Films -- Animation

  • Word of God is that the folks at Pixar calculated that the roof of the Pizza Planet restaurant in Toy Story would collapse on itself if it was built in Real Life.
  • Disney's Pinocchio has a tavern shaped like an 8-ball.
  • In Pixar's Cars, Sally Carera's Cozy Cone motel is a set of one-car garages that look like road cones, in an example of the Giant Objects variant of the trope. This was designed as an homage to a similar real-world roadside motel that is composed of plaster tepees. Flo's gas station looks like a giant cylinder head, but that's not so obvious.
  • The Nightmare Before Christmas. Lock, Shock and Barrel's treehouse might have looked like a real treehouse at some point, but Henry Selick kept telling the designer to push it further and further till it looked like it was about to fall off. Then someone had to build a model out of it.


Films -- Live-Action

  • Appropriately, every set in the live-action film The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953) is like this. Ladders to nowhere, stairs that close in on themselves or disappear into a hole in the ceiling, a tree made out of pipe and urinals etc. And of course, the 500-seat piano.
  • The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Holstenwall, probably the only fictitious town whose architecture alone is Nightmare Fuel.
    • O R'lyeh ?
      • Note that the best adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu so far makes R'lyeh look uncannily like Holstenwall with squid-statues.
  • Cube (1997) is set in a building made up of a three-dimensional moving matrix of cube-shaped cells, most equipped with various booby traps that will kill the prisoners inside.
    • Cube 2: Hypercube (2002) takes the concept to a whole new level, adding strange gravitational, and time effects, as well as much more. The matrix of cubes is, in this movie, a tesseract, which is made by extending a cube along a fourth spatial dimension. It's about as comprehensible as it sounds.
      • There are also bizarre quantum effects, which combine with the temporal and spatial effects mean that once someone goes IN, they will never stop coming OUT, with every copy having had a different set of experiences inside. This turns out to be rather important to the closing explanation of what the hell's actually been going ON in this film that's got a plot almost as weird as the setting.
  • Hill House, the house born bad in The Haunting of Hill House. There isn't a single right angle in the place.
  • The Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining is loaded with this, most certainly deliberately. A few, but by no means the only examples: the window in Mr. Ullman's office could not exist because a hallway is shown to be behind the office, the interior of room 237 is impossibly spacious given how close together the doors to the rooms are in the outer hallway - plus said doors would have to open into flights of stairs or the walls of the Colorado Lounge in order to be consistent with how the hall is shown relative to the rest of the hotel in Danny's tricycle scenes. Irregularities exist in the location of the kitchen relative to the lobby, the layout of the hedge maze, the window of the bathroom in the Torrance's apartment and several sets - the games room, the river of blood hallway and the hallway where Danny sees the two girls, are not shown in relation to any other part of the hotel. As if the Overlook wasn't scary enough already.
  • Jareth's Escherian castle in Labyrinth.
  • Mirror Mask is a great example of just about every subcategory at some time in the movie.
  • The Rocketeer: The Bulldog Cafe is an example of the Giant Objects variant. No points for guessing what it's shaped like.
    • This is an example of Aluminum Christmas Trees, since diners shaped like animals used to be quite common in Los Angeles.
  • The villains' ice palace in Die Another Day was made of... ice. Handwaved because it was set in Iceland; it would be cold enough for that to work at least some of the time. The villain melts it to drown the NSA agent inside.
    • Aluminum Christmas Trees: Those kind of buildings actually exist. However, Iceland is actually not cold enough for such a building to exist for more than a couple of weeks. The winter weather is very erratic and fluctuating, with frequent freeze-thaw-cycles that would ruin an ice building very quickly. As the previous example shows, northern Scandinavia is much more amenable to Ice buildings, because there they actually have a stable, cold winter climate.
  • A number of the locations in Metropolis fit this trope, especially the Eternal Gardens and the Catacombs, partially because they borrow from the Expressionist aesthetics of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (see above). Plus there's all those drawings of buildings shown when Freder talks to his father about the city, which were so ridiculous that even models couldn't be made of them.
  • The office building in Being John Malkovich contains a 7 1/2th floor with a portal into the head of John Malkovich.
  • One of the pirate outposts in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies consists of dozens of ships piled on top of one another, with doors and windows cut into their hulls.
  • Inception runs on this trope, including a folding city and two instances of Escher's neverending staircase. This is easily explainable because every example given took place in a dream world, and were played with specifically because of their real-life non-existability.
  • Dracula's Castle in Bram Stokers Dracula is essentially this, although on outside. Apparently distorted gravity doesn't help either. Portrayal of the castle during Jonathan's escape is nothing short of Escher's works.
  • Dario Argento's Suspiria and Inferno run on this trope, but it makes (some) sense considering they take place in magical houses of the damned. Strangely averted in the third film in the series, Mother of Tears, which made its house run-down and dark.
  • The bad guys in The Adjustment Bureau could, among their many powers turn ordinary buildings into messed up mazes. The Daily Show (yes, really) seemingly had a door into an in-escapable prison.
  • Dark City looks reasonably normal, but when everyone is asleep, the whole city would transform.
  • Casino Royale 1967 depicts East Berlin as something straight out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
  • The Jewish ghetto of Prague in The Golem, another German movie of the silent film era, designed as jumbled array of exaggeratedly crooked houses.
  • The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland features Grouchland, a city where all the buildings, cars, furniture and everything else are deliberately built at weird angles to conform with the Grouches' ideals of messiness.


Literature

  • Rendezvous With Rama, anyone? One of the greatest science fiction books ever written. Its about a presumed asteroid which turns out to be a cylinder. Inside the cylinder is a whole new world with buildings that look like ours and oceans and mountains. The problem? They're all built inside a giant cylinder so no matter where you are if you look above you see more buildings that are upside down! Or mountains, or the most disturbing and nauseating to the explorers, The Cylindrical Sea. It's an ocean that sits above you. With waves and everything that hang in the air. poof there goes your sanity.
    • This is known as an O'Neill cylinder. Greg Bears The Way Series uses the same concept only with such things as super tall skyscrapers supported by cables.
  • The house in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is Bigger on the Inside, and that's the most normal thing about it.
    • Jumbled Buildings: The house changes a lot.
    • Strange Orientations: The house appears to be non-Euclidean, and even changes size.
  • Teresa Edgerton examples:
    • The Castle of the Silver Wheel. If you visit various portions of the complex in a specified order, pattern spells associated with them act as magical shortcuts (e.g., if you go through the double arch behind the South Tower after visiting various courtyards, buildings, and gardens in a certain order, you will find yourself on the opposite side of the castle rather than in the place just beyond the arch).
    • Dame Ceinwen's house has Unlikely Foundations, as it is sometimes in the Marshes-Between-Here-and-There (as in The Grail and the Ring) and sometimes in other places. It seems to be Bigger on the Inside, although it's hard to tell, since someone inside the house can never quite see all of the room he or she is standing in.
  • In Robert A. Heinlein's short story —And He Built a Crooked House—, the eponymous house is inspired by the idea of a heretofore undiscovered fourth dimension of space, producing a 4-dimensional house 'unfolded' in 3D. Which is fine until there's an earthquake and it 'folds' to become fully 4D.
    • He plays around with dimensions again in The Number of the Beast, the ending of which features a giant party for characters from every possible literary continuity and alternate universe. To prevent guests from being pestered by them, the protagonists invite every possible literary critic and direct them to a buffet hall with topology best described as a cross between a Klein bottle and a lobster trap.
  • Diana Wynne Jones examples:
    • Howl's Moving Castle has...
      • Unlikely Foundations (although a wizard built it). It not only moves, but can bob in the air and hang partially over a cliff, as shown in House of Many Ways. The water pipes somehow bring in water from the hot springs out in the marshes (or the waste, if necessary).
      • It also appears much bigger on the outside than on the inside, since it gives the appearance of a full-sized castle from the outside, but on the inside contains only the interior space of whatever 'real' house it corresponds to (e.g. Howl's place in Porthaven, which only has about four rooms). When Calcifer is moved to Market Chipping, the room around the main hearth changes shape a little, and while the actual building it corresponded to had extra rooms (and the windows still existed on the outside), they seemed unreachable from the inside.
      • Strange Orientations: It's impossible to go all the way around the castle on the outside. The side that people can't get to seems to look out on our world; Howl's bedroom window looks out over his sister's house, and Calcifer says that the black-down version of the Cool Gate (which leads to Wales) goes to the side of the castle that no one can walk around.
    • The eponymous house in House of Many Ways was built on a spot where space and time were naturally 'folded', as was discovered by the wizard who lives there.
  • In Betty MacDonald's Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's house was built upside-down.
  • In Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter, the palace of the Beast has a subtly changing floor plan, including changes to interior decoration. The room featuring a star design on the floor, for example, has a different number of corridors branching off from it at different times, and the star design's number of points changes to suit. It is very disorienting to climb stairs within the building, because it makes one more conscious of subtle shifts. Most notable is the room containing the staircase that leads to the roof; its interior cannot be seen, because no light will stay lit within it.
  • In Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard, the building in which Werner is being housed has very Unlikely Foundations indeed; at some point since his arrival, Werner's body has become spliced into the building itself, such that if he is killed or removed from the influence of the nephilim, the building will collapse.
  • Terry Pratchett's Discworld:
    • The Jumbled Buildings of Unseen University, whose staircases go somewhere different depending on the time of day (later... ahem... inspiring Hogwarts from Harry Potter) and which includes rooms with infinite floor space. Any map made of the university is only valid for a few days, and resembles an exploding chrysanthemum.
    • The building we see the most is also the most bizarre: the Library. Noted for being connected to every other library and book store anywhere and anywhen, the geometry is so complex that search parties sometimes have to be mounted for lost students. There's also the bit where there isn't so much a ceiling, just another part of the floor with more books.
      • It is also mentioned at least once that no matter where one goes in the Library, one always seems to be under the glass dome at the center. Presumably, this includes when one is in those areas where one can look up and see another floor covered with bookcases (although it is never actually mentioned if those floors above you are places where you can also look up and also see the floor, or even if anyone other than the librarian can actually REACH them, despite people being seen in them)...
    • Don't forget the tower at Bugarup University in The Last Continent, which in a confusing inversion of Bigger on the Inside is taller on the outside. Or possibly the inside. Or is it taller at the top? Argh. It was actually taller at the top than at the bottom. From the ground and inside while climbing the ladder, it was about 20 feet high. At the top it was thousands of feet tall.
    • And there's also Death's mansion, which also has the same "bigger on the inside" and "rooms with infinite floorspace" problems. Notably, only the middle 20 square feet or so of the rooms are carpeted, and normal humans walk straight from the door to the carpeted space without noticing the area in between.
    • Also Empirical Crescent, Bergholt Stuttley "Bloody Stupid" Johnson's masterpiece of architecture where no-one lives very long as the front door of No.1 opens into the back bedroom of No.15 and so on. It has a low crime rate, though. Thieves generally prefer to break into one apartment at a time.
    • Speaking of B.S. Johnson, he also brings us a semi-inversion: Where a version of bizzarechitecture is that buildings are built to look like giant objects, Johnson actually designed a tea set that was eventually used as a set of buildings. The pepper mill is used as a grain silo, and four families (somehow) live in the cruet.
    • The original story (The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic) had a few examples of bizzarechitecture itself (such as the Temple of B* l-Shamh* roth, which was little-described but designed to have as many eights (7As?) in the plan as possible, and the Wyrmberg, which was an up-side down mountain).
    • Also the capital city of Krull, built mostly out of ships that were collected by the Circumfence.
  • Which brings us to Hogwarts from Harry Potter. Staircases that move, walls pretending to be doors and vice versa, and the Room of Requirement that becomes whatever is needed by whomever's nearby. It is also implied that the entire castle has magically grown and changed over time, which handwaves the fact that a 1000-year-old castle wouldn't be anything like what Hogwarts is.
    • The Burrow (house of the Weasleys) is this too, as described by Harry. It is mostly held together by magic.
  • Black House by Stephen King contains a house that has a lot of reality altering characteristics, as well as a gateway to another dimension. The house seems to be alive.
  • H.P. Lovecraft: R'lyeh from the Cthulhu Mythos. An architecture so bizarre humans go crazy even when seeing only a small part of it. Note that it's a pretty Flanderized description. In the original short story, The Call of Cthulhu, the Norwegian sailors who entered the city were pretty freaked out, but no-one actually went insane before Cthulhu himself showed up.
  • The book The Haunting of Hill House has at least as much Bizarrchitecture as either movie version. "Angles which you assume are the right angles you are accustomed to, and have every right to expect are true, are actually a fraction of a degree off in one direction or another. I am sure, for instance, that you believe that the stairs you are sitting on are level...."
  • In Dan Simmons Hyperion, the technology of the Farcster leads to this. The house of Martin Silenius had stairs which lead down to a tower on another world. The toilet was on a raft in the middle on an ocean on another planet as well. It is mentioned that albeit very expensive it is not uncommon to have such houses.
  • Armada, from China Mieville's Bas-Lag novel The Scar, is an entire metropolis built atop lashed-together sea vessels of all sizes and designs.
  • A facet of many buildings in Sthiss Tor, capital and sole city of Nyissa in David Edding's Belgariad universe. The buildings are literally what would happen if architects designed buildings while taking several narcotics at once, because they were designed by architects taking several narcotics at once.
  • The castle of the Good Magician Humfrey in the Xanth series was constructed using several plans and layouts. At command, the castle can assume a different configuration meaning few visitors see the same castle twice.
  • The Vorkosigan Saga gives us Lord Dono Vorrutyer (an ancestor of the current Count Dono Vorrutyer) Mad Emperor Yuri's Imperial architect: responsible for the two ugliest buildings in Vorbarra Sultana: ImpSec headquarters, and the municipal stadium. ImpSec headquarters have oversized steps leading up to its enormous front doors, guaranteed to give anyone leg cramps who tried to climb them. (People with genuine business with ImpSec know to go around to the side door.) After Yuri was deposed, Lord Dono retired to country, where he lived off his daughter and son in law, and went stark mad. He built a bizarre set of towers there, that his descendants charge admission for people to see, now.
  • It's theoretically buildable, but the eponymous House of Stairs is a rather impractical design, to say the least. The stairs go up and the stairs go down, supported by pillars, and at various places they reach small landings, but they never actually go to a floor or a ceiling. No walls can be seen from any of the stairs the protagonists can reach, though they can see other stairs, not connected to theirs. They can't even figure out how they got there, let alone how to get out.
  • Gormenghast frequently strays into this trope. And lingers.
  • Hobbit-holes from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
  • The Hotel Denouement from A Series of Unfortunate Events is built so that the actual building cannot be distinguished from its reflection at first glance. To achieve this effect, the building's architects wrote all of the hotel's signs backwards, constructed it at an angle so that the nearby lake reflected only the building and not the surrounding scenery, and grew moss and lilies on the bricks like those that you would find in a lake. This is all without mentioning the fact that the entirety of the hotel's interior is organized by the Dewey Decimal System.
  • Red Harvest from Star Wars. The main building at one of the Sith Academies eems to be this. The students and the staff would swear the tower curves in ways not supportable by everyday physics.
  • Many of the cities in Invisible Cities, in different ways.
  • The settlers' undersea houses in Dark Life are shaped like jellyfish and other invertebrates, because they deal with the pressure better.
  • In the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, one of King Mendanbar's ancestors was so fond of sweeping up and down staircases in his ermine robe that he had staircases installed wherever there was room, regardless of need. This resulted in a castle where getting anywhere involves a lot of climbing. The oddest case is cited to be a dungeon which requires a four-flight climb followed by a six-flight descent.
  • The city of Oubliette on terraformed Mars featured in Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief is built on the backs of titanic Atlas Quiets, uploaded human minds controlling gigantic robots. In result it's always on the move, and its layout is constantly changing as the Quiets move around each other. As far as bizzareness of architecture goes, it's actually one of the more normal locations in the novel's transhuman future.
  • The eponymous Wayside school.
  • In The Red Tree, Sarah discovers that the cellar under the house has some properties that it simply just shouldn't - such as the fact that it randomly decides that it wants to be an impossibly large, featureless cavern. The area around the title tree also demonstrates some impossible geography - Sarah and Constance manage to spend an hour running in circles and getting lost even though they were heading in a straight line to a visible target less than a hundred yards away.
  • In the pilot of Code Monkeys, the office hallways were deadly video game levels and the characters treated it as a regular thing. Later episodes dropped this.
  • In a setting with as-expected nonhuman alphabets (one in which many letters can become other letters when the lower half is covered), it's strange that the offices of the Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy are in a building shaped like a giant letter H, according to how Ford navigates it, not just how an English person reads it with the Babelfish.
  • The Mortal Engines series by Philip Reeve is full of this trope. Much of the action takes place on a number of 'traction cities' - enormous industrial, ziggurat-shaped vehicles with whole cities piled on top of them, that move around the landscape on caterpillar tracks, or in one instance, sleds.
  • The planet Bundinal in Starfleet Corps of Engineers. Due to the natives' love of symmetry, houses on Bundinal have faux front doors at the back - not a back door, but a door identical to the one in front, and looking equally important, even though it isn't. This is but the first of their architecture's aesthetically significant but practically useless features.


Live-Action TV

  • The Twilight Zone (1985): in "Wong's Lost and Found Emporium", the emporium manifests itself in the form of a door that appears briefly sometimes in blank walls throughout the world. Go through the door and you are in a very very large lost & found shop, with everything that anybody has ever lost.
  • Doctor Who
    • The TARDIS in almost every Doctor Who episode every made (aside from parts of the 3rd Doctor's run), which is "bigger on the inside than on the outside." It has miles of hallways, multi-level wardrobes with spiral staircases and balconies, a boot cupboard the size of a bedroom, laboratories and medical bays, and multiple swimming pools.
    • The serial "Castrovalva" is made of this trope.
  • Stargate SG-1: In the season 6 episode 6 "Abyss" , there is a jail cell where Jack O'Neill is trapped inside by a shifting gravity field that turns the wall into the floor.
  • The Brady Bunch: A client, Beebee Gallini, seems to like the Giant Objects variant; she freaks Mike out when she asks him to design her makeup factory first in the shape of a powder puff, then a lipstick, and finally a compact, complete with hinged roof.
  • In Pushing Daisies, the "Pie Hole" has a roof shaped like pie crust.
  • On Wings, Joe and Helen hire a famous architect to build their house for them...but are less than thrilled when the house he designs is shaped like a 7.
  • Warehouse 13 has the Escher Vault, which is, uh, Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • In LazyTown just try to find a doorway, window, building, or any structure or object made of only basic straight lines.
  • Although almost certainly not intentional, Fawlty Towers was a very Jumbled House. Come in the main door, turn left, go straight ahead into the kitchen, turn left again out the back door. Return to the kitchen and leave the way you came in, turn right up the stairs. Halfway up, there's a 180-degree turn to the right, and at the top you have to turn right 90 degrees onto the first floor. There are plenty of rooms on either side of the wide landing, and if you go past the two on the right, there's a little passage that leads to the next flight of stairs up with another turn right, which means by now you're somewhere over the car park. From the outside it looks like a perfectly normal ex-stately home.
  • Clarissa's father Marshall in Clarissa Explains It All frequently designs buildings of the Giant Objects variety, including a tooth for a dentist's office, to name one out of many examples.
  • Rose Red, being a Genius Loci and rather malevolent, is full of rooms and corridors that don't care for the laws of physics and are generally out to kill anyone within its walls.


Tabletop Games

  • Over the Edge: The Al Amarjan airport terminal is shaped like a cone standing on its point. This is a trick, though -- the actual terminal is underground and the cone is an empty shell. Said terminal was built with the assistance of coral-like extradimensional aliens, so the inside can get very weird in places.
  • In Dungeons & Dragons, githzerai monks make use of the fact that the Plane of Limbo has subjective gravity (i.e. "down" is whatever direction you want it to be) and make their monasteries Escheresque fortifications.
    • That doesn't have anything on Babba Yagga's house, which is an enormous hypercube inside a tiny house.
    • Some of the Demon Lords like to do this (since they have godlike power and can reshape layers of the Abyss that they control however they see fit). Lolth, for instance, reshaped one layer known as the Demonweb into a large, twisting maze in which some paths go over some parts of other levels and under others.
  • Magic: The Gathering uses this a lot on Rath. It's also used on Phyrexia, both old and new. More recently, the Eldrazi have used this too, creating superstructures from the hedrons designed to keep them in physical form (and thus unable to escape Zendikar).
  • Exalted has, among other examples, Malfeas, the Demon City. He is both the city at the heart of the hell dimension and the hell dimension itself, surrounded by his co-conspirators who have taken on various elemental forms. His body is made up of various strata of buildings, statues, streets and monuments of varying utility and habitability—and he is frequently known to bring said strata crashing down upon one another without warning.


Theater


Theme Parks

  • Spaceship Earth, the iconic building at the entrance to Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center. It's spherical.
  • Disney Theme Parks LOVES this trope. Also included are The Tree of Life, an oil rig platform dressed up to look like a giant tree with animals sculpted into the "bark", that houses a theater and can double as Large Objects. The Rainforest Cafe in Down Town Disney looks like a volcano, the Dino Cafe looks like a mountain, and the Circe du Solie building looks like a giant white circus tent. All Star Sports, Music, and Movies and Disney's Pop Century Hotel all boast a metric ton of giant objects related to their themes (it's a trope unto the hotels on the lower end of the price spectrum) and two pools that reflect a particular theme. Many of the hotels also feature pools with bizarre structures that house water slides (most are mountains, but a few break this norm such as French Quarter, which has a sea serpent). Disney also has a love affair with Roller Coasters in mountains, featuring no less than five different man-made mountains in four separate parks, and before we forget EPCOT, let's remember the World Show Case. And as a special note, this only accounts for the Orlando based parks, not even covering the four other ones around the world.


Video Games

  • Just about any 2D platformer is going to have this. When is the last time you saw a structure built like ones in Sonic the Hedgehog?
  • The Forest Temple from The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time fits this trope, mainly because of the corridors that end up becoming "twisted" as you activate certain switches, really screwing with your mind when you realize that as you walk through them, you stay on the red carpet decorating the floor instead of walking onto the walls or ceiling midway, and that the hallways twist in such a way that the doors shouldn't even lead in the directions they do.
    • Any Zelda dungeon/temple counts as an example but another particularly notable one is the stone tower temple in Majoras Mask.
      • Hell, ALL of Majora's Mask could qualify.
  • In the Banjo-Kazooie series, Mumbo Jumbo's house is shaped like his skull mask and feathers, an example of the Giant Objects variant of this trope.
  • In Diablo II, act II, the Arcane Sanctuary consists of many paths and stairways with Unlikely Foundations (actually, no foundations at all).
    • It's basically an entire level designed by M.C. Escher. Go down stairs to a level which then passes over the one you were just on, etc. Surprisingly doesn't hurt your brain as much as you would think it ought to.
  • Ibsen's Castle in Final Fantasy IX features Strange Orientations: it is mirror-imaged on the underside.
    • And it's nothing compared to Memoria.
  • In the first Devil May Cry, buildings and surroundings alike get really weird when you travel through the rifts in and out of the Underworld. If its not Womb Level, its this. Also happens in the second one to a lesser extent, and in Devil May Cry 3 there's the Temen-ni-guru tower. You eventually get to walk up/down/sideways a pristine white version of the Escher Stairs as well as a rotating "room" with a giant hourglass.
  • Some of the desert tourist traps that lay abandoned in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas are restaurants shaped like the animals they serve, in a representation of a real trend in now-dated 50's-60's architecture toward Giant Objects.
  • Some blocks of Tartarus in Persona 3 (and the Abyss of Time in FES) feature the Jumbled Buildings variant in the form of jumbled collections of floors and staircases floating in midair in the background.
    • There's also the whole sprouting up out of the ground every night bit... during the day it's a perfectly normal high school.
  • The Purple Moon civilization of Glacia, from Skies of Arcadia features Strange Orientations, as it is comprised of upside down buildings reminiscent of stalagmites. The city is itself located on the bottom of the Purple Continent, which is the equivalent of one of the real world's poles... except floating in midair.
  • In Sonic Battle, Tails's house is shaped like his head, in an example of the Giant Objects variant of this trope.
  • Constantine's Mansion in the Thief: The Dark Project and Thief Gold games manages to combine:
    • Giant Objects (in the Gold version's Brobdignag section)
    • Strange Orientations (much of the ground floor and the floor above it have interiors rotated either 90 or 180 degrees from normal, with furniture either fastened to the walls or ceilings)
    • Jumbled Buildings (some of the rooms and corridors that aren't of the Strange Orientation variety have oddly slanted walls, in one case forming a spiral pattern; some of the gardens also have this; one floor is a mixture of jungle-type tunnels, ordinary corridors, and corridors with odd perspectives)
    • Unlikely Foundations (one room is entered through the roof of a greenhouse - you come up through a pool of water inside the room)
  • The Sunken Temple in World of Warcraft Is an example of Strange Orientation. Built by a snake cult, the building features twisting passages, enormous spiral stairs, and a deeply, deeply unintuitive layout (going up two floors to get to a stair that takes you down one is a mild example). And all four of its wings are like that.
    • Blackrock Mountain is this. Why is there a dead end? Why are half of this city's walkways suspended over a lake of lava? No real reason.
  • Grandma's house in indie horror game The Path.
  • In the second half of Castlevania Symphony of the Night, you fight in Dracula's Castle... which is now upside down.
    • Not to say that his castle, when right-side-up, was much more sensibly laid out...
      • It never is, it's Chaos Architecture. Until Portrait of Ruin, all the save points were identical looking. So you could get Symphony's really nice red carpeted save points... in the underground caverns. And then there's the fact that half of the locations link to each other even if it makes no sense.
  • The Polyhedron in Pathologic. Lampshaded and then justified in that it has a massive spike through the centre that keeps the building up. This was the wound that became 'infected' and caused the plague.
  • Croft Manor from the Tomb Raider series is often as confusing, hazardous, and complicated as any Tomb that Lara tries to Raid, which is odd because it's her house. Secret and concealed doors are needed to go from place to place, and many of them are booby trapped, justified as Lara has a trove of valuables worth a fortune. It also suffers from Chaos Architecture, as Lara can use it as a Deadly Training Area that she is always expanding. Fortunately, it's one labyrinth with no monsters trying to kill her... Well, usually there isn't...
  • Every building in The Neverhood... especially the giant piece of toast with the fries sticking out of the top.
  • Psychonauts has very few levels outside the summer camp that don't have topography that would drive one insane. Justified Trope in that many of the levels take place in the mental landscape of people who are questionably sane at best.
    • Of special note is the Thorney Towers asylum, which starts looking like something out of the mind of Escher as you climb it but is set completely in the real world instead of someone's twisted imagination.
      • Justified since it used to be an asylum for psychics who had been driven crazy by the resident Phlebotinum. Also, no matter how screwy the landscape gets, your gravitational orientation stays the same.
  • It's quite easy to create bizarre-looking buildings in The Sims (and its sequels), either on purpose or just through not knowing anything about architecture. Buildings that break topography are more or less impossible, but through either cheats or removing load-bearing elements after building on top of them, you can violate physics quite a bit.
    • Specifically, you can build or edit any structure that has solid ground beneath it. Thus, you can build a 2 or 3-story house and then remove parts of the lower floor(s), so that the upper floor(s) is now partially/wholly unsupported. Taken to the extremes, the game will allow you to have a building that consists of only a 3rd floor+roof, accessible only by a ladder from a small block of land located in the middle of a swimming pool that takes up all of the property's land.
      • The reason why some people choose to do this is because when characters are near death, Death will come to collect their souls...but he can't cross water (and can't swim). So characters inside this sort of house cannot die.
  • The buildings in City of Heroes look normal, but they clearly aren't. Aside from the more mundane issues (Elevators only go up one floor, labyrinthine layouts that no sane office building would have), there are also some weirder things... (A door leading to an office building one visit can lead to a secret laboratory on a later one, sometimes within minutes of each other.) And don't even get me started about the one mission where an ordinary door in a Casino takes you to HELL.
  • Team Fortress 2, in accordance with its cartoonish, over the top style, is made of this trope in its map layouts. 2Fort is the most obvious—the opposing sides' bases are placed within a stone's throw from one another, and the power lines in the intelligence rooms just run from one outlet to another. User-made maps (such as Orange Box or Mario Kart) can be even more deliberately bizarre.
  • Silent Hill, being a town made of Nightmare Fuel, invokes this trope on purpose when you're wandering in the Dark World.
    • Or in the (for lack of a better term) Light World, for that matter. Silent Hill Historical Society, anyone?
  • Dawn of Mana in general tries to justify the layout of its stages so that people could have conceivably used those places other than an obstacle course, but the Very Definitely Final Dungeon is full of twisting hallways, strangely oriented walls and floors, and warp zones to vaguely shaped structures floating in space.
  • The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion uses this for the Oblivion Gates and the outdoor architecture in Oblivion (though less so indoors). The Shivering Isles expansion pack has architecture that is often just as sane.
    • Morrowind has both Daedric ruins, which are full of weird angles, and Telvani towers, which are giant mushrooms used as buildings.
  • Prince of Persia has some bizarre angles and other unexplained weirdness, especially in The Concubine's levels.
  • Realm Of Impossibility is a 2D adventure game from 1984 that features a number of floorplans that would be impossible in 3D.
  • The Myst games adore this trope, with such Scenery Porn delights as rock-embedded shipwrecks (Myst), prisons or wasp-nestlike villages built into giant trees (Riven), a cross between a pagoda and a roller coaster (Exile), elevators that travel horizontally underwater (Revelation), giant cubical tombs suspended over canyons (Uru), and Clock Punk-looking alien observatories (End Of Ages).
  • Dwarf Fortress can have it's eponymous fortresses lain out however you like; there's nothing wrong with having the barracks and apartment complex sprinkled with random tombs and burial chambers. And then we can move onto the physics, which are hilariously bent. It can start with upside-down pyramids, and quickly moves on to having entire regions completely undermined and only held up by a handful of pillars, made from soap. Tallow soap. Bizarre constructions, along with pointless doomsday devices, are a rite of passage amongst DF players.
  • Resident Evil's Raccoon City could fill up this entire page with all its Bizarrchitecture. What sort of insane architect designs police stations, houses, and cities riddled with mind-numbingly difficult puzzles and deadly traps?
  • The tower of St. Mystere, in Professor Layton and the Curious Village, looks like nothing so much as a dozen or so differently-shaped buildings stacked on top of one another. It's a mystery as to how it defies gravity, much less is safe to inhabit.
  • The Darco, or deconstructed arcology, in SimCity 2000. Purposely built to be weird and twisty.
    • All the arcologies in the Sim City series exhibit this trope to varying degrees.
  • Yen Sid's tower in Kingdom Hearts II. The tower is on an island floating in space, and the interior is a floating stairway with portals connecting to the rooms.
  • Little Nemo the Dream Master has the level "Topsy-Turvy," set in an upside-down house.

Web Animation

  • The CCC series features some pretty strange, but cool looking architecture, that clearly mixes a Mexican/Latin American style with a impossibly high towers, futuristic buildings and crazy colours.
  • In one Happy Tree Friends episode, the characters work together to rebuild one character's house. Whether the original blueprints would have created a normal house is debatable, as while the house is being built, Lumpy folds the blueprints into an origami crane, inexplicably causing the building to be shaped like a giant origami crane that even moves. In any other series, this would be pretty awesome, but since it's this show, there are virtually no exits and dozens of death traps.
  • Pushmo has giant objects in the shape of Mario, a strawberry, a duck, and more.


Web Comics

  • In Knights of the Dinner Table, the Tic Tac Taco restaurant has a giant sombrero on the roof, in an example of the Giant Objects variant.
  • In Sluggy Freelance, the Demon King lives in a house on top of a giant pile of bones. While suitably menacing as an Unlikely Foundation, you gotta figure bones make for a pretty unreliable foundation. There are also weird things that look like wisps of fire or smoke built into the house itself.
  • The eponymous structure in The Mansion of E.
  • All of the kids' houses (and trolls' hives) in Homestuck are built up to be impossibly tall by copy-pasting bits of the original house on top of each other. The results tend to be a little strange.
    • Even before entering the Medium, the trolls' hives were bizarre constructs, since a troll designs and constructs his/her own hive (with the help of carpenter droids) right after exiting the caverns in their early youth. The design judgement of one-sweep olds is questionable, as Vriska laments at one point.
  • In Girl Genius, Castle Heterodyne had a reputation of being able to reconfigure itself at will. The stories turn out to be true, and even though it's been seriously damaged at the time of the current story, it still can.

Tiktoffen: "The door we came through -- It never led here before!"

    • Here, Agatha has an impossible fork as a work tool.


Western Animation

  • Giant Objects are played with in The Mouse That Jack Built, a Warner Brothers short featuring mouse expies of Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone. Benny receives a flyer for the "Kit Kat Club", which is actually the family cat with little tables and chairs in its mouth. Benny thinks it is just a gimmick until the mouth starts to close, with them in it...
  • In The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, the Giant Object burger-shaped restaurant McSpanky's.
  • The Western Air Temples in Avatar: The Last Airbender are built upside down on the bottom face of a cliff—Strange Orientations indeed. Perhaps not impossible, but certainly questionable. There are also examples of Unlikely Foundations—a temple built on the cracks of an active volcano, and a prison built of metal on a lake which somehow sits inside a volcano.
  • Almost every building in CatDog is an example of Giant Objects—Catdog's fish/bone house, the bowling alley shaped like a bowling ball, the local taco joint shaped like a giant taco... the list goes on.
  • An episode of Futurama features Fry and Bender looking for a new apartment. One of the ones they visit and reject is an M. C. Escher painting brought to life, with the various doors and passages acting like Scooby-Dooby Doors.
    • Bender trips and falls down the M.C. Escher stairs, then up a different flight of stairs, then across another different flight of stairs...
  • The Bueno Nacho restaurants on Kim Possible have sombrero roofs as Giant Objects, and look positively mundane next to some of the things on this list. Also of note, deep-fried snack food king Pop-Pop Porter maintained a fleet of blimps in the shape of various snacks of his line. His favorite was shaped like a giant popcorn shrimp, but the corndog was more aerodynamic.
  • In Krypto the Superdog, the fire hydrant-shaped space station is an example of Giant Objects.
  • "Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? SpongeBob SquarePants! Not to mention some of the other Giant Objects that the characters live in. Presumably, they were discarded or lost by humans and then used by resourceful sea creatures. Squidward lives in an Easter Island head, Mr. Krabs lives in an anchor, and Plankton lives in a bucket. The only home that's realistic for an aquatic invertebrate is Patrick's rock. Note that the objects are only "giant" in comparison to the little sea critters.
    • Interestingly enough, Patrick's rock, despite being the most "normal-looking" on the outside, has some of the weirdest architecture on the inside. Sometimes, it's just a small flat space while Patrick clings to the underside of the rock (much like a real starfish). Other times, it's a shallow pit containing his furniture (bed, television, armchair, etc.). Sometimes, it's got all sorts of twisty passages leading away from it. And the rock itself? It always flips up on end, like it's on hinges. Possibly justified due to Rule of Funny.
  • The Teen Titans live in a giant T-shaped tower on an island in the middle of a bay. Granted, it's not as cool as some of the other examples of Giant Objects, but has anyone ever seen a T-shaped tower in real life?
    • It was modified into an H when the Hive took over.
  • Sumdac Tower in Transformers Animated is inexplicably shaped like a giant sparkplug. How this Giant Object remains standing is a mystery for the ages. Quite possibly because of the technology Sumdac reverse engineered from Megatron's head. No, really, that's why Earth has robots.
  • Phineas and Ferb: Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated is shaped like a wrench. Or Ferb's head, sort of.
  • Wakfu
    • Nox's Giant Clock Mecha is a mindbending clockwork nightmare, as much from the outside than from the inside.
    • The cursed castle of the ugly princesses is quite weird too.
    • Many of the decrepit buildings in Rubilaxia qualify, as well.
  • The eponymous Wayside Elementary school.


Real Life

  • The Winchester Mystery House. You know something is messed up when there are Staircases that lead into the ceiling. There's also Over Nine Thousand[1] windows. This is more than the Empire State Building. There's also a legion of hallways that criss-cross and go nowhere. Oh, and there are multiple doors with walls behind them, multiple doors that when you open them lead to absolutely nowhere and there's no floor. There's just a giant drop. And, to top it all off, there's a stair case that turns 7 times and is 150 feet long, all to just go up 9 feet.
    • Also, closets. One closet is exactly one inch deep, another closet is much bigger than a closet probably should be.
    • If that wasn't bad enough, it's said to be haunted, since Sarah Winchester, widow to gun magnate William Winchester, was told by a spirit medium that she must build a house to appease the ghosts of the people killed by her husband's rifles. She got together a construction crew and did just that, building 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from 1884 to her death on September 5, 1922. At first, the house, though enormous, was built according to a well-thought-out and extremely extensive set of plans and blueprints. Then the plans ran out, but Sarah Winchester insisted that construction continue...
  • The Giant Objects variety of Bizarrchitecture is actually the real-world Vernacular architectural style. Examples can be seen here, including the Donut Hole (a drive-through donut shop in the shape of a pair of giant donuts) and the famous Wigwam Motel.
  • Tatlin Tower, a never-built monument to avant-garde modernism, a vast radio antenna / monument to the Russian Revolution.
  • Horton Plaza in San Diego, which doesn't really have stories, as different bits of what ought to be the same floor are at different levels.
  • Just by Frank Gehry:
  • The Dancing House in Prague, designed by Czech architect Vlado Miluni? with a little help from... you guessed it, Frank Gehry.
    • A spectacular Real Life example of Strange Orientations is Orlando, Florida's "Wonderworks," which is built to resemble a stately museum... lifted off its foundations and turned-upside-down.
  • Lucy the Elephant, who makes her home in Margate, NJ
  • And what about the Guggenheim? The chase that introduces J in Men in Black goes through it specifically because it's so bizarre.
  • In Australia, the Sydney Opera House, and some of the Big Things, although not all of them are buildings.
    • Comedian Ross Noble has been stopping at these in Ross Noble's Australian Trip, including pretending that a giant oyster shaped car showroom is his Supervillain Lair; "Welcome to my oyster domain!"
    • Bill Bryson stopped at the Giant Lobster in his Australian travelogue, and has a conversation with an enthusiast about the others around the country, especially a giant anatomically correct bull; "Beware of Falling Bullock's Bollocks!"
  • Vienna's Hundertwasserhaus
  • Rejected Real Life example: The V&A Spiral. London had a narrow escape there.
  • The (in)famous Happy RIZZI House at the edge of the Magniviertel of the city of Brunswick (Braunschweig), Germany. The monstrosity was perpetrated by the American Pop-art commercial artist James Rizzi who designed it and the German architect who built the house, and somehow the officials were pressured or bribed to go along with it, despite everyone else hating it. The house's right at the edge of what was once the center of the medieval town, right next to some traditional timber-framed houses and the St. Magni church that survived World War II. It was supposed to look similar to the famous Hundertwasser House in Vienna, but where the Hundertwasser House is playful and colorful with gentle organic lines, the RIZZI House is just... just... stupid. Like a cartoon house in a kindergarten. It's neither functional nor aesthetic. Actually trying to work in there must be a nightmare. Worse, it's now right between the old church on one side and the newly reconstructed classicistic facade of the Braunschweiger Residenzschloss, first built in 1718, rebuilt in 1830 after a fire, heavily damaged in World War II, demolished and rebuilt as a shopping center in 2007.
  • The Milwaukee Art Museum, with its brise soleil "wings", which have a 217 wingspan when fully open.
    • Nearly all of the structures of Santiago Calatrava, the architect who designed this building, would be at home in this category.
  • In fact, just about any art museum built within the past couple of decades, at least in the U.S., will be of a rather unusual design, ranging from fanciful to paint-eatingly insane. Especially if it's a museum of modern art.
  • Appropriately enough, the Ted Geisel Library at the University of California San Diego, which looks like a cross between something from one of Seuss' books, and the spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It sits within a pit lined by jagged mirrors positioned at such an angle as to give the basements natural lighting.
  • Toronto (Canada) has the Ontario College of Art and Design building and the new wing of the Royal Ontario Museum. Oddly enough, both are additions on perfectly normal buildings.
  • The Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi built some very different but beautiful examples of gothic architecture, getting his inspiration from organic shapes. The best known is the Sagrada Familia, but one has to wonder about the people who lived at La Pedrera or Casa Batll?
  • The Fine Arts Center at UMass Amherst is supposed to look like a piano from above. From normal perspective, it's just a weird looking building. It says something when one internal classroom is so hard to find that it has to be approached from another part of the building, utilizing both up and down staircases to reach while touring the backstage area of the main theater.
  • Several of the buildings on the Sussex University campus are built in deliberate shapes, visible from above. For example, the library looks like an open book and another building is said to look like a cat.
  • Quite a few of the Ripley's Believe It Or Not museums are built with bizarre architecture. See the relevant information on the Other Wiki.
  • The Denver Airport [dead link] . It looks like a bunch of tents... very unusual. And it comes complete with a conspiracy theory that's just plausible enough to be entertaining.], although it is complete nonsense.
    • Supposedly, it's supposed to look like the Rocky Mountains, which... is sort of true, in an abstract sort of way. Other notable bizarre buildings in Colorado are the Coney Island Hot Dog Stand (shaped like a hotdog) and the Fredrich C. Hamilton building at the Denver Art Museum (which is very...pointy).
  • The House on the Rock.
  • The "Victor Hugo House" in Saint Peter Port, the capital of the island of Guernsey, where Victor Hugo spent the years of his exile from Napoleon Bonaparte's France. The house is tall, narrow, rambling, dark and oppressive, with secret passages and mirrors and optical illusions that the author of Les Misérables was so fond of. The view from the balcony/sun terrace on the roof is nice, though. Because it means you don't have to look at the house.
  • The Oscar Meyer Wienermobile.
    • And the Star-Ledger Munchmobile, albeit less so because the Big Dog is a van with a giant hot dog on top rather than a giant hot dog in its own right.
  • The Longaberger Headquarters.
  • The Big Apple in Cobourg, Ontario. There's not really much in it, just exhibits on apples and stairs to the top. The main building (which is not shaped like anything weird, unfortunately) has pictures of other Giant Object buildings.
    • They make pretty good apple crumble pies though.
  • In the upside-down pyramid category of Strange Orientations: Tempe City Hall in Arizona. Interestingly, this is not the only building in the vicinity of Phoenix shaped like an upside-down pyramid.
  • In the upside-down pyramid category of Strange Orientations: St. Petersburg, Florida's "Pier."
  • Altgeld Hall at the University of Illinois. Home of the Mathematics department, a running joke on campus is that you need to be a math major to figure out where your class is. It started out fairly normal, but was later given four additions, none of which had floor levels aligning with each other. The official floor plan shows 14 actual levels on three nominal floors, not including the basement, bell tower, or library stacks, but including the classroom with its door built in the middle of a long ramp, and the post office.
    • The Burrowes Building at Penn State is similar. Because of the way it's built into the sloping campus (there's a reason it's called "Happy Valley", after all), the first floor, which starts underground, rises into the second floor and then lowers again. Every story does the same. Thankfully it's mostly an administration building...
  • The Cube Houses in Rotterdam. They look stranger than they sound.
  • The Cornett building on the University of Victoria campus was supposed to house the psychology department and be modeled after the human brain. It has staircases that don't go anywhere and far too much basement than a building that size should. (Some sort of metaphor?)
  • Sheffield Hallam University student's union, the former National Centre for Popular Music. Seemingly designed to look like four curling stones.
  • The Giant Artichoke, a restaurant in Gilroy, California, artichoke-growing capital of the world. Looks just the way you'd expect.
  • Some Hard Rock Cafe locations have unusual architecture.
    • There have been two Cafes in Orlando, FL, next to Universal Studios. The original, opened in 1990, was not unusual in and of itself, but sat upon a platform that was designed to look like an electric guitar laying flat on the ground. The current Cafe building, located about a quarter of a mile away, is modeled in part after the Coliseum in Rome.
    • The Hard Rock Cafe in Myrtle Beach, SC is a pyramid with an Egyptian theme inside and out.
  • Before it went out of business in 1997, the Best Products catalog store chain was known for the ... odd ... architecture of several of its branches, born of a long relationship with an innovative architectural firm.
    • Its Houston, TX store had a facade that looked it was crumbling in the wake of an earthquake or other destructive force.
    • A store in Richmond, VA looked like its facade was peeling off.
    • Another in Richmond looked like it had been abandoned and open to the elements for decades, and had a small forest growing in it.
    • The store in Sacramento, CA looked like an earthquake had broken it diagonally and shifted part of it to the side.
    • A New Jersey store was designed to look like two store buildings, one stacked on top of the other and twisted at a slight angle.
    • Other stores included a giant terrarium, a store that looked it had been lifted by one corner and put back down crooked, another where the facade had been "broken" into several pieces and "pulled out" in front of the building proper, and one where an entire corner of the building would actually physically "break free" and roll away to reveal its entrance.
    • A short documentary on the Best architecture can be found here.
  • The Tianzi Hotel in Langfang, China is designed in the image of three Chinese gods. It goes without saying that the deities are fittingly huge, measuring 10 stories high.
  • Anything done by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, like the major landmarks of Brazil's capital. His most recognizable works (all in Brasília) are the Cathedral of Brasília, the Planalto Palace and the National Congress of Brazil.
    • He's also responsible for the street plan of Brasilia, which is probably the only city on Earth designed to look like a giant airplane when seen from the air.
      • Actually having Brasilia look like an airplane from above was Lucio Costa's idea and it was preferred over several other plans by different people.
  • Located in Espoo, Finland, Dipoli, a convention center owned by the university of science and technology, is often jokingly referred as being non-euclidian. The building has a very irregular shape and extremely few right angles (even the roof is slightly tilted).
  • In Ottawa,[2] in Canada, the Canadian Museum of History is built in a manner that has no right angles. It actually has more space than you'd expect. The same architect, Douglas Cardinal, also designed the York Region Regional Government building in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada. It is apparently a real pain, as it functions as an office building, and none of the offices are regular.
  • The National Conference Center in Virginia, built in the mid-70's by Xerox, has an odd terraced layout that's apparently even weirder on the inside. Legend has it that the complex was designed to be confusing on purpose to promote team-building among lost employees.
  • Any time you repurpose a building, you face the possibility that rooms turned to new uses will be odd compared to what you'd normally expect for that kind of use. It gets worse when you significantly remodel to try and make rooms fit their intended use. Just outside uptown Charlotte is the Central High building. It was a high school built in the fifties, and it looks like it. It is now part of the community college, and it was remodeled, as the needs of a community college today differ greatly from a high school in the fifties. It has some classrooms, but needs significantly more office space. From a hallway, you can go into a cramped office with a door in the back corner. The door opens onto a narrow staircase made narrower by lots of shelving overflowing with... stuff. It gets more open at a landing, but that doesn't help as the staircase ends in a blank wall. The building has several staircases to nowhere, and odd dimensions in several areas.
  • The Crazy House Hotel in Dalat, Vietnam. Designed by famously eccentric Vietnamese architect Hang Nga, it's a mishmash of fairy tale and surrealist elements, including giant animals coming out of the walls, ten foot tall mushrooms, and staircases that go nowhere - and a working hotel.
  • The Inntel Hotel in Zaandam, Netherlands, which is currently being built, looks like a bunch of Dutch houses piled up.
  • Usen Castle at Brandeis University has stairways and hallways that lead nowhere. Supposedly this is because it was based on a European castle a beneficiary fell in love with and wished to recreate. Since he wasn't allowed inside, he drew pictures of the outside and then the inside had to be extrapolated.
  • Ice hotels.
  • This [dead link] very unusually shaped Hilton hotel in Manchester.
  • Evoluon: the conference center. Or something.
    • Evoluon was originally built in the 60s to house a science exhibition. There was a short film about it, which might be available from the usual sources.
  • Oddee has a couple of pages worth looking at, although some of the buildings have already been covered.
  • Barcode building in Saint-Petersburg, Russia.
  • Woodeon skyscraper in Arhangelsk. Unfortunately building was destroyed in 2009.
  • Sanatorium "Druzhba", Crimea
  • Casapueblo in Uruguay
  • The main branch of the Seattle Public Library is rather unusual looking.
  • Körner's Folly, dubbed by some to be the "strangest home in the world", looks fairly normal from the outside. The inside almost defies description. Three stories are divided into seven different functioning levels, and rooms range from ones with grand high 25-foot ceilings to 5-foot rooms scaled down for a child. There are hallways that go nowhere, trap doors, murals, and a fully-operational performance theater in the attic. Jule Körner was a bit eccentric, indeed.
  • Bishop Castle- built by one guy over the last 40 years or so, and he just keeps on adding to it.
  • The Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. A "hubbed spine" between two older buildings with underground sections.
  • The China Central Television headquarters building. Also known as the Big Pants or Big Boxer Shorts.
  • Montreal's Habitat 67. Imagine piling up a bunch of cardboard boxes any which way until it forms a mound-like shape. Imagine someone decided this was the future of architecture and made it happen for real. It looks as strange as it sounds... and the architect still owns an apartment in the complex.
  • The Michigan League at the University of Michigan. It looks normal enough on the outside, but on the inside it's full of convoluted staircases and hallways that branch off in unusual directions.
  • Ramot Polin, a suburb of Jerusalem. The buildings there are universally weird: resembling honeycombs or egg cartons on their sides from the outside, the rooms inside are laid out in any shape but cubical. When you have a bedroom shaped like a dodecahedron, where do you put the bed?
  • Urban supermarkets, by virtue of sometimes having to be crammed into rather small buildings, can often take on very strange shapes; an extremish case is the Whole Foods near Symphony Hall in Boston, which is wedged into the bottom floor of a parking garage and is more or less crescent-shaped. The aisles don't really track, so despite the fact that it's a relatively small store, it's very easy to get lost in.
  • The Gate Tower Building in Osaka, Japan, which has the Hanshin Expressway going right through it. It is sufficiently cushioned and soundproofed so the workers inside don't really notice the noise and vibrations from passing cars.
  1. ↑ No, seriously.
  2. ↑ Well, technically it's in a completely different province... but it's directly across the river from Ottawa.
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