Unusual Life

This beachfront home’s dramatic pool lights up in vivid shades of blue and purple, creating an incredible setting. The pool features an adjustable swim current for when you want to break a sweat, plus a champagne-glass spa when you just want to relax. When it’s time to dry off, this amazing outdoor spot also has multiple balconies and a private rooftop deck for sun bathing. And the price has just been reduced to only $9.9M!

Mountain Googie, originally uploaded by Chimay Bleue.

This unusual building is near Lake Tahoe in Incline City. This was originally an Orbit gas station and has been vacant since around 1998. They’ve been arguing about whether to demolish it or turn it into a Visitors Welcome center for years. Most locals are not fond of the building.

It’s a great example of Googie architecture, modern and eye-catching, awaiting the future in the land of tomorrow.

Museu Dalí de Figueres. Dalí Museum of Figueres. SERIE 01, originally uploaded by ¡arturii!.

A short train ride from Barcelona takes you to Figueres and the fantastical Dali Theatre and Museum. Even lining up to get in, you know you’re in for an intriguing visit.

From Wikipedia : “The Dalí Theatre and Museum (Teatre-Museu Dalí in Catalan language), is a museum of the artist Salvador Dalí in his home town of Figueres, in Catalonia.

The heart of the museum was the building that housed the town’s theatre when Dalí was a child, and where one of the first public exhibitions of young Dalí’s art was shown. The old theater was bombed in the Spanish Civil War and remained in a state of ruin for decades until Dalí and the mayor of Figueres decided to rebuild it as a museum dedicated to the town’s most famous son in 1960. The museum also occupies buildings and courtyards adjacent to the old theater building.”

Dali Museum

Opera House In Pink, originally uploaded by judepics.

Sydney Opera House, lit up pink for Breast Awareness Week.

Bart Prince is an American-born architect who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is known for his organic and flowing architectural forms that are designed to harmonize with the environment. Pictured is a home he designed for Steve Skilen in Columbus Ohio. The curvilinear glass-and-copper-clad residence had to be beautiful from the air, since Steve comes in by helicopter.

Prince made this home to form hidden lower levels and shored it up with stone walls. Bananas, papayas, guavas and other tropical fruits and flowers grow in the garden, which is enclosed in a domed conservatory near the man-made pond and waterfall.

“We wanted everything to be transparent, not translucent,” Prince says. “There are almost no blinds, draperies or brise-soleils.” Windowpanes, which cover three quarters of the exterior, enclose the storm room. Glass guardrails “join the spaces visually.”

Beams radiate from a central column in the main living area. Above it is the storm room; below, accessible by a ramp, are the pool and garden area. Inside the column are the house’s mechanical and electrical systems. Sandstone quarried on-site was used for the fireplace, at rear.

The master bedroom, which has a private balcony, is set at the top of a spiral staircase that links the four rooms in the bedroom wing.

A 75-foot-long pool winds its way along the lower level of the house. “The owner wanted a lap pool running through a tropical garden, with palm trees and bananas and views of the sky,” the architect says. “The living spaces are arranged around that.”

www.BartPrince.com

Interior Seattle Public Library, originally uploaded by michael_troeger2001.

Here are a few cool photos of the Rem Koolhas designed Seattle Public Library. Following the photos of this library is a tour of other amazing libraries around the world, from Huffington Post.

Most Amazing Libraries in the World Part 1

Most Amazing Libraries in the World Part 2

David Fisher’s Dynamic Tower is the world’s first building in motion, where each floor of the Tower rotates independently at different speeds, in different directions, resulting in a unique and ever-evolving shape.

The Dynamic Tower is a self-powered Green building with the ability to generate electricity for itself through the use of horizontal wind turbines and solar panels.

The first skyscraper to be built entirely from pre-fabricated parts custom-made in a factory, the assembly process of the Dynamic Tower will reduce construction time, offer cost savings, provide an environmental construction site and increase safety for workers on site.

This is the Fennell Residence in Portland, Oregon, designed in 2001, completed in 2005.

The Fennell residence, as a floating house, presented a unique opportunity for design.

The imaginative use of curved glue lam beams evoke the poetry of the ripples and contours of a river. The expansive glass facade embraces the river and frames the sunset, and one accesses the deck via an expansive sliding glass door.

A master bedroom sits over a study and looks out over the living dining area and out to the river beyond.

The curvilinear forms create spacial differentiation that enhance the experience of time as light plays through the daily and seasonal changes.

Robert Harvey Oshatz, Architect

The Wilkinson Residence is located in Portland, OR and is designed by architect Robert Harvey Oshatz.

Located on a flag lot, a steep sloping grade provided the opportunity to bring the main level of the house into the tree canopy to evoke the feeling of being in a tree house.

A lover of music, the client wanted a house that not only became part of the natural landscape but also addressed the flow of music.

This house evades the mechanics of the camera; it is difficult to capture the way the interior space flows seamlessly through to the exterior.

One must actually stroll through the house to grasp its complexities and its connection to the exterior. One example is a natural wood ceiling, floating on curved laminated wood beams, passing through a generous glass wall which wraps around the main living room.

Dornob: Design Ideas Daily

The official name is Hang Nga Guesthouse and gallery, but all locals refer to it as the crazy house. And when you stand in front of its entrance it is easy to see why: this house is indeed strange.

The house is owned by the daughter of the ex-president of Vietnam, who studied architecture in Moscow.

It does not comply with any convention about house building, has unexpected twists and turns, roofs and rooms. It looks like a fairy tale castle, it has enormous “animals” like a giraffe and a spider, no window is rectangular or round, and it can be visited like a museum.

The Craziest Getaway: Hang Nga Guesthouse from Apartment Therapy

Crazy House from Touristino

Book the Hang Nga Guesthouse

Mexican architect Senosiain Arquitectos created “Nautilus” for a young couple with two children who after living in a conventional home wanted to change to one integrated to nature.

The land, with upward topography, is limited to the south, north and east by high buildings. The west adjoining provides a wide view of the mountains. The model work generated numberless changes until achieving the volume needed by the construction: the Nautilus.

The metaphor was to feel like an internal inhabitant of a snail, like a mollusk moving from one chamber to another, like a symbiotic dweller of a huge fossil maternal cloister. This home social life flows inside the Nautilus without any division, a harmonic area in three dimensions where you can notice the continuous dynamic of the fourth dimension when moving in spiral over the stairs with a feeling of floating over the vegetation.

Via Geekologie

The PCI Residence glows, literally — the home’s exterior is made up of 100 percent recyclable polycarbonate walls, which illuminate the home from dawn to dusk, as well as a custom LED lighting system. Chris Pardo, co-founder of Pb Elemental Architecture, says the design plan behind this home “was based on the concept of interacting with and utilizing nature.” Among other green building techniques, the PCI Residence incorporates rooftop solar panels, in-floor radiant heat, a rainwater-harvesting system and low-impact materials such as raw concrete, raw steel, glass, concrete board and bamboo.

Link to Unusual architecture in Michigan

• Architect Liz Diller shares her firm DS+R’s more unusual work, including the Blur Building, whose walls are made of fog, and the revamped Alice Tully Hall, which is wrapped in glowing wooden skin.

The Klein Bottle House is located in Rye, Australia and designed by Rob McBride. the unusual home design was inspired by its namesake: the klein bottle. this 19th century invention is used to describe a form which has no distinguishable inside or outside. the architects also wanted to move away from the paradigm of designing buildings based on orthogonal methods and instead imbrace the complexity inhernt with computer aided design (cad). while the desigm imbraced mathematics and digital design it also references
the vernacular australian cement sheet beach house. the house recently won the Harold Desbrowe-Annear award in architecture. it is made from concrete sheets and black metal, which are both folded and twisted
to create the multitude of angles.