Unusual Life

This image is unidentified, but is on a great design blog called Home Sweet Home featuring dozens of whimsical and creative interiors. Tip o’ the hat to Dan Dean!

Built in 1999 as a snowy mountain retreat, the two foot thick stone castle walls were built by laying up double walls of split ashlar rock to create a permanent formwork for the hidden steel reinforced concrete core and layers of waterproof insulation. Hydronic floor heat hidden in the stone and hardwood floors throughout the castle keep the interior toasty warm in addition to two stone fireplaces. Stone arched handcrafted walnut windows,stained glass, torches, and hand forged light fixtures. Includes 4-car garage, indoor pool, 3 towers, and real stone & carved hardwoods.

Castle is for sale and located in Sandpoint, Idaho. Castle Magic will build you your own castle on your lot!

You can build incredible homes with ferro cement. It is extremely strong and durable and the thing I love most is that you can build the whole building, walls, roof, gutters, cabinets, etc. out of the same material.

You build a cement home by first building the frame, which is made of metal. You wire rebar, remesh and lathing tightly together. You can make the design as fanciful as you wish.

Stage two of the process is stucco, covering the frame with concrete. Stucco goes on in layers. The first is called a scratch coat, for which the concrete should be a little drier than the subsequent coats. It’s called a scratch coat, because you have to scratch it up before the mud sets. This gives the second coat something extra to grip to.

The finishing coats are called brown coats. The stucco needs to be almost runny. It goes on a lot faster than the scratch, and can even be applied with a hopper gun.

Want to build your own ferro cement home? Start here at FerroCement.com

Caveland is the home of William Sleeper and Family. They have built this home in a cave found on ebay over the last five years.

Curt and Deborah Sleeper find themselves in a predicament millions of other Americans find themselves in these days: they own a house in which the mortgage payment is about to reset and they can’t afford it. Except the Sleepers’ house isn’t just any old house. It’s a cave, and a pretty cool one at that. Boing Boing ran a post on the cave house last Friday. Apparently, it’s listed for sale on eBay as “Unique Cave Home over 15,000 sf. Beautiful setting — 2.8 acres, commerical or residential.” Starting bid is $300,000.

Read story on Zillow blog by Diane Tuman

CAVELAND

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.

Clingstone, an unusual, 103-year-old mansion in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, survives through the love and hard work of family and friends. Via Grow-a-Brain

Nit Wit Ridge is a house built entirely of junk located between San Francisco and LA near the Pacific Ocean. It is considered a fine example of folk art and is a California State Historic Landmark. It was built by one man (Arthur Harold Beal) over the course of 51 years.

Art began his creation in 1928 by digging out a hillside in Cambria. He used rocks, abalone shells, wood, beer cans, tile, car parts and other assorted junk to create his “Hearst Castle”.

Nit Wit Ridge is in Cambria (881 Hillcrest Drive), about 20 minutes north of Cayucos. Tours are available from the owners (Michael and Stacey O’Malley) by calling 805-927-2690. To get there, take highway 1 north to Cambria. Turn right at Main Street and continue through East Village into West Village. Turn right on Cornwall Street and then right again on Hillcrest Drive.

Via Weird Universe

MoMA’s Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling

California Realtor Matt Heafey has a high-quality photo set of weird homes around the world, via Zillow.

Buckminster Fuller with models of the Standard of Living Package and Skybreak Dome. “[Fuller] believed that his task was to innovate in such a way as to benefit the greatest number of people using the least amount of resources,” Kolbert writes in The New Yorker. There is an exhibition about Fuller at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “By staging the retrospective, the Whitney raises—or, really, one should say, re-raises—the question of Fuller’s relevance,” Kolbert writes. “Was he an important cultural figure because he produced inventions of practical value or because he didn’t?”

The New Yorker Bucky Fuller slideshow

Buckminster Fuller Exhibit at The Whitney

Artists Madeline Gins and Arakawa say that their house in East Hampton, N.Y., opposes death and may extend life. Originally called the Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa), they say its architecture makes people use their bodies in unexpected ways to maintain equilibrium, and that will stimulate their immune systems.

The couple also built nine “reversible destiny” loft-style apartments in Mitaka, Japan.

The house on Long Island, which cost more than $2 million to build, is their first completed architectural work in the United States - and, as they see it, a turning point in their campaign to defeat mortality.

The house, which is still unoccupied, was commissioned in the late 1990s by a friend who sold the property to an anonymous group of investors after the project dragged on and costs mounted. But it is ready, Arakawa and Ms. Gins said, to begin rejuvenating whoever moves in.

In addition to the floor, which threatens to send the un-sure-footed hurtling into the sunken kitchen at the center of the house, the design features walls painted, somewhat disorientingly, in about 40 colors; multiple levels meant to induce the sensation of being in two spaces at once; windows at varying heights; oddly angled light switches and outlets; and an open flow of traffic, unhindered by interior doors or their adjunct, privacy.

All of it is meant to keep the occupants on guard. Comfort, the thinking goes, is a precursor to death; the house is meant to lead its users into a perpetually “tentative” relationship with their surroundings, and thereby keep them young.

A House Not for Mere Mortals from the New York Times

Immortality House Audio Slideshow

(Thanks to Earl and Rhonda Brown for the tip!)

Photos of Saddam Hussein’s palace in his hometown of Tikrit.