Unusual Life

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.

New cultural buildings by big-name ‘starchitects’ have been going up around the country. Here are recent highlights from nine cities.

Amazing museum photo tour

One-time Russian gangster Nikolai Sutyagin’s home is certainly unusual. The eccentric former convict’s seemingly accidental 15-year project begun in 1992 stands 13 floors, 144 feet high. He claims he was only intending to build a two-story house - larger than those of his neighbours to reflect his position as the city’s richest man.

Read the story here.

Burj Dubai is now taller than any building in both the Middle East and Europe. Having reached 110 stories high (380 meters) it has the largest number of floors of any building, and when completed, will be the tallest in the world.

There are only 38 other buildings in the world that reach over 300 meters high, with 3 of them now being in Dubai.

Incredible skyskrapers from Frog View

Skyscrapers in HDTV

“For the most part Soviet architecture and design is remembered for its heavy block buildings and functionally Spartan designs. Its overpowering desire for conformity left little room for individual creative freedom. A notable exceptions to this is in the transportation sector. One can admire this creativity in the Metro stations of cities like Moscow and Tashkent where the coldness and sterility of typical soviet urban architecture is abandoned and costs are not spared as creative freedom is unleashed. While many of us are aware of the elaborate splendor of the Moscow underground, it is easy to overlook the phenomenon of the common roadside bus stop as an example of soviet art and design letting loose and becoming a little weird and crazy.”

Soviet Roadside Bus Stops

A cool collection of photos of organic architecture around the world.

Haute*Nature

Built primarily in the ’50s and ’60s, the dingbats are usually simple two- to four-story wood and stucco structures which are balanced on small beams or poles to accommodate parking spaces on the first level. They are found throughout the country, but primarily in California and the West.

Most dingbats are remarkable only in their complete lack of any distinguishable qualities. The builders of some dingbats, however, chose to decorate their flat facades with all sorts of gaudy decorations like tikis, cutout fish, planets and stars. Others sought to achieve individuality by giving them unusual or elegant names.

You’ve probably drove past them for years and never gave them a moments thought, but they’re beginning to garner some attention, no doubt because of the rise in popularity of Mid-Century Modern style.

Artist Lesley Marlene Siegel is a photographer, and she began her series, “Apartment Living is Great”, in the early ’90s, as the photographic documentation of apartment building names, bringing to light their importance in landscape and community history.

Mark Frauenfelder, a writer and co-founder of BoingBoing wrote the first article I ever read about the architectural style, How I Came to Love the Dingbat, first published in the LA Weekly. (Mark, who is also an artist and illustrator, is currently showing at Seattle’s Roq la Rue Gallery, where he has unveiled a series of paintings done in a storybook style with a dash of children’s manga and secret arcane symbolism, and is on view through December 2nd.)

The Dingbat on Wikipedia

More Seattle Dingbats on Unusual Life

Via Grow-a-Brain: Architects in the Eastern European country of Albania have solved the problem of ugly air contioners ruining the look of their buildings. By placing white blocks of color randomly over the exterior of their buildings, they’ve masked and blended the random existence of the real air conditioners and created an icon in their city.