Architecture
Architectural Oddities Throw Home Design a Curveball
Get ready for your eyes to pop. From undulating curves to a twisted stack of blocks, these singular homes bust architectural boundaries
Among the hundreds of thousands of home photos on Houzz, most fall into a few broad stylistic categories. Designs rooted in traditional styles tend to predominate, and modern houses get their fair share, even though the two camps can rarely agree. Even in the eclectic category, many of the buildings are still very similar to traditional or modern/contemporary houses, with slight idiosyncrasies.
But what about the truly odd? Showing some of these houses was my goal in this ideabook, and thankfully, I've found a few.
But what about the truly odd? Showing some of these houses was my goal in this ideabook, and thankfully, I've found a few.
Take away all the curves going this way and that, and this house in Northern California might just fit in with other modern houses on Houzz. But why do so? They give this hillside residence so much character. It seems as if the various volumes and curves work in perfect balance, the convex curve on the left rooting the house into the site as the concave curve on the right leans over the slope.
A ravine of sorts sits between these two curving volumes. This is the entry stairway below a third volume that is also capped by a curving roof.
This view of the leaning volume gives a slight peek indoors, where we can see a curving interior wall on the top floor. It's good to see that the curves aren't only skin deep.
Also curved, yet at odds with the first example, are these DomeHouses from Korea. Where the hillside house is custom inside and out, the DomeHouse is a prefabricated construction purported to take four hours for a few people to build. Bucky Fuller might be proud, given that they are prefab, round (enclosing the most space) and extremely lightweight. I'm not sure about those square windows inserted into the domes, though.
Inside, the DomeHouse is just what you would expect: a dome. Furnishing a small, single-room dome isn't easy (note the way the wardrobe "violates" the sphere), but one can't argue that it doesn't have character.
This is the XS House, which I think is pretty cool—it's so basic yet so different. Uni Architecture used three plywood-clad boxes and shifted them relative to each other. Windows are cut into parts of the boxes.
Along with the windows, light also comes in through the gaps that are created by shifting the boxes relative to each other. Like I said: basic yet different.
This house is thoroughly modern, minus one detail: that curved window cut into the metal facade. Is the house smiling? Does Amazon's biggest stockholder live there?
I've heard of reusing barns for residences, but how does one reuse a concrete silo? From the looks of it, the cylinder connects the two pieces on either side, so stairs would be a good guess. The "hat" on top indicates a secluded loft or getaway as well.
Illinois Outdoor Playhouse
The oddest example yet might be the miniaturization of a modern masterpiece into a playhouse, as in Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House (Plano, IL, 1951). Mies supposedly said, "God is in the details," in which case the playhouse is unfortunately lacking — it is wood instead of steel and has corner posts where the original had none. But still, it immediately recalls the original in an odd sort of way.