Ever stumbled across a house that looks like it rolled off a movie set, or a hotel that seems to defy gravity?
Weird Buildings, with captivating text by Imogen Fortes and published by Hoxton Mini Press, is a rollicking photo tour of precisely those creations. It’s a celebration of structures that don’t just shelter us, but surprise us, provoke us, invite us to question everything we thought we knew about bricks and mortar.
Sculptural Homes and Whimsical Retreats
Casa do Penedo in Fafe, Portugal (1974) feels more draped in nature than built. Four hulking granite boulders cradle the little stone cottage—do penedo, “of stone”—so seamlessly that at first glance you wonder if somebody carved the house out of the mountain itself.
I love that its owners retreat here for holidays, not for status, but to immerse in mossy quiet.
Visitors still stream in, cameras clicking, yearning to experience the odd magic of a home born from geology.
A few time zones away, the Airplane House in Miziara, Lebanon (1975) skims low over the landscape with its stubby nose cone and balconies on both wings. With thirty portholes punched on each side, it’s like living inside a grounded Airbus A380—minus the jet lag. Architect Michael Suleiman’s bold daydream is part art installation, part personal manifesto, and I can’t help but grin at the sheer audacity of cooking dinner inside something that looks ready to taxi down a runway.
And then there’s the Inntel Hotel in Zaandam, Netherlands (2010) by WAM Architecten. Twelve stories of stacked, candy-colored wooden houses—workers’ cottages, a notary’s office—riff on local vernacular. I adore the nod to Monet’s Zaandam painting in that signature blue residence. It’s architecture wearing a costume, proudly shouting: we’re rooted in history but we’re having way too much fun.
Roadside Icons and Spacebound Fantasies
Some structures exist purely to grab eyeballs at fifty miles an hour. New York’s Big Duck (1931) began life as a roadside poultry store, its giant duck shape impossible to ignore. Today it’s a Long Island landmark, a quacking reminder that architecture can double as kinetic sculpture.
Then there’s Robert Bruno’s Steel House at Lake Ransom Canyon, Texas—an unfinished, rust-rich Corten steel marvel that resembles a crash-landed spaceship. Bruno tinkered away for thirty years, turning metal plates into something both alien and strangely inviting.
I’m mildly obsessed with the idea that visitors might feel like explorers, tiptoeing through a parallel universe inside that corroded shell.
Architecture Beyond Norms
What unites these diversions isn’t style but spirit. Weird Buildings doesn’t just catalog oddities; it places them in continuum with Gaudí’s sinuous wonders, Gehry’s theatrical swoops, Zaha Hadid’s fluid futurism, and the current wave led by BIG. These visionaries all share a willingness to break the mold, to fling open new possibilities for shape, material, and storytelling in built form. It’s a reminder that architecture can be bold performance art, not just beams and slabs.
In an era obsessed with efficiency and standardization, these edifices feel downright rebellious. They whisper: dare to dream, to play, to tinker with scale and silhouette. Their creators understood that buildings can delight, start conversations, ignite curiosity—and maybe even provoke debate over what “home” or “hotel” really means.
So next time you pass a mundane facade, stop and wonder: could my next getaway be in a boulder-cradled cabin? A duckshop turned landmark? A grounded jetliner-dwelling?
Share your dream destination below, and if you’ve snapped a photo of your own weird building encounter, pop it in the comments.
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Sources:
- www.wallpaper.com/architecture/weird-buildings-around-the-world-book
- www.designboom.com/architecture/ducks-spaceships-weird-buildings-book-unconventional-worldwide-hoxton-mini-press-imogen-fortes-08-21-2025/
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