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| 3 | %% This page has been alphabetized. Please add new examples in the correct order. Thanks! |
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| 6 | |
| 7 | [[quoteright:300:[[Creator/MCEscher https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/mcescher.png]]]] |
| 8 | [[caption-width-right:300: [[UrbanLegends Going up, then down, the number of steps is different...]][[VideoGame/KingdomHeartsII .]]]] |
| 9 | |
| 10 | ->''"I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check."'' |
| 11 | -->-- '''Creator/MCEscher''' |
| 12 | |
| 13 | When a building is shown to have been built in a way that would either be impossible to build or is just plain ridiculous. Things like upside-down pyramids or buildings in the shape of something that is obviously not a building (for example, restaurants shaped like their signature food). |
| 14 | |
| 15 | Can also apply to vehicles, too. Compare AlienGeometries, NotDrawnToScale, BenevolentArchitecture, MalevolentArchitecture, and UnnaturallyLoopingLocation. Taken to the extreme, this can result in a man-made EldritchLocation. If looking for Creator/MCEscher, head on down to TrueArtIsIncomprehensible by way of the stairwell which goes upward until it loops on itself. Also note {{Zeerust}}, as the decades around the middle 20th century contain several prominent real-life examples. |
| 16 | |
| 17 | '''Common variations include:''' |
| 18 | * {{Alien Geometr|ies}}y: Buildings or structures may be made with geometry that doesn't make sense, usually resulting in a MindScrew. Optical illusions are commonly used, such as the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_triangle Penrose Triangle.]] |
| 19 | * AlphabetArchitecture: Buildings shaped specifically like letters. Prevalent enough to get a subtrope. |
| 20 | * BiggerOnTheInside: Buildings which contain more space than they occupy. The subtrope is probably bigger on the inside too. |
| 21 | * {{Faceship}}: A vehicle that resembles the face of its driver. |
| 22 | * Giant Objects: Buildings that look like giant versions of everyday items; most commonly a store that is ShapedLikeWhatItSells. |
| 23 | ** TheDinnermobile applies the trope to vehicles rather than buildings. |
| 24 | * Jumbled Buildings: Jumbled assortments of walls, roofs, windows and doors. |
| 25 | * Strange Orientations: Normal buildings with odd orientations (Leaning Tower Of Pisa being a RealLife example). |
| 26 | * Unlikely Foundations: Regular buildings with unlikely foundations (such as [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stilt_house stilts]]). |
| 27 | * UpsideDownBlueprints: The bizarrchitecture is the result of the builders looking at the blueprints the wrong way, and not realizing their error. |
| 28 | |
| 29 | ---- |
| 30 | !!Examples: |
| 31 | |
| 32 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 33 | |
| 34 | [[folder:Anime & Manga]] |
| 35 | * ''Manga/AfterGod'': Vollof's house is designed after his dreams and is more like a liminal museum, with half of the chapter being spent running through rooms filled with carpets, paintings, aquariums, houses, and some volcanoes. |
| 36 | * In ''Manga/{{Blame}}'', it's pretty much all you see, as most shots are primarily of the characters' surroundings and not the characters themselves. The scale of many shots is mind boggling, and the architectural style jumps all over the place, mainly because the place in question is a Dyson Sphere called the City with an [[UnnecessarilyLargeInterior inner surface at 1 AU and an exterior at about 8 AU]]. Therefore, if a building ''can'' be built, it probably ''has'' been built in The City. |
| 37 | * ''Manga/{{Bleach}}'': |
| 38 | ** Kuukaku Shiba's ever-moving house. |
| 39 | ** Also from there, Las Noches is a palace ''the size of a country'', and Szayel has the ability to mess with the corridors (at least in his section of the castle) with a central console in his room. It also has at least one room filled with pillars that do not reach up to the roof and serve no discernible purpose. |
| 40 | ** Ichigo's inner world is a city that is completely sideways while the clouds drift down. Despite being his own inner world, it seems to bother Ichigo. |
| 41 | * ''Manga/BlueExorcist'': True Cross Academy, on top of being pretty weird, is in fact rigged with various anti-demon measures, requiring the use of magical keys to get from place to place. It's not uncommon for characters to enter an elaborate, vaulted chamber through the door of what looks like a storage shed. |
| 42 | * ''Manga/CipherAcademy'': The main building of the titular academy is shaped like a colossal padlock. It is flanked by metal towers in the shape of keys and lockpicks (which serve to delimit different zones of danger in the forest surrounding the academy). |
| 43 | * ''Franchise/{{Digimon}}'': |
| 44 | ** The upside-down pyramid from the [[Anime/DigimonAdventure first season]]. Several similar pyramids made an appearance in ''[[Anime/DigimonFusion Fusion]]'' as ruins in the Sand Zone, though their ruined upper surfaces suggest that they may have been octahedra once. |
| 45 | ** In ''Anime/DigimonDataSquad'', there's a mansion situated upside down on the bottom of a cliff. Oddly enough, the inside of the mansion is right-side-up. |
| 46 | * ''Manga/FairyTail'' has the Sky Labyrinth from the Grand Magic Games Arc, as well as Pandemonium. |
| 47 | * The Medical Mechanica factory in ''Anime/{{FLCL}}'' looks like [[spoiler:and works as]] a giant steam iron. |
| 48 | * In ''Manga/GhostHunt'', they encounter a house very similar to the famous Winchester House, but with a much more sinister reason behind its construction. |
| 49 | * Sandman's castle in ''Anime/{{Gravion}}'' looks like someone took a fairytale castle, stuck an identical castle to the underside, then mounted them both on a giant pylon. |
| 50 | * ''Anime/IriaZeiramTheAnimation'' has skyscrapers that look like giant parasols on one planet (which may be justified, as there is apparently some hazardous precipitation on that particular planet, although the specifics are glossed over). Two vehicles (at least) feature what look like parasols with the open sides sandwiched together. One is a 4-seat craft that appears to have this as the drive housing, and the other is a space liner that has this as most of the hull (which means it could also be needed for the drive to work). |
| 51 | * ''Manga/JoJosBizarreAdventure'': |
| 52 | ** ''[[Manga/JojosBizarreAdventureStardustCrusaders Stardust Crusaders]]'': Dio's mansion has a ''tropic island'' in the lower floors, and a MC Escher-esque main room. [[spoiler:It turns out to be the work of the Stand user Kenny G. Once Iggy takes him out effortlessly, the interior turns back to normal]]. |
| 53 | ** In the spin-off game; ''[=JoJo=]'s Bizarre Escape: The Hotel'', Dija's House of Holy turns the [[HellHotel Hotel Haboob]] into a shifting maze. |
| 54 | * The ''Manga/JunjiItoKyoufuMangaCollection'' story "The Town Without Streets" takes place in a town with buildings that grow together to the point that the streets are gone and people need to move through the buildings to get around. Any damage done to the buildings regenerates within a day. |
| 55 | * In ''Manga/KeepYourHandsOffEizouken'', the town and especially the school have a bizarre, chaotic architecture of mismatched buildings, odd floors, and so on. Just as an example, the school's faculty office is in an empty indoor swimming pool, and the school's clock is where no one can really see it. |
| 56 | * ''Anime/PuellaMagiMadokaMagica'''s [[EldritchLocation witch barriers]] absolutely make no sense at all, which only adds to the weirdness. |
| 57 | ** Homura's house in ''Anime/PuellaMagiMadokaMagica'' is more abstract than other houses, with floating pictures and a stark white wall. [[spoiler: WordOfGod confirms this was done to make it resemble a witch barrier]]. |
| 58 | * The dueling arena in ''Anime/RevolutionaryGirlUtena'' is beneath a giant suspended upside-down castle. |
| 59 | ** Ohtori Academy is this in [[Anime/AdolescenceOfUtena the movie]], in the flavor of Jumbled Architecture that ''moves''. |
| 60 | * ''Anime/RoninWarriors'': Talpa's palace contains an Escherian room. |
| 61 | * ''Manga/{{Uzumaki}}'' has an UndergroundCity where all of the buildings are spirals, interwoven and twisting over an area of several square miles. [[spoiler:This enormous structure is an actively malevolent GeniusLoci that seems to underlie the problems faced by the protagonists]]. |
| 62 | * In a ''Manga/XxxHolic'' NonSerialMovie, Watanuki et al visit an eccentric's house that's more like a (very deadly) funhouse, with fun features like never-ending hallways, trap doors leading to other trap doors leading to other trap doors, and stairs that can't ever seem to decide which way is up. |
| 63 | * Seen in ''Anime/YuGiOh'' when inside the [[JourneyToTheCenterOfTheMind pharaoh's mind]]. |
| 64 | * ''Manga/YuYuHakusho'': |
| 65 | ** It's mentioned that the person who built the House of Four Dimensions was paranoid, yet insanity wasn't mentioned. |
| 66 | ** When encountering a lava pit in Maze Castle, this is {{lampshade|Hanging}}d in ''WebVideo/YuYuHakushoAbridged'': |
| 67 | --->'''Yusuke:''' What freakin' architect designed this place? Who the hell thought this would be a good idea? |
| 68 | [[/folder]] |
| 69 | |
| 70 | [[folder:Asian Animation]] |
| 71 | * ''Animation/PleasantGoatAndBigBigWolf'': ''Pleasant Goat Fun Class'' takes place in a building that has a spinning flower and a giant pencil. |
| 72 | * In ''Animation/SimpleSamosa'', Samosa's house is a giant saucepan while Dhokla's house is a giant cooking pot. For that matter, a lot of the buildings in the main characters' hometown of Chatpata Nagar are shaped like food-related containers such as pots and bottles. |
| 73 | [[/folder]] |
| 74 | |
| 75 | [[folder:Comic Books]] |
| 76 | [[AC:Franchise/TheDCU]] |
| 77 | * ''Franchise/{{Batman}}'': |
| 78 | ** [[UsefulNotes/TheSilverAgeOfComicBooks Silver Age]] comics used to have all sorts of giant object-shaped buildings, which was also reflected in the '60s TV show: the ''ComicBook/BatmanBlackAndWhite'' story "Urban Renewal" has a writer/photographer documenting the change of the city's architecture to the more Gothic style and attempting to start a preservation movement for the older buildings. |
| 79 | ** In ''ComicBook/ArkhamAsylumLivingHell'', it's established that Humpty Dumpty caused a huge accident involving all the novelty buildings, causing the [[ShoutOut Sprang Act]] to ban that sort of thing from the Gotham skyline. |
| 80 | * The Tower of Fate in the Earth 2 comics, shown [[http://i.imgur.com/Mr3cfgp.jpg?1?2336 here]] and up closer [[http://i.imgur.com/RlIzGXU.jpg?1 here.]] Even the wiki says that it "looks like something out of M C Escher's 'Infinity'". |
| 81 | * Titans Tower, or the "[[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin T-Building]]", from ''ComicBook/TeenTitans''; brought over into the cartoon, as seen under WesternAnimation. |
| 82 | ** Parodied in ''ComicBook/CaptainCarrotAndHisAmazingZooCrew'' with their "Z-Building". |
| 83 | ** Also lampshaded in a crossover between the Titans and the ComicBook/LegionOfSuperHeroes. Beast Boy mocks the Legion for their L-shaped headquarters... and a Legionnaire immediately asks what their headquarters looks like. |
| 84 | |
| 85 | [[AC:Franchise/MarvelUniverse]] |
| 86 | * ComicBook/DoctorStrange's Sanctum Sanctorum looks like an ordinary New York brownstone on the outside, but the inside is much bigger, and parts of it looks like M. C. Escher was the lead contractor. |
| 87 | * The "Future Future Foundation", an incarnation of the ComicBook/FutureFoundation from the future, is based in the Baxter/Retxab, a space station that looks like an Escher impossible cube made out of Baxter Buildings. According to Captain Wakanda, it extends backwards and forwards in reality. |
| 88 | |
| 89 | [[AC:Other]] |
| 90 | * The Emperor's Tomb in ''ComicBook/ABCWarriors''; one section is a direct homage of Escher's Relativity. |
| 91 | * Edifis the Architect's house in ''ComicBook/{{Asterix}} and Cleopatra''. |
| 92 | * The Great Beings' tower fortress in the later ''ComicBook/{{BIONICLE}}'' comics is shaped like a [[http://img.lugnet.com/ld/3673.gif LEGO Technic pin.]] |
| 93 | * The Changeling castle in ''ComicBook/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicIDW'' seems to have an interior inspired by an Escher painting. |
| 94 | [[/folder]] |
| 95 | |
| 96 | [[folder:Fan Works]] |
| 97 | * ''Bringing Me To Life'' being a fanfic of ''VideoGame/TheMatrixPathOfNeo'' example below has the same jumbled building/bigger on the inside maze. Max even thinks that, "It's like something out of an M.C. Escher painting." |
| 98 | * In Creator/AAPessimal's ''Literature/{{Discworld}}[=/=]Series/TheBigBangTheory'' crossover fanfic [[https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9812307/1/The-Many-Worlds-Interpretation the Many Worlds Interpretation,]] Sheldon Cooper unerringly pisses off Lord Vetinari and brings poetic retribution on his head. Vetinari, in as many words, concedes a science-based education has its advantages over an arts-based one. As proof of this, Sheldon is sent to do something useful for the city of Ankh-Morpork during his visit, which only a true scientific genius is capable of. He is placed in charge of Empirical Crescent (see literature, below) and invited to make sense of the place. As this has baffled the Discworld's finest intellects and carries overtures of actual hazard, it is possible Vetinari got very pissed off indeed. Most of the visiting Caltech crew, with the exception of Penny and Leonard, go over there with him and it becomes their apartment block whilst on the Disc. With interesting and strange results. |
| 99 | * ''Fanfic/HauntedMansionAndTheHatboxGhost'': The titular Haunted Mansion is a BigLabyrinthineBuilding with two examples: |
| 100 | ** The rooms the guests are allowed to visit might appear to make sense on the surface, but the Mansion is really absurdly BiggerOnTheInside with a [[TheMaze maze]] of corridors in which even the ghosts sometimes get lost. |
| 101 | ** The Endless Staircases are Escher-like stairs that throw sensibility out the window altogether. They exist in their own limbo-like dimension and connect all haunted locations in the world together. They're even worse than the Corridors, and only the Hatbox Ghost knows how to navigate them in the regular cast. |
| 102 | * [[LampshadeHanging Lampshaded]] in ''Fanfic/WhenTheBrushHitsTheCanvas'', where Link wonders just how the BottomlessPits in the dungeons work and decides to stop thinking about it. |
| 103 | * ''Fanfic/{{Outcast}}'' is set in an ElaborateUniversityHigh[=/=]BoardingSchool campus of St. Hetalia Academy for Boys, located in a huge lakefront mansion hidden away in the woods. The school building's design can best be described as a hodgepodge of architectural styles spanning the globe, reflecting the school's mission to bring together the best and brightest students from around the world. The result is said to be strangely beautiful: |
| 104 | -->"Big as a castle, it was built on a massive foundation of suitcase-sized stone bricks. But above that there was no unified style. Some parts were made of brick, others of wood, and others of what looked like concrete. Likewise, there were elements that seemed to originate from very disparate parts of the world, Greek columns alongside Chinese corbels and gothic buttresses. But oddly, it all flowed seamlessly and blended into what could have been mistaken for the architecture of some great fictional civilization." |
| 105 | * ''Fanfic/MaybeTheLastArchieStory'': Mad Doctor Doom's Limbo fortress is a floating spherical structure which combines manmade and alien architectural parts radiating out from its core. It's also dizzying to look at. |
| 106 | -->It was a castle.\ |
| 107 | But not the kind of castle anyone would have seen on Earth. Some of the architecture looked recognizable, other parts of it were clearly alien. The structure was spherical, like a planet. Towers, walls, and other edifices radiated out from a central point. It was incredible. Archie could barely stand to look at it for very long. |
| 108 | * ''Fanfic/MiseryLovesCompany'': Hecate's magic makes it so that the interior of her house makes no logical sense, with Gaz at one point going from a room on the top floor to the ground-floor kitchen after walking through a single doorway. |
| 109 | [[/folder]] |
| 110 | |
| 111 | [[folder:Fairy Tales]] |
| 112 | * FairyTale examples include the witch that lived in a giant GingerbreadHouse, and the old woman who lived in a giant shoe. |
| 113 | * Literature/BabaYaga's house sits atop outwards facing chicken legs, often walking in circles... |
| 114 | [[/folder]] |
| 115 | |
| 116 | [[folder:Films -- Animation]] |
| 117 | * In Pixar's ''Franchise/{{Cars}}'', Sally Carera's Cozy Cone motel is a set of one-car garages that look like road cones. This was designed as an homage to a similar real-world roadside motel that is composed of plaster tepees. Flo's gas station looks like a giant cylinder head, but that's not so obvious. |
| 118 | * In ''Anime/HowlsMovingCastle'', the castle looks like a giant heap of old machinery bits, doors and windows, roofs shaped like crabs' heads, and walks on giant mechanical "chicken legs" (Baba Yaga, anyone?). Creator/HayaoMiyazaki sure has a strange imagination. |
| 119 | * The city and palace in the French surrealist film ''WesternAnimation/TheKingAndTheMockingbird'' is a complex bunch of vertiginous towers, endless staircases and incredibly spacious rooms. To top it all off, the building layout and practical placement of rooms (or anything for that matter) are utterly nonsensical. Sometimes cartoonishly (and situationally) so. |
| 120 | * ''WesternAnimation/TheNightmareBeforeChristmas'': Lock, Shock and Barrel's treehouse might have looked like a real treehouse at some point, but Creator/HenrySelick kept telling the designer to push it further and further till it looked like it was about to fall off. Then someone had to build a model out of it. |
| 121 | * Disney's ''WesternAnimation/{{Pinocchio}}'' has a tavern shaped like an 8-ball. |
| 122 | * WordOfGod is that the folks at Creator/{{Pixar}} calculated that the roof of the Pizza Planet restaurant in ''WesternAnimation/ToyStory1'' would collapse on itself if it was built in RealLife. |
| 123 | [[/folder]] |
| 124 | |
| 125 | [[folder:Films -- Live-Action]] |
| 126 | * Appropriately, every set in ''Film/The5000FingersOfDrT'' (1953) is like this. Ladders to nowhere, stairs that close in on themselves or disappear into a hole in the ceiling, a tree made out of pipe and urinals etc. And of course, the 500-seat piano. |
| 127 | * The bad guys in ''Film/TheAdjustmentBureau'' could, among their many powers, turn ordinary buildings into messed up mazes. ''Series/TheDailyShow'' (yes, really) seemingly had a door into an in-escapable prison. |
| 128 | * ''Film/TheAdventuresOfElmoInGrouchland'' features Grouchland, a city where all the buildings, cars, furniture and everything else are deliberately built at weird angles to conform with the Grouches' ideals of messiness. |
| 129 | * In the ''Film/AngryVideoGameNerdTheMovie'', a ProperlyParanoid programmer designs his house to be a video game level, complete with moving platforms over lava. He reckons that only gamers would be able to get past it, keeping out the [[TheMenInBlack government agents]] he's afraid of. |
| 130 | * The office building in ''Film/BeingJohnMalkovich'' contains a 7 1/2th floor with a portal into the head of John Malkovich. |
| 131 | * Dracula's Castle in ''Film/BramStokersDracula'' is essentially this, although on outside. Apparently distorted gravity doesn't help either. Portrayal of the castle during Jonathan's escape is nothing short of Escher's works. |
| 132 | * ''Film/TheCabinetOfDrCaligari'': Holstenwall, probably the only fictitious town whose architecture alone is horror incarnate. All the buildings are crooked, and the shadows are painted on the ground. |
| 133 | * ''Film/CasinoRoyale1967'' depicts East Berlin as something straight out of ''Film/TheCabinetOfDrCaligari''. |
| 134 | * The house in ''Film/TheCatInTheHat'' is bizarre enough on the inside during most of the film, being filled with big rooms and bright colors, but after the Cat's world merges with the house it truly takes a bizarre turn. |
| 135 | * ''Film/{{Cube}}'' (1997) is set in a building made up of a three-dimensional moving matrix of cube-shaped cells, most equipped with various booby traps that will kill the prisoners inside. |
| 136 | * ''Film/Cube2Hypercube'' (2002) takes the concept to a whole new level, adding strange gravitational and time effects, as well as much more. The matrix of cubes is, in this movie, a tesseract, which is made by extending a cube along a fourth spatial dimension. It's about as comprehensible as it sounds. There are also bizarre quantum effects, which combine with the temporal and spatial effects mean that once someone goes IN, they will never stop coming OUT, with every copy having had a different set of experiences inside. [[spoiler: This turns out to be rather important to the closing explanation of what the hell's actually been going ON in this film that's got a plot almost as weird as the setting.]] |
| 137 | * ''Film/{{Dark City|1998}}'' looks reasonably normal, but when everyone is asleep, the whole city would transform. |
| 138 | * The villains' ice palace in ''Film/DieAnotherDay'' was made of... ice. Handwaved because it was set in Iceland; it would be cold enough for that to work at least some of the time. The villain melts it to drown the NSA agent inside. Those kind of buildings [[http://www.icehotel.com/ actually exist.]] However, Iceland is actually not cold enough for such a building to exist for more than a couple of weeks. The winter weather is very erratic and fluctuating, with frequent freeze-thaw-cycles that would ruin an ice building very quickly. As the previous example shows, northern Scandinavia is much more amenable to ice buildings, because there they actually have a stable, cold winter climate. |
| 139 | * The Buddhist pagoda of the original ''Film/GameOfDeath'' is meant to be a restaurant in the 1978 version. It is a very strange restaurant that has entire floors only for fighters to rest. |
| 140 | * The Jewish ghetto of Prague in ''Film/TheGolem'', another German movie of the silent film era, designed as jumbled array of exaggeratedly crooked houses. |
| 141 | * Hill House, the house born bad in ''Literature/TheHauntingOfHillHouse''. There isn't a single right angle in the place. |
| 142 | * There is not one single straight object to be seen in ''Film/HowTheGrinchStoleChristmas'', not even a teacher's yardstick. |
| 143 | * ''Film/{{Inception}}'' runs on this trope, including a folding city and two instances of Escher's never-ending staircase. |
| 144 | * Jareth's Escherian castle in ''Film/{{Labyrinth}}''. |
| 145 | * ''Film/TheLodgers'': How does a vast, seemingly-bottomless body of water exist inches beneath the floors of an earthbound Victorian mansion? Also, why is there a trapdoor in the middle of the entryway that opens directly into it? |
| 146 | * A number of the locations in ''Film/{{Metropolis}}'' fit this trope, especially the Eternal Gardens and the Catacombs, partially because they borrow from the Expressionist aesthetics of ''The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari'' (see above). Plus there's all those drawings of buildings shown when Freder talks to his father about the city, which were so ridiculous that even ''models'' couldn't be made of them. |
| 147 | * ''Film/MirrorMask'' is a great example of just about every subcategory at some time in the movie. |
| 148 | * ''Film/MurderByDeath'': Played for laughs when Sam Diamond decides to investigate the house while everyone else is waiting in the dining room, but the rooms keep shifting around to Sam's confusion. |
| 149 | * In ''Film/{{Naboer}}'', the sisters’ apartment is visibly bigger on the inside, fitting in at least a dozen rooms in a space that is no more than 10 meters long on the outside. [[spoiler: It turns out that this second apartment didn't exist, and was Jon's flat all along, but he refused to see it because of his guilt.]] |
| 150 | * In ''Film/{{Paperhouse}}'', young Anna sketches a house which, in a dream [[SharedDream shared with]] young Marc, appears solid, but retains the sketch's wonky angles. Similarly, Anna's sketched addition of a stack of books manifest as seamlessly fused into the house's inner wall. |
| 151 | * A pirate outpost in ''Film/PiratesOfTheCaribbeanAtWorldsEnd'' consists of dozens of ships piled on top of one another, with doors and windows cut into their hulls. |
| 152 | * ''Film/TheRocketeer'': The Bulldog Café is an example of a giant object building. No points for guessing what it's shaped like. Not as daft as it sounds, since diners shaped like animals used to be quite common in Los Angeles. |
| 153 | * The Overlook Hotel in Creator/StanleyKubrick's adaptation of ''Film/TheShining'' is loaded with this, most certainly [[MindScrew deliberately.]] A few, but by no means the only examples: the window in Mr. Ullman's office could not exist because a hallway is shown to be behind the office, the interior of room 237 is impossibly spacious given how close together the doors to the rooms are in the outer hallway - plus the doors would have to open into flights of stairs or the walls of the Colorado Lounge in order to be consistent with how the hall is shown relative to the rest of the hotel in Danny's tricycle scenes. Irregularities exist in the location of the kitchen relative to the lobby, the layout of the hedge maze, the window of the bathroom in the Torrance's apartment and several sets - the games room, the river of blood hallway and the hallway where Danny sees the two girls, are not shown in relation to any other part of the hotel. Not to mention the fact that the interior clearly doesn't match the shape of the exterior. As if the Overlook wasn't scary enough already. See [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sUIxXCCFWw these]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfJ8rK7eJeQ two]] videos for a detailed breakdown. |
| 154 | * Creator/DarioArgento's ''Film/Suspiria1977'' and ''Film/Inferno1980'' run on this trope, but it makes (some) sense considering they take place in magical houses of the damned. Strangely averted in the third film in the series, ''Film/MotherOfTears'', which made its house run-down and dark. |
| 155 | * ''Film/TheTrial'' features many odd-looking buildings that don't fit together well. Josef K's office is in an oddly huge, cavernous building (in RealLife the Gare d'Orsay train station in Paris, which had been closed down). Most dramatic is the scene in which Josef opens a door in Titorelli the artist's dilapidated wooden shack, only to find that it opens directly to the file room of the law court, the shack apparently butting up right against the law court's wall. |
| 156 | * ''Film/ZackSnydersJusticeLeague'': Gotham Harbor has what appears to be a submarine base that looks exactly like the ones built by the Germans in occupied France during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII such as that of La Rochelle (which can be seen in ''Film/DasBoot'' and ''Film/RaidersOfTheLostArk''). |
| 157 | [[/folder]] |
| 158 | |
| 159 | [[folder:Literature]] |
| 160 | * The Andrews Family Townhouse in ''Literature/TheAetherCycle'' is semi-intelligent and can rearrange its rooms at will. |
| 161 | * The eponymous building in ''Literature/AnnoDracula 1999: Daikaiju'' is, as the name suggests, a skyscraper shaped like a {{kaiju}}. [[spoiler: In keeping with the book's plundering of all 20th century Japanese media tropes, it inevtiably turns out to be a HumongousMecha.]] |
| 162 | * Armada, from Creator/ChinaMieville's [[Literature/BasLagCycle Bas-Lag novel]] ''Literature/TheScar'', is an entire metropolis built atop lashed-together sea vessels of all sizes and designs. |
| 163 | * In ''Literature/TheBelgariad'', many buildings in Sthiss Tor, the capital and lone city of Nyissa, feature this. Buildings can include interesting features such as doors that open over sheer drops due to the architects being under the influence of multiple narcotics. |
| 164 | * ''Literature/BlackHouse'' by Creator/StephenKing contains a house that has a lot of reality altering characteristics, as well as a gateway to another dimension. The house seems to be alive. |
| 165 | * ''Literature/TheCatWhoSeries'': To an extent, Qwill's summer home is this; it's a converted apple barn on the Klingenschoen property, which many characters compare with the Guggenheim Museum. |
| 166 | * Consider Willy Wonka's factory in ''Literature/CharlieAndTheChocolateFactory''. Within this BigLabyrinthineBuilding that is also an ElaborateUndergroundBase, there's the mostly-edible Chocolate Room and the chocolate river system for starters. Via the Great Glass Elevator, even more strange rooms are glimpsed or mentioned in passing: "The Rock-Candy Mine — 10,000 feet deep", a caramel lake, and a fudge mountain. In [[Literature/CharlieAndTheGreatGlassElevator the sequel novel]], there's also a room where chocolate gushes from the ground the way oil can, and the elevator can even go all the way down to a dreary MinusWorld. |
| 167 | * ''Literature/ChroniclesOfTheEmergedWorld'': The sanctuary of time appears as a gigantic cubical edifice whose top is crowded with a mess of disparate buildings and with a river doing an eternal, gravity- and entropy-defying circuit of its walls. Its inside, which starts as a chaotic tangle of intersecting stairs and only gets weirder from there, [[EldritchLocation goes way beyond just bizarre]]. |
| 168 | * Creator/HPLovecraft: |
| 169 | ** R'lyeh from the Franchise/CthulhuMythos. An architecture so bizarre humans go crazy even when seeing only a small part of it. Note that it's a pretty {{Flanderiz|ation}}ed description. In the original short story, "Literature/TheCallOfCthulhu", the Norwegian sailors who entered the city were pretty freaked out, but no-one actually went insane before Cthulhu himself showed up. |
| 170 | ** In "Literature/TheDreamsInTheWitchHouse", the witch house has a door that somehow leans [[MindScrew both to the left and right at the same time]]. |
| 171 | * In "Literature/CuckooSong" The creations of the Architect are demonstrated to be examples of this trope. The most notable being the fact that the man (Using the term generously) has managed to build a small village on the "underside" of a bridge which subverts the laws of gravity, and that his studio is described as having "strange angles" like in painting with bad perspective. Even his plans for future building are described as "plans for impossible buildings made possible". |
| 172 | * The settlers' undersea houses in ''Literature/DarkLife'' are shaped like jellyfish and other invertebrates, because they deal with the pressure better. |
| 173 | * ''Literature/{{Deeplight}}:'' The church-turned-auction-house was designed to be "frecht", referring to the awe-inspiring strangeness of [[EldritchAbomination the gods]]. The building is strangely proprotioned, with a high ceilling creating a pitch-black void above. |
| 174 | * Creator/TerryPratchett's ''Literature/{{Discworld}}'': |
| 175 | ** The jumbled buildings of [[WizardingSchool Unseen University]], where due to the extreme concentrations of magical energy the staircases go somewhere different depending on the time of day (later... ahem... [[FollowTheLeader inspiring]] Hogwarts from ''Literature/HarryPotter'') and there are rooms with infinite floor space. Any map made of the university is only valid for a few days, and resembles an exploding chrysanthemum. |
| 176 | ** The building we see the most is also the most bizarre: the Library. Noted for being connected to every other library and book store ''anywhere'' and ''anywhen'' through the physics of 'L-space', the geometry is so complex that search parties sometimes have to be mounted for lost students. There's also the bit where there isn't so much a ceiling, just another part of the floor with more books. It is also mentioned at least once that no matter where one goes in the Library, one always seems to be under the glass dome in the middle. Presumably, this includes when one is in those areas where one can look up and see another floor covered with bookcases (although it is never actually mentioned if those floors above you are places where you can also look up and also see the floor, or even if anyone other than the Librarian can actually REACH them, despite people being seen in them). |
| 177 | ** The tower at Bugarup University in ''Literature/TheLastContinent'', which in a confusing inversion of BiggerOnTheInside is taller at the top than at the bottom. From the ground and inside while climbing the ladder, it was about 20 feet high. At the top it was thousands of feet tall. |
| 178 | ** [[TheGrimReaper Death's]] mansion, which also has the same "bigger on the inside" and "rooms with infinite floorspace" problems. Notably, only the middle 20 square feet or so of the rooms are carpeted, and normal humans walk straight from the door to the carpeted space without noticing the area in between. |
| 179 | ** Empirical Crescent, Bergholt Stuttley "Bloody Stupid" Johnson's masterpiece of architecture where no-one stays very long as the front door of No.1 opens into the back bedroom of No.15 and so on. It has a low crime rate, though. Thieves generally prefer to break into one apartment at a time. |
| 180 | ** On the subject of B.S. Johnson, he also brings us a semi-inversion: where a version of bizarrchitecture is that buildings are built to look like giant objects. Johnson actually designed a cruet set that was eventually used as a set of buildings: the pepper mill is used as a grain silo, and four families (somehow) live in the salt shaker. |
| 181 | ** The original pair of books (''Literature/TheColourOfMagic'' and ''Literature/TheLightFantastic'') had a few examples of bizarrchitecture, such as the Temple of [[EldritchAbomination Bel-Shamharoth]], which was little-described but designed to have as many [[ArcNumber eights]] in the plan as possible, and the Wyrmberg, which was an upside-down mountain. |
| 182 | ** The Temple of the Sender of Eight was particularly notable in that it was completely constructed of regular octagons [[AlienGeometries that tessellated perfectly]]. |
| 183 | ** The capital city of Krull, built mostly out of ships that were collected by the Circumfence. |
| 184 | * ''Literature/{{Doom}}: Knee-Deep in the Dead'' attempts to justify the game's secret doors by explaining them as motion sensor-operated automated portions of the facility. Then the aliens rework the place with demonic imagery, skulls, [[GagPenis penis-levers]], and [[BloodyBowelsOfHell flesh walls]]. Fly and Arlene are uncertain if the aliens are responsible for the computer bank laid out as a Nazi Swastika. At one point they release the area of "hell" they've entered was designed in the shape of a hand. Another time they find themselves in a ''literal'' WombLevel. |
| 185 | * In ''Literature/DragonBones'', Ward is shown a way that leads from the caves under castle Hurog to his room in the castle. And he's sure he didn't walk upstairs as long as she should have needed to. As the person who shows him the way is the [[GeniusLoci family ghost Oreg]], and the castle is PoweredByAForsakenChild (Oreg), it is possible that this is a genuine case of bizarrchitecture. AWizardDidIt, (including the part of making Oreg a part of the castle) so the laws of physics don't apply. |
| 186 | * Creator/TeresaEdgerton examples: |
| 187 | ** ''Literature/TheCastleOfTheSilverWheel'': If you visit various portions of the complex in a specified order, pattern spells associated with them act as magical shortcuts (e.g., if you go through the double arch behind the South Tower after visiting various courtyards, buildings, and gardens in a certain order, you will find yourself on the ''opposite'' side of the castle rather than in the place just beyond the arch). |
| 188 | ** Dame Ceinwen's house is sometimes in the Marshes-Between-Here-and-There (as in ''Literature/TheGrailAndTheRing'') and sometimes in other places. It seems to be BiggerOnTheInside, although it's hard to tell, since someone inside the house can never quite see all of the room he or she is standing in. |
| 189 | * In the ''Literature/EnchantedForestChronicles'', one of King Mendanbar's ancestors was so fond of [[CapeSwish sweeping up and down staircases]] in his [[ErmineCapeEffect ermine robe]] that he had staircases installed wherever there was room, regardless of need. This resulted in a castle where getting anywhere involves a lot of climbing. The oddest case is cited to be a dungeon which requires a four-flight climb followed by a six-flight descent. |
| 190 | * ''Literature/TheEyeOfArgon'' features a royal palace which seemingly teleports from the middle of a city to some poorly-defined plains, under which is a dungeon from which Grignr follows a hallway to a storeroom. The storeroom contains a trap which protects a gap in the floor leading down to a mausoleum, and inside an occupied sarcophagus in the mausoleum is another secret trapdoor leading down to the secret sacrificial chamber of the cult of Argon, which doesn't seem to have any other doors or any stairs to reach the trapdoor. |
| 191 | * ''Literature/ForestKingdom'': The Forest Castle, which is believed to average about five thousand rooms. The entire south wing has been inaccessible for years, and when they finally found a way back they had to go through a GravityScrew to get there. Inconvenient, since that's the wing that contains the treasury and armory. It's ultimately BroughtDownToNormal in book 4 (''Beyond the Blue Moon'') when the source of the magical effect is removed. |
| 192 | * In ''Literature/TheGirlWhoDrankTheMoon'', the Tower is described as being so confusingly designed with passages that meet at odd angles and ascend or descend counter to expectations that without a guide any visitor would be lost for days. |
| 193 | * ''Literature/GoblinsInTheCastle'': Nilbog's buildings. The place has no straight lines or corners, the buildings are all helter-skelter with one side taller than the other, and they're all rounded at the edges. |
| 194 | * ''Literature/{{Gormenghast}}'' frequently strays into this trope. And lingers. |
| 195 | * Which brings us to Hogwarts from ''Literature/HarryPotter''. Staircases that move, walls pretending to be doors and vice versa, and the Room of Requirement that becomes whatever is needed by whomever's nearby. It is also implied that the entire castle has magically grown and changed over time, and it is known to have had renovations which handwaves the fact that a 1000-year-old castle wouldn't be anything like what Hogwarts is. The Burrow (house of the Weasleys) is this too, as described by Harry. It is mostly held together by magic. |
| 196 | ** The Department of Mysteries is discovered to combine this with MobileMaze in ''Literature/HarryPotterAndTheOrderOfThePhoenix'' for security and due to the nature of the magics studied there. |
| 197 | * The book ''Literature/TheHauntingOfHillHouse'' has at least as much Bizarrchitecture as either movie version. "Angles which you assume are the right angles you are accustomed to, and have every right to expect are true, are actually a fraction of a degree off in one direction or another. I am sure, for instance, that you believe that the stairs you are sitting on are level..." |
| 198 | * Creator/RobertAHeinlein: |
| 199 | ** In his short story ''Literature/AndHeBuiltACrookedHouse'', the eponymous house is inspired by the idea of a heretofore undiscovered fourth dimension of space, producing a 4-dimensional house 'unfolded' in 3D. Which is fine until there's an earthquake and it 'folds' to become fully 4D. |
| 200 | ** He plays around with dimensions again in ''Literature/TheNumberOfTheBeast'', the ending of which features a giant party for characters from every possible literary continuity and alternate universe. To prevent guests from being pestered by them, the protagonists invite every possible literary critic and direct them to a buffet hall with topology best described as a cross between a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle Klein bottle]] and a lobster trap. |
| 201 | * In a setting with as-expected nonhuman alphabets (one in which many letters can become other letters when the lower half is covered), it's strange that the offices of ''Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' are in a building shaped like a giant letter H, according to how Ford navigates it, not just how an English person reads it with the Babelfish. This is probably one of that "whole string of pretty meaningless coincidences" mentioned in passing as a byproduct of creating an Infinite Improbability Drive way back in the first book. Or maybe the modern Roman alphabet got its letter H the same way the British got the game of cricket. Either of these explanations make at least as much sense as anything that happened on the page both times when a viewpoint character was in the vicinity of these buildings. |
| 202 | * Hobbit-holes from ''Literature/TheHobbit'' and ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings''. Hobbits build underground houses by digging tunnels into the sides of hills, which seems straightforward enough. The bizarre part seems to happen with older homes, similar to regular human habitation, where a structure is expanded on over time to accommodate extended families. Additional tunnels are dug, stairwells are installed...[[note]]Hobbits don't really like to have upper floors and aren't likely to put bedrooms up there; they're more likely to use these areas as storage[[/note]]; Hobbits tend to accumulate Stuff, so you need more cupboards and shelf space, and given hobbits' long lives and large families, these "holes" -- especially for middle- to upper-class hobbits -- can become more like good-sized underground/cave complexes, nicely paneled, fixed up and furnished. Brandy Hall is a perfect example. His neighbors' assumption that Bilbo Baggins, albeit a bachelor, had created some secret rooms or cellars to store supposed treasure is actually pretty reasonable. |
| 203 | * The [[blue:house]] in Mark Z. Danielewski's ''Literature/HouseOfLeaves'' is BiggerOnTheInside, and that's the most normal thing about it. The [[blue:house]] also appears to be [[EldritchLocation non-Euclidean]], and even changes size. |
| 204 | * It's theoretically buildable, but the eponymous ''Literature/HouseOfStairs'' is a rather impractical design, to say the least. The stairs go up and the stairs go down, supported by pillars, and at various places they reach small landings, but they never actually go to a floor or a ceiling. No walls can be seen from any of the stairs the protagonists can reach, though they can see other stairs, not connected to theirs. They can't even figure out [[OntologicalMystery how they got there]], let alone how to get out. |
| 205 | * ''Literature/HowlsMovingCastle'' has... |
| 206 | ** Unlikely foundations (although [[AWizardDidIt a wizard built it]]). It not only moves, but can bob in the air and hang partially over a cliff, as shown in ''House of Many Ways''. The water pipes somehow bring in water from the hot springs out in the marshes (or the waste, if necessary). |
| 207 | ** It also appears much bigger on the outside than on the inside, since it gives the appearance of a full-sized castle from the outside, but on the inside contains only the interior space of whatever 'real' house it corresponds to (e.g. Howl's place in Porthaven, which only has about four rooms). When [[spoiler:Calcifer is moved to Market Chipping]], the room around the main hearth changes shape a little, and while the actual building it corresponded to had extra rooms (and the windows still existed on the outside), they seemed unreachable from the inside. |
| 208 | ** It's impossible to go all the way around the castle on the outside. The side that people can't get to seems to look out on our world; Howl's bedroom window looks out over his sister's house, and Calcifer says that the black-down version of the CoolGate [[spoiler:(which leads to Wales)]] goes to the side of the castle that no one can walk around. |
| 209 | ** The eponymous house in ''House of Many Ways'' was built on a spot where space and time were naturally 'folded', as was discovered by the wizard who lives there. Therefore, not only is it BiggerOnTheInside, but routes through the house can lead to different places and/or times. |
| 210 | * In Creator/DanSimmons' ''Literature/{{Hyperion}}'', the technology of the Farcster leads to this. The house of Martin Silenius had stairs which lead down to a tower on another world. The toilet was on a raft in the middle on an ocean on another planet as well. It is mentioned that albeit very expensive it is not uncommon to have such houses. |
| 211 | * The City of the Immortals in Creator/JorgeLuisBorges' "The Immortal" is made of this. It was built like that as suggested by an immortal [[spoiler:Homer.]] |
| 212 | * Many of the cities in ''Literature/InvisibleCities'', in different ways. |
| 213 | * The children's book ''Literature/KoziolekMatolek'' has a Chinese palace in the form of a giant teapot. |
| 214 | * The buildings of St. Custards skool in the Literature/{{Molesworth}} stories are said to be the creation of a Victorian-era lunatic, and it shows. |
| 215 | * The ''Literature/MortalEngines'' series by Philip Reeve is full of this trope. Much of the action takes place on a number of 'traction cities' - enormous industrial, ziggurat-shaped vehicles with whole cities piled on top of them, that move around the landscape on caterpillar tracks, or in one instance, sleds. |
| 216 | * ''Literature/{{Moonflowers}}'': TheFairFolk have strange buildings: TheWildHunt imprisons Ned and Lucy Song in a glass room that has no windows or doors, which is tough enough that a goddess has to break into it. Then there's the Hawthorn Fort--a castle built around a massive hawthorn maze, with bridges above it that the Wild Hunt use to toss people in. The underground throne-room is a cave covered with prehistoric paintings, with the throne itself carved high into the wall. |
| 217 | * In Betty [=MacDonald=]'s ''Literature/MrsPiggleWiggle'' stories, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's house was built upside-down. |
| 218 | * In the ''Literature/NurseryCrime'' series, there was a brief trend for "surrealist architecture". The most famous example is Castle Sponng, whose highlights include a driveway with speedbumps that play ''Jeruselum'', a room that rotates around an axis, making visitors feel that [[GravityScrew gravity has gone wrong]], and a banquet hall with a large mirror at the far end [[spoiler: which is actually a window to a mirror-image banquet hall, creating the impression that the visitor [[MissingReflection doesn't have a reflection]]]]. |
| 219 | * Some of the constructs in ''Literature/{{Otherland}}'' are truly odd. One being a rambling house the size of a large city, and another being a hacker-run virtual enclave called Treehouse, where they threw out the laws of physics altogether. |
| 220 | * The city of Oubliette on terraformed Mars featured in Hannu Rajaniemi's ''Literature/TheQuantumThief'' is built on the backs of titanic Atlas Quiets, uploaded human minds controlling gigantic robots. In result it's always on the move, and its layout is constantly changing as the Quiets move around each other. As far as bizarreness of architecture goes, it's actually one of the more ''normal'' locations in the novel's transhuman future. |
| 221 | * In ''Literature/{{The Red Tree|2009}}'', Sarah discovers that the cellar under the house has some properties that it simply just shouldn't - such as the fact that it randomly decides that it wants to be an impossibly large, featureless cavern. The area around the title tree also demonstrates some impossible geography - Sarah and Constance manage to spend an hour running in circles and getting lost even though they were heading in a straight line to a visible target less than a hundred yards away. |
| 222 | * ''Literature/RendezvousWithRama'': one of the greatest science fiction books ever written. It's about a presumed asteroid which turns out to be a cylinder. Inside the cylinder is a whole new world with buildings that look like ours and oceans and mountains. The problem? They're all built inside a giant cylinder so no matter where you are if you look above you see more buildings that are upside down. Or mountains, or -- the most disturbing and nauseating to the explorers -- the Cylindrical Sea. It's an ocean that sits above you. With waves and everything that hang in the air, poof there goes your sanity. This is known as an O'Neill cylinder. |
| 223 | ** The ''Literature/BookOfTheLongSun'' has the Whorl, which has similar properties. |
| 224 | * In Creator/PatriciaAMcKillip's ''Literature/TheRiddleMasterTrilogy'', the High One has a tower of finite height that's accessed via an external spiral staircase. The problem is that no matter how long one climbs the top always appears the same distance above. An exhausted Morgon eventually makes it to the top when space starts behaving again, only to discover that Raederle has arrived before him by transforming into a bird and flying in through a window. As she points out, however, neither of them would have succeeded if the High One had wanted to keep them out. |
| 225 | * On the outside alone, ''Literature/TheRedTower'' is a ruined factory whose brick walls have no doors or loading bays or other visible means of entry, nor any roads leading to it. The inside is [[EldritchLocation stranger]]. |
| 226 | * In Creator/RobinMcKinley's ''Literature/RoseDaughter'', the palace of the Beast has a subtly changing floor plan, including changes to interior decoration. The room featuring a star design on the floor, for example, has a different number of corridors branching off from it at different times, and the star design's number of points changes to suit. It is very disorienting to climb stairs within the building, because it makes one more conscious of subtle shifts. Most notable is the room containing the staircase that leads to the roof; its interior cannot be seen, because no light will stay lit within it. |
| 227 | * ''Literature/ASeriesOfUnfortunateEvents'': |
| 228 | ** The Hotel Denouement from is built so that the actual building cannot be distinguished from its reflection at first glance. To achieve this effect, the building's architects wrote all of the hotel's signs backwards, constructed it at an angle so that the nearby lake reflected only the building and not the surrounding scenery, and grew moss and lilies on the bricks like those that you would find in a lake. This is all without mentioning the fact that the entirety of the hotel's interior is organized by the Dewey Decimal System. |
| 229 | ** Doctor Orwell's eye-shaped building, the "thumb" shaped buildings at Prufrock Prep and to a certain extent, the Eye décor of Olaf's house. Aunt Josephine's house clinging to the edge of a cliff counts as well, though THAT one didn't last long... |
| 230 | * The planet Bundinal in ''Literature/StarfleetCorpsOfEngineers''. Due to the natives' love of symmetry, houses on Bundinal have faux front doors at the back -- not a back door, but a door identical to the one in front, and looking equally important, even though it isn't. This is but the first of their architecture's aesthetically significant but practically useless features. |
| 231 | * ''Literature/StarWarsRedHarvest'': The main building at one of the Sith Academies; the students and the staff would swear the tower curves in ways not supportable by everyday physics. |
| 232 | * ''Literature/TheStormlightArchive'' has the AdvancedAncientAcropolis of Urithiru, the former stronghold of the Knights Radiant. When the tower was functional, a lot of rooms were accessed by sliding parts of the wall back using {{Magitek}}, but with the tower running on emergency power, all these "doors" are stuck randomly open or shut, whichever they were when the city lost power. When the heroes find Urithiru millennia later, they have to deal with corridors randomly winding off to dead ends, with no visible doors or purpose for existing. There are also a lot of other parts of the tower that don't seem to make sense, because they are part of systems that no longer function. |
| 233 | * The ''Literature/VorkosiganSaga'' gives us Lord Dono Vorrutyer (an ancestor of the current Count Dono Vorrutyer), Mad Emperor Yuri's Imperial architect: responsible for the two ugliest buildings in Vorbarra Sultana: [=ImpSec=] headquarters, and the municipal stadium. [=ImpSec=] headquarters has oversized steps leading up to its enormous front doors, guaranteed to give anyone leg cramps who tried to climb them. (People with genuine business with [=ImpSec=] know to go around to the side door.) After Yuri was deposed, Lord Dono retired to the country, where he lived off his daughter and son-in-law, and went stark mad. He built a bizarre set of towers there, that his descendants charge admission for people to see now. |
| 234 | * Greg Bear's ''Literature/TheWaySeries'' uses the O'Neill cylinder concept as well, only with such things as ''super tall skyscrapers supported by cables''. |
| 235 | * The eponymous Literature/WaysideSchool is an elementary school that was accidentally built sideways. And without a nineteenth story -- the eighteenth and twentieth are there, but not the nineteenth. [[HandWave The builder said he was very sorry.]] |
| 236 | * The castle of the Good Magician Humfrey in the ''Literature/{{Xanth}}'' series was constructed using several plans and layouts. At command, the castle can assume a different configuration meaning few visitors see the same castle twice. |
| 237 | [[/folder]] |
| 238 | |
| 239 | [[folder:Live-Action TV]] |
| 240 | * ''Series/{{Atlanta}}'': In "The Old Man And The Tree," Fernando's mansion is somehow located inside a modest London block house. While the house could just serve as a hidden entrance, it doesn't explain how the mansion has multiple levels, many rooms including a full service restaurant, a swimming pool, and a wide central courtyard open to the outside, yet still isn't visible from the street. |
| 241 | * ''Series/TheBradyBunch'': A client, Beebee Gallini, freaks Mike out when she asks him to design her makeup factory first in the shape of a powder puff, then a lipstick, and finally a compact, complete with hinged roof. |
| 242 | * Clarissa's father Marshall in ''Series/ClarissaExplainsItAll'' frequently designs buildings of the giant objects variety, including a tooth for a dentist's office, to name one out of many examples. |
| 243 | * ''Series/DoctorWho'': |
| 244 | ** The TARDIS in almost every ''Doctor Who'' episode every made (aside from parts of the Third Doctor's run), which is "{{bigger on the inside}} than the outside". It has miles of hallways, multi-level wardrobes with spiral staircases and balconies, a boot cupboard the size of a bedroom, laboratories and medical bays, and ''multiple'' swimming pools. Not to mention the giant room containing a star just to fuel the thing. The whole thing fits in a package the exact size and shape of a British police box from 1963. |
| 245 | *** And, every time the TARDIS rebuilds itself, it gets a whole new floorplan. The swimming pool just might be ''in'' the library. |
| 246 | *** Meanwhile, [[Recap/DoctorWhoS33E10JourneyToTheCentreOfTheTardis "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS"]] shows [[MalevolentArchitecture what happens]] when you make the [[GeniusLoci TARDIS]] ''angry''. |
| 247 | ** The serial [[Recap/DoctorWhoS19E1Castrovalva "Castrovalva"]] is ''made'' of this trope, courtesy of the titular city. |
| 248 | * Although almost certainly not intentional, ''Series/FawltyTowers'' was a very Jumbled House. Come in the main door, turn left, go straight ahead into the kitchen, turn left again out the back door. Return to the kitchen and leave the way you came in, turn right up the stairs. Halfway up, there's a 180-degree turn to the right, and at the top you have to turn right 90 degrees onto the first floor. There are plenty of rooms on either side of the wide landing, and if you go past the two on the right, there's a little passage that leads to the next flight of stairs up with another turn right, which means by now you're somewhere over the car park. From the outside it looks like a perfectly normal ex-stately home[[note]]Actually the Wooburn Grange Country Club in Buckinghamshire, now long-since burned down[[/note]]. |
| 249 | ** While the eponymous Towers are a very extreme example, old manor houses repurposed as hotels often do have a rather confusing layout in real life, being subdivided and remodeled to cram in as many bedrooms as possible while staying within hailing distance of local fire codes. Especially if the original owners try and do it on the cheap, which Basil almost certainly would have. |
| 250 | * Sometimes shows up in [[HomeAndGarden house renovation shows]] as well. One episode of ''Series/FixerUpper'' featured a house pre-remodel that had two bathrooms separated by a door that could be opened to allow those on the toilets to ''hold hands''. |
| 251 | * In ''Series/HowIMetYourMother'', Ted was once hired to design a restaurant shaped like a giant cowboy hat. In an earlier episode, his boss designed a building that (inadvertently) resembled an enormous penis. |
| 252 | * In ''Series/{{LazyTown}}'', just try to find a doorway, window, building, or any structure or object made of only basic straight lines. |
| 253 | * In ''Series/PrettyGuardianSailorMoon'', the presence of a youma in a building causes this, leading to doors opening on the same hallway you came from, and stairs that you climb only to find yourself on the same floor. |
| 254 | * In ''Series/PushingDaisies'', the "Pie Hole" has a roof shaped like pie crust. |
| 255 | * ''Series/RoseRed'', being a GeniusLoci and rather malevolent, is full of rooms and corridors that don't care for the laws of physics and are generally out to kill anyone within its walls. |
| 256 | * ''Series/{{Seinfeld}}'': Jerry's apartment [[https://www.iflscience.com/physics/reddit-makes-unsettling-discovery-seinfelds-apartment-defies-the-laws-of-physics/ defies the laws of physics.]] |
| 257 | * ''Series/StargateSG1'': In the season 6 episode 6 "Abyss" , there is a jail cell where Jack O'Neill is trapped inside by a shifting gravity field that turns the wall into the floor. |
| 258 | * ''Franchise/StarTrek'': |
| 259 | ** ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'': In the episode "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS2E2WhereSilenceHasLease Where Silence Has Lease]]", the Enterprise ends up trapped in a seemingly endless void when the ''Enterprise'''s sister ship the ''Yamato'' appears. Riker and Worf beam over to investigate, only to find some impossibly bizarre architecture, including rooms they just came from changing right behind them and a bridge whose exits only loop around to the same bridge. |
| 260 | ** ''Series/StarTrekVoyager''. In "[[Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS2E6Twisted Twisted]]", a NegativeSpaceWedgie somehow rearranges all the compartments in the ship. The crew spend the entire episode walking around in circles, trying to work out what's happening. They don't succeed. |
| 261 | * ''Film/TheStoneTape'': The haunted room being studied by the scientists has a staircase leading up the wall to nowhere, apparently built as a folly. The maid whose ghost is haunting the house was killed falling off the stairs and the female member of the team notes it doesn't seem high enough to kill someone that way. [[spoiler:She herself is pursued up the staircase by an ancient evil to an EldritchLocation from which she falls an infinite distance, being found in the room later dead of shock.]] |
| 262 | * ''Series/TheTwilightZone1985'': In "Wong's Lost and Found Emporium", the emporium manifests itself in the form of a door that appears briefly sometimes in blank walls throughout the world. Go through the door and you are in a very very large lost-and-found shop, with everything that anybody has ever lost. |
| 263 | * ''Series/Warehouse13'' has the Escher Vault, which is, uh, ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin. |
| 264 | * On ''Series/{{Wings}}'', Joe and Helen hire a famous architect to build their house for them...but are less than thrilled when the house he designs is shaped like a 7. |
| 265 | [[/folder]] |
| 266 | |
| 267 | [[folder:Roleplay]] |
| 268 | * ''LetsPlay/{{Headshoots}}'': The "Room Outside Space", a seemingly ordinary room that, due to some glitch, became unfindable unless you zoomed to a dwarf already occupying it. |
| 269 | [[/folder]] |
| 270 | |
| 271 | [[folder:Tabletop Games]] |
| 272 | * ''TabletopGame/AnimaBeyondFantasy'' has its share too. One notable example is Ascani, the main city of Bellafonte (sort of FantasyCounterpartCulture of medieval Italy), built almost entirely over platforms sustained by massive rocky columns that are connected using a lot of footbridges and rams. Oh, as it's described as having a population of several hundred thousand. |
| 273 | * In ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'': |
| 274 | ** Githzerai monks make use of the fact that the Plane of Limbo has subjective gravity (i.e. "down" is whatever direction you want it to be) and make their monasteries Escheresque fortifications. |
| 275 | ** Baba Yaga's house is an enormous hypercube inside a tiny house. |
| 276 | ** Some of the Demon Lords like to do this (since they have godlike power and can reshape layers of the Abyss that they control however they see fit). Lolth, for instance, reshaped one layer known as the Demonweb into a large, twisting maze in which some paths go over some parts of other levels and under others. The paths are all level, there are no inclines or declines, they are perfectly level. Yet they go over and under each other anyway. |
| 277 | ** The Hive Ward in [[TabletopGame/PlaneScape Sigil]] started as a collection of normal buildings. Then some entrances got closed off, some walls got knocked down ... a few thousand years of this and it's almost an EldritchLocation. It doesn't help the magic of the city itself can turn any doorway into a portal to anywhere, and anyone with the proper key who walks through it will be whisked away. The most common way of discovering the key for a Hive portal is the ''hard'' way. |
| 278 | * ''TabletopGame/ElectricBastionland'' has an entire city of this, where it changes so constantly that mapping it out with any degree of accuracy is impossible, and the city's underground transportation system itself defies the laws of physics to the point where it can lead anywhere. |
| 279 | * ''TabletopGame/{{Exalted}}'' has, among other examples, Malfeas, the Demon City. He is both the city at the heart of the hell dimension [[GeniusLoci and the hell dimension itself]], surrounded by his co-conspirators who have taken on various elemental forms. His body is made up of various strata of buildings, statues, streets and monuments of varying utility and habitability -- and he is frequently known to bring the strata crashing down upon one another without warning. |
| 280 | * ''TabletopGame/InvisibleSun'' is set in a dimension of magic, and so if it can be imagined, it can be built. The city of Satyrine in particular boasts streets that shift, disappear, or mirror each other and buildings made of sentient creatures or strange materials such as paper, towers that can float in the air without visible support, or homes that should not be standing that nonetheless manage to remain upright. The rule of architecture in Satyrine is basically there are no rules. |
| 281 | * ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'' uses this a lot on Rath. It's also used on Phyrexia, both old and new. Over time, the Eldrazi have used this too, creating superstructures from the hedrons designed to keep them in physical form (and thus unable to escape Zendikar). |
| 282 | * ''TabletopGame/OverTheEdge'': The Al Amarjan airport terminal is shaped like a ''cone standing on its point''. This is a trick, though -- [[spoiler:the actual terminal is underground and the cone is an empty shell]]. It was built with the assistance of [[spoiler:coral-like extradimensional aliens, so the inside can get very weird in places]]. |
| 283 | * The ''TabletopGame/{{Pathfinder}}'' version of Baba Yaga's hut is even stranger than the D&D version. The hut can travel to pretty much anywhere in the multiverse, and at each destination, the inside of the hut has a different layout. All layouts are {{Bigger On The Inside}}, and they frequently demonstrate AlienGeometries as well. |
| 284 | * Unintentional example from ''TabletopGame/{{Shadowrun}}'': published adventures have weird maps that look like they were designed by people who have never seen real buildings before, like a twelve-storey shopping complex with no clearly visible elevators, escalators, or service corridors. |
| 285 | [[/folder]] |
| 286 | |
| 287 | [[folder:Theatre]] |
| 288 | * In ''Theatre/ThePhantomOfTheOpera'', the Phantom's opera house is a crazy mass of passages. |
| 289 | [[/folder]] |
| 290 | |
| 291 | [[folder:Theme Parks]] |
| 292 | * [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth_(Epcot) Spaceship Earth,]] the iconic building at the entrance to Ride/WaltDisneyWorld's Epcot. It's ''spherical''. |
| 293 | * Ride/DisneyThemeParks LOVES this trope. Also included are The Tree of Life, an oil rig platform dressed up to look like a giant tree with animals sculpted into the "bark", that houses a theater and can double as Large Objects. The Rainforest Café in Down Town Disney looks like a volcano, the Dino Café looks like a mountain, and the Circe du Solie building looks like a giant white circus tent. All Star Sports, Music, and Movies and Disney's Pop Century Hotel all boast a metric ton of giant objects related to their themes (it's a trope unto the hotels on the lower end of the price spectrum) and two pools that reflect a particular theme. Many of the hotels also feature pools with bizarre structures that house water slides (most are mountains, but a few break this norm such as French Quarter, which has a sea serpent). Disney also has a love affair with mountain-themed roller coasters, featuring no less than five different man-made mountains in four separate parks, and then there's the World Showcase. And as a special note, this only accounts for the Orlando based parks, not even covering the four other ones around the world. |
| 294 | * ''Ride/TheTwilightZoneTowerOfTerror'': The fictitious Hollywood Tower Hotel that the ride is set in is full of numerous irregularities and paradoxes in the layout, which is to be expected in a ride themed after ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959''. |
| 295 | ** The giant neon sign in Florida is situated ''in front of'' the elevator doors, where the top hotel corridors are supposed to be. This was possibly meant to give riders, who would be facing the back of the sign when the elevators doors open, a bit of SurrealHorror. |
| 296 | ** The orientation pre-show in the Florida version shows the elevator that carried the 5 people fell in front of the hotel sign. However, the elevator shaft is in the lobby located ''beside'' the building. |
| 297 | ** The Paris version has its lobby elevator vaguely match with the ones in the pre-show, but the hallway scene just before the drop sequence, has the main elevators doors across the hall directly facing your ride elevator when it should be facing perpendicular as the doors in the lobby do. |
| 298 | ** The Mirror Scene in the Parisian version suggests there's at least one floor of the hotel dedicated to having just a large mirror flanked by two windows on each side, that's it. No rooms, no hallway, literally just a mirror and windows. |
| 299 | --->'''Rod Serling:''' Wave goodbye to the real world. |
| 300 | *** The same goes for the mirror in Tokyo [=DisneySea's=] ''Tower of Terror'', as it's somewhat modeled off the Parisian version (absent the first two drops, and a shorter final drops). |
| 301 | ** The placement of windows along the hotel facade for all versions, specifically where the drop shafts are located, suggest that they lead to other places of the building (rooms, hallways, etc.) when really there could only be enough space for the ride elevators. |
| 302 | ** You enter the Library on what can be assumed to be "The First Floor", and then make your way to the boiler room. When you approach the elevator, the indicator shows that you are now ''at the basement''. [[note]]In the Florida version, the true basement is the unload area of the attraction, and you're on the second floor when you enter the lobby.[[/note]] |
| 303 | ** In every version except the one in Florida, you line up in front of a set of elevator doors in the boiler room, complete with a needle to indicate the floor the elevator is on. But they open to a small nondescript hallway with another set of elevator doors across from it, which lead to the actual elevator. |
| 304 | * The Walt Disney World version of ''Ride/TheHauntedMansion'' had an MC Escher-esque staircase scene like the one pictured as the header image added in its 2007 refurbishment. |
| 305 | [[/folder]] |
| 306 | |
| 307 | [[folder:Video Games]] |
| 308 | * ''VideoGame/ANNOMutationem'': The Consortium's underground facility first appears as an [[EternalEngine industrial]] high-tech base filled with laboratories, the later layouts start to shift to becoming something out of a LovecraftLite with monuments appearing out from the ground and ominous red glow in the background. |
| 309 | * ''VideoGame/{{Antichamber}}'': The levels are practically non-Euclidean. Rooms don't necessarily connect to other rooms based on relative spatial position. Rooms often also connect to rooms based on where the player is looking and at what angle the player is coming from, or on the player's previous series of actions. Some rooms even change after visiting other rooms. However, the more esoteric means of getting around have distinctive objects that you can associate with what you need to do. |
| 310 | * ''VideoGame/BanjoKazooie'': |
| 311 | ** Mumbo Jumbo's house is shaped like his skull mask and feathers. |
| 312 | ** Gruntilda's Lair is a castle shaped like the game's BigBad Gruntilda Winkybunion's head, with her hat acting as a tower on top of which the final battle is fought. |
| 313 | * ''VideoGame/{{Bloodborne}}'': Yharnam is a giant maze of gothic architecture, ladders, and giant levers. It really makes you wonder how Yharnamites manage when it ''isn't'' the night of a hunt. |
| 314 | * ''VideoGame/TheCaligulaEffect'' takes place in a virtual world shaped by its inhabitants' thoughts, hopes, and memories. Having so many people causes things to get jumbled, as everything is based on people's ideas of how things should look like. As a result, the third and fourth floors of Kishimai High have some very strange, twisty hallway layouts. This is also used as a justification for the school's BlackoutBasement. |
| 315 | * ''Franchise/{{Castlevania}}'': |
| 316 | ** In the second half of ''VideoGame/CastlevaniaSymphonyOfTheNight'', you fight in Dracula's Castle... which is now upside down. Even weirder, the pools of water in the [[UndergroundLevel underground areas]] now float upside down as well. |
| 317 | ** Until ''VideoGame/CastlevaniaPortraitOfRuin'', all the save points were identical looking. So you could get Symphony's really nice red carpeted save points... in the underground caverns. And then there's the fact that half of the locations link to each other even if it makes no sense. |
| 318 | * ''VideoGame/ChainsOfSatinav'' has a place like this in [[TheWonderland Neirutvena]]. The spiraling walkway outside the Queen's throne room is styled in such a way that [[DepthDeception you become smaller]] as you walk up towards the pool at the top, which is fed into by an upwards-falling waterfall below. Dropping things off this waterfall, or letting them float up, will change the size of the object. |
| 319 | * ''VideoGame/CodeVein'': The Cathedral Of The Sacred Blood can best be described as a convoluted maze in three dimensions: the entire building dangles precariously over a bottomless pit carved into the ground, comprised entirely of narrow walkways and winding towers that all look nearly identical to one another, so getting lost is easy if they didn't constantly double back on each other. Several paths end in abrupt dead ends that look like the bridge was broken, until you realise there's nothing on the other side for them to connect to as if they were simply unfinished. Others ''seem'' like dead-ends, until you look down and realise the only way forward is to jump to a platform below. You'll no doubts spend the entire level wondering what deranged lunatic built this place. It's a JustifiedTrope, however, in that [[spoiler:it was created to hide the Successor of the Heart and the Successor of the Ribcage, and is ''deliberately'' hard to solve for that reason. Presumably there wouldn't be a way through at all if they weren't leaving it open for Jack and Eva]]. |
| 320 | * Surely the Tower of Gedden in ''VideoGame/ChronoCross'' qualifies. The building itself is the remnant of a TimeCrash, containing chunks of many a future - and one aborted present. It's just as screwed up as you'd expect it to be. |
| 321 | * The buildings in ''VideoGame/CityOfHeroes'' ''look'' normal, but they clearly aren't. Aside from the more mundane issues (Elevators only go up one floor, labyrinthine layouts that no sane office building would have), there are also some weirder things... (A door leading to an office building one visit can lead to a secret laboratory on a later one, sometimes within ''minutes'' of each other). There's also the one mission where an ordinary door in a Casino takes you to ''HELL''. |
| 322 | * Very few of the buildings in ''VideoGame/CrueltySquad'' have layouts that bear more than a passing resemblance to a real-life building. Paradise, a level that ostensibly takes place in a wealthy suburban area, includes things like a giant, neon castle that only has two rooms and a building that has two constantly-spinning towers on top of it. Even one of the more normal-looking houses still has a door that opens onto a five-foot drop for no apparent reason. |
| 323 | * ''Franchise/{{Danganronpa}}'': |
| 324 | ** ''VisualNovel/DanganronpaTriggerHappyHavoc'': The layout of Hope's Peak Academy is... odd when you examine it. Most of the floors are shaped in ways that don't line up with each other, there's a pool on the second floor that somehow occupies the same space as the gym on the first floor, and many rooms (such as every room in the dorms) have bolted up windows in places that couldn't possibly face the outside of the school. There's also [[spoiler: the hatch in the Monokuma room's floor that apparently leads to the mastermind's bunker, even though a hatch in that location would lead directly into the hallway of the floor below.]] |
| 325 | ** ''VisualNovel/Danganronpa2GoodbyeDespair'': The fourth island has a funhouse split between two areas; [[EdibleThemeNaming Strawberry House and Grape House]]. Its key attraction is a strange tower which is determined to be the same building that can be accessed by both houses which it's right in the middle of, but a setup of sensors and lights changes the tower's appearance and can only be accessed by one house at a time and refuses to change if it's occupied by one side, both of which can only be travelled between by a strange elevator. When a murder breaks out in the tower, a majority of the mystery revolves around figuring out how the funhouse works. |
| 326 | * ''VideoGame/DawnOfMana'' in general tries to justify the layout of its stages so that people could have conceivably used those places other than an obstacle course, but TheVeryDefinitelyFinalDungeon is full of twisting hallways, strangely oriented walls and floors, and warp zones to vaguely shaped structures floating in space. |
| 327 | * In ''VideoGame/{{Detention}}'', the school starts out as a fairly normal building, but as the game progresses your travel through the levels make less and less sense and the school becomes filled with puzzles and references to Taiwanese mythology. [[spoiler: Because you aren't playing in the real school, and haven't been since the prologue. The place you spend most of the game is actually Ray's personal IronicHell that she wound up in after betraying the forbidden book club and subsequently committing suicide out of guilt. You're only in the actual school during the segments where you are controlling Wei.]] |
| 328 | * In ''VideoGame/DevilMayCry'', buildings and surroundings alike get really weird when you travel through the rifts in and out of the Underworld. If it's not WombLevel, it's this. Also happens in the [[VideoGame/DevilMayCry2 second game]] to a lesser extent. In ''VideoGame/DevilMayCry3DantesAwakening'', there's the Temen-ni-gru tower and the Netherworld. In the latter area, the Lost Souls Nirvana is a pristine white version of M.C. Escher's ''Relativity'' stairways. You get to walk up, down and sideways to find gateways leading to the boss battles. There's also a rotating "room" with a giant hourglass. |
| 329 | * In ''VideoGame/DiabloII'', act II, the Arcane Sanctuary consists of many paths and stairways with no foundations at all. It's basically an entire level designed by M.C. Escher. Go down stairs to a level which then passes over the one you were just on, etc. Surprisingly doesn't hurt your brain as much as you would think it ought to. |
| 330 | * The engine used in ''VideoGame/DukeNukem3D'' is quite capable of this, although it isn't used for this purpose in most of the official levels, the two exceptions being "Tier Drops" and "Lunatic Fringe." The engine is pretty much the last one that used sectors (discrete units of space) to define levels instead of solid objects (which was popularized by Quake and has been used in pretty much all engines since). To allow sectors over other sectors, which edges connect is defined in the level data, but there's nothing that says you need to, for instance, have the actual heights of ceilings and floors in overlapping sectors make them different floors of a building. This allows you to build environments where you can walk around a building and be in different places depending on how many times you've walked around the building. |
| 331 | * ''VideoGame/DwarfFortress'' can have its eponymous fortresses lain out however you like. There's nothing wrong with having the barracks and apartment complex sprinkled with random tombs and burial chambers. And then we can move onto the physics, which are [[ArtisticLicensePhysics hilariously bent]]. It starts off with upside-down pyramids and waterwheel {{perpetual motion machine}}s. Then it goes to one tile wide corridors that are [[AlienGeometries somehow]] wide enough that ''100 dragons'' can slip by (as long as 99 of them are laying down), yet 2 dwarves can't go past each other if both are standing up. And finally, you get entire regions completely undermined and only held up by a handful of pillars, made from soap. ''Tallow soap.'' Bizarre constructions that exploit these broken physics (lovingly referred to as "dwarven physics"), along with {{pointless doomsday device}}s, are a rite of passage amongst DF players. {{Succession Game}}s take this even further, as they will inevitably reach a point where even the original players are completely baffled by the design of the fortress. This is not helped by some players' fondness of outright MalevolentArchitecture. If you want a good example of this -- all of this --, look up Blog/{{Boatmurdered}}. |
| 332 | * ''VideoGame/EarthBound1994'' has Dungeon Man, a giant, sapient humanoid dungeon. |
| 333 | * ''Franchise/TheElderScrolls'': |
| 334 | ** In the series' lore, the island of Artaeum combines this with AlienGeometries and, to an extent, being an EldritchLocation. Artaeum is the home of the Psijic Order, a powerful MagicalSociety and the oldest monastic order in Tamriel. Artaeum shifts continuously either at random or by decree of the Psijiic Council. It can also be made to disappear entirely from Mundus. |
| 335 | ** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIIIMorrowind Morrowind]]'': |
| 336 | *** Daedric shrines are designed in some downright [[AlienGeometries impossible ways]]. |
| 337 | *** The [[ProudWarriorRace House Redoran]] council district in Ald'Ruhn is situated in Under-Skar, the hollowed-out exoskeleton of a [[GiantEnemyCrab humongous sentient crab]] known as Skar. |
| 338 | *** The wizards of [[EvilSorcerer House Telvanni]] don't care much for actually building structures. Instead, they grow them out of [[FungusHumongous giant mushrooms]] whose growth is facilitated by the [[YourSoulIsMine trapped souls]] of [[OurDemonsAreDifferent powerful Daedra]]. |
| 339 | *** The Ministry of Truth is literally a hollowed-out giant rock that a [[MadGod certain Daedric Prince]] [[ColonyDrop threw down]] from Oblivion onto the [[{{Egopolis}} city of Vivec]], stopped in its tracks by the [[PhysicalGod Tribunal deity Vivec]], [[FloatingContinent several hundred feet over]] the largest and holiest temple in Vvardenfell. |
| 340 | ** ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIVOblivion Oblivion]]'' uses this for the Oblivion Gates and the outdoor architecture in Oblivion (though less so indoors). The Shivering Isles expansion pack has architecture that is [[{{Pun}} often just as sane.]] The parts of Arkved's Tower that aren't outright {{Pocket Dimension}}s have also been twisted into this by said wizard's nightmares under Vaermina's influence. |
| 341 | * ''VideoGame/TheEndTimesVermintide'' has The Wizard's Tower, a convoluted labyrinth where the party must eventually walk on bookshelves and open chests on the ceiling. |
| 342 | * ''VideoGame/Fallout4: Nuka-World'' has the Grandchester Mystery Mansion (see "Real Life" below) on the outskirts of the titular theme park, a bizarrely-designed pre-War home with stairs abutting solid walls and furniture attached to the ceiling. According to the automated tour guide, these were all deliberate design choices by its owner to confuse the evil spirits she thought were possessing her daughter, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt, since said daughter ended up brutally murdering her. When you visit it in-game, the Mansion's confusing layout is made worse by a series of booby traps set by the paranoid mercenary hiding out there, whose journal entries mention that he keeps hearing a little girl's giggling. |
| 343 | * ''Franchise/FinalFantasy'': |
| 344 | ** Ibsen's Castle in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIX'' is mirror-imaged on the underside. And it's nothing compared to Memoria, a place made from peoples memories that mostly looks like a number of runs and cities jumbled together through AlienGeometries and {{Gravity Screw}}s. |
| 345 | ** ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXII'' has [[ItsAllUpstairsFromHere the Pharos at Ridorana]], which features floating stairs and walkways circling around a central hollow column that pulls seawater up to the top of the tower where the [[{{Macguffin}} Sun-Cryst]] resides. Giruvegan is also pretty strange, with most of the playable area consisting of an enormous shaft centered on the Great Crystal with walkways made of crystal and HardLight around the sides. |
| 346 | ** Cocoon in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIII'' is a floating world above the surface of Gran Pulse. It's a DysonSphere, so the people live ''inside'' Cocoon rather than outside like on normal planets. |
| 347 | * Houses in ''VideoGame/TheFloorIsJelly'' are built on stilts, and violently bounces about back and forth when the jelly-like ground underneath them shifts about. |
| 348 | * Some of the desert tourist traps that lay abandoned in ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoSanAndreas'' are restaurants shaped like the animals they serve, in a representation of a real trend in [[{{Zeerust}} now-dated 50's-60's architecture]] toward giant objects. |
| 349 | * ''VideoGame/HelloNeighbor'': Even on the outside, the Neighbor's home is incredibly strange, apparently cobbled together from several houses, leading to such things as odd placements of windows, doors that open onto sheer drops, random holes in the floor leading outside, and the trolley car that goes through one side of it. |
| 350 | * In ''VideoGame/HeroinesQuest'', the svartalf village Nidavellir has Escheresque architecture, with parts of the city being upside down, furniture on the walls, and decorations incorporating endless stairs and a blivet. The locals take it all in stride, but the narrator keeps getting confused about which way is up. |
| 351 | * As seen in ''VideoGame/Hitman2'', [[TheIlluminati Providence]]'s "meeting room" is a floating upside-down glass pyramid supported entirely by three cables hung onto some mountains in an undisclosed location. It looks super unsafe, but nobody's in danger since they hold their meetings via holograms anyway. One has to wonder why they even need a structure like this if that's the case, though. |
| 352 | * ''Illusions'' for the Platform/{{Colecovision}} has level designs inspired by Escher. |
| 353 | * ''VideoGame/JakAndDaxterThePrecursorLegacy'': The Lost Precursor "City" doesn't resemble a city [[MalevolentArchitecture by any stretch of the imagination.]] Not only does it house open vats of Dark Eco, but most of it is lethal as mechanisms in the water turn it deadly and will harm Jak if he stays in it, shifting platforms in the walls and even being home to the Lurkers. |
| 354 | * ''VideoGame/JetIsland'' features giant towers, bridges that go nowhere, floating pillars, twisting rails, and various other bits of random architecture that exist just to give the player fun ways of getting around. |
| 355 | * ''Franchise/KingdomHearts'': |
| 356 | ** Yen Sid's tower in ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsII''. The tower is on an island floating in space, and the interior is a floating stairway with portals connecting to the rooms. The Castle that Never Was is even weirder. It's a mountain-sized floating castle full of impossibly long hallways, elevators that space manipulation to reach their distinations, suspended floors, HardLight paths between platforms, and areas that can only be accessed by portals. |
| 357 | ** ''VideoGame/KingdomHearts3DDreamDropDistance'''s The World That Never Was (Sora's side) has the Contorted City, which combines aspects of the original World that Never Was with Xemnas's World of Nothing. It's so contorted, it's barely a city anymore. The version of the Castle that Never Was on Riku's side is just as twisted, requiring Reality Shifts to rearrange the architecture into a traversible state. |
| 358 | ** The original and ''3D'' (Riku's side) has Monstro (known as Prankster's Paradise in ''3D'') which is an example of this AND WombLevel. Having wood pilings actually makes sense considering Monstro is a giant whale that eats ships. However, they didn't try to lay it out like what the inside of a giant animal might actually be like until ''3D''. Even then, you can open a hole in the bottom of the Bowels and end up right in Monstro's mouth. |
| 359 | ** Castle Oblivion, as seen from the outside in ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsChainOfMemories'' has towers jutting out horizontally, sinking into the ground, and even sticking out from the bottom of the floating island the castle sits on. The rooms inside the castle are just as weird in their own right, being made of setpieces from ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsI'' [[RemixedLevel rearranged]] into rooms that are clearly not built for normal use and often contain multiple floors. |
| 360 | ** In ''VideoGame/KingdomHearts02BirthBySleepAFragmentaryPassage'', [[WesternAnimation/SnowWhiteAndTheSevenDwarfs the Evil Queen's castle]] has been twisted into this by [[EldritchLocation the Realm of Darkness]], with its separate areas separated into pocket dimensions by whatever malevolent force is possessing the Magic Mirror. One area is an expanse of pillars mirroring themselves into several equally real "layers" for Aqua to traverse while another consists of four ruined staircases that form a loop through mirrored walls on each landing. The central "hub" area is just a stone floor floating in the void with distorted edges and gazebos containing mirrors that lead to the other areas. |
| 361 | * ''Franchise/TheLegendOfZelda'': |
| 362 | ** ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOcarinaOfTime'': The Forest Temple, located in the frontier areas of TheLostWoods, looks like an ordinary mansion with some castle motifs, but as Link explores it he finds corridors that end up becoming "twisted" as he activates certain switches, really screwing with the player's mind upon realizing that Link walks normally while ''staying on the red carpet'' decorating the floor instead of walking onto the walls or ceiling midway; as a result, the hallways twist in such a way that the doors shouldn't even lead in the directions they do. |
| 363 | ** ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaMajorasMask'': Stone Tower Temple has many corridors in the floor as well as the ceiling, because the dungeon can be literally turned upside down to explore it while it's in that state, and avoiding to fall into the sky. |
| 364 | ** ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaSkywardSword'': Sky Keep, in addition to having a strange external design (think of a Roman-inspired building, only positioned upide-down), features rooms inside whose position can be moved via special tile panels, changing drastically the layout of the dungeon. |
| 365 | * Because the interiors of buildings in ''VideoGame/LethalCompany'' are [[RandomlyGeneratedLevels randomly generated]], they often lack coherence. For example, the fire exit is usually positioned far from the main entrance, but player might discover a fire exit in the room next to the main entrance. Additionally, there are numerous dead-ends and long, looping hallways. And because only the interiors are randomized while the outside remains the same for every location, the game will often end up creating a building [[AlienGeometries with an interior that does not resemble its exterior shape]]. |
| 366 | * ''VideoGame/LittleNemoTheDreamMaster'' has the level "Topsy-Turvy", set in an upside-down house. |
| 367 | * The Last Resort from ''VideoGame/LuigisMansion3'' is very eccentrically built. Alongside more typical amenities such as a shopping center and high-class restaurant are features such as a vertical botanical garden with overgrown hotel suites, a medieval jousting arena, multiple fully-equipped filming stages, a recreation of an Egyptian pyramid, a pirate-themed restaurant with an entire lagoon and pirate ship inside, [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking and a swimming pool several stories above ground level]]—[[NoOSHACompliance which is a very unsafe place to put it]]. Moreover, the entire hotel seems to be BiggerOnTheInside since several "floors" [[NonIndicativename are multiple stories in height]] and their floor plans seem to clash with the hotel's outer facade. Perhaps the most bizarre part, though, is that everyone has to use the elevator to get to every floor past the second—there is no stair access between floors aside from a flight connecting the basement to the lobby. |
| 368 | * ''VideoGame/ManifoldGarden'': To be expected in buildings built to accommodate six directions of gravity and world-wrapping. Especially so when portals are involved within the same world. |
| 369 | * The engine used in ''VideoGame/{{Marathon}}''. One fan made map had an entire maze contained in a figure 8 shaped hallway, overlapping itself dozens of times. |
| 370 | * ''VideoGame/TheMatrixPathOfNeo'' has a jumbled buildings/bigger on the inside maze of doors, rooms and floating platforms of a mostly French or medieval style. If you go through the wrong one, you're suddenly walking on the 'under-side' of the staircase/room that you were just on. |
| 371 | * ''VideoGame/Metroid1'' has the most alien and isolating environments in the [[Franchise/{{Metroid}} series]], designed to make the player uncomfortable rather than for pacing or flow. A perfect example is the final ascent at the end; the platforms are incredibly small and awkwardly spaced, while in ''VideoGame/SuperMetroid'' and ''VideoGame/MetroidZeroMission'', the same platforms are much larger and less obstructive to the player. |
| 372 | * ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}'' allows players to build structures that fit into any category. Big objects are common as megaprojects, while unlikely foundations (or No Foundations At All) are made possible by the fact that only a few blocks are affected by gravity. Place one block on top of another, then knock out the bottom block, and the first block will remain suspended in midair where you placed it. |
| 373 | * The game play of ''VideoGame/MonumentValley'' is determining possible paths in ''Creator/MCEscher''-like ruins. |
| 374 | * ''VideoGame/MyHouse'', a ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'' GameMod inspired by the aforementioned ''Literature/HouseOfLeaves'', makes heavy use of non-Euclidean geometry implemented via the [=GZDoom=] engine's lineportal feature. |
| 375 | * The ''VideoGame/{{Myst}}'' games adore this trope, with such SceneryPorn delights as rock-embedded shipwrecks (''Myst''), prisons or wasp-nestlike villages built into giant trees (''VideoGame/{{Riven}}''), a cross between a pagoda and a roller coaster (''VideoGame/MystIIIExile''), elevators that travel horizontally underwater (''VideoGame/MystIVRevelation''), giant cubical tombs suspended over canyons (''VideoGame/{{Uru}}''), and {{Clockpunk}}-looking alien observatories (''VideoGame/MystVEndOfAges''). |
| 376 | * Every building in ''VideoGame/TheNeverhood''... especially the giant piece of toast with the fries sticking out of the top. Which also has butter on the inside wall, apparently, so the sandwich is complete. |
| 377 | * ''VideoGame/{{Obsidian}}'' plays with this trope: 2/3 of the game environment is set in dream worlds, made real by nanobots generated from a satellite inspired by them. The first world is a cube-shaped office building where you're literally able to walk on the walls and ceiling, and the camera moves so that any face of the cube that you're standing on is upright.. As put by a Lets Player: |
| 378 | -->'''Doc Sigma''': A world that looks like it was designed by M.C. Escher and Frank Lloyd Wright, after doing some terrible, terrible drugs. |
| 379 | * In ''VideoGame/{{Outcry}}'', the Shimmering World greets you with plenty of outright impossible constructions. |
| 380 | * Grandma's house in indie horror game ''VideoGame/ThePath''. |
| 381 | * The Polyhedron in ''VideoGame/{{Pathologic}}''. Lampshaded and then justified in that [[spoiler: it has a massive spike through the centre that keeps the building up. This was the wound that became 'infected' and caused the plague]]. |
| 382 | * The Skedar Ruins from ''VideoGame/PerfectDark''. It's an ancient temple that's full of collapsed roofing, off-kilter walls, random chasms and dead ends, [[SlowDoors and doors that just won't frigging open.]] Apparently it was purpose-built as a shrine to war; [[FridgeBrilliance it definitely looks like it's been bombed a few times.]] |
| 383 | * Some blocks of [[EvilTowerOfOminousness Tartarus]] in ''VideoGame/Persona3'' (and the Abyss of Time in ''[[UpdatedRerelease FES]]'') feature jumbled collections of floors and staircases floating in midair in the background. There's also the whole sprouting up out of the ground every night bit... during the day it's a perfectly normal high school. |
| 384 | * Many of the buildings in the ''VideoGame/PokemonMysteryDungeon'' series consist of a giant version of their owner's head, even the player character's team base in the first game. |
| 385 | * ''VideoGame/PrinceOfPersia2008'' has some bizarre angles and other unexplained weirdness, especially in The Concubine's levels. |
| 386 | * The tower of St. Mystere, in ''VideoGame/ProfessorLaytonAndTheCuriousVillage'', looks like nothing so much as a dozen or so differently-shaped buildings stacked on top of one another. It's a mystery as to how it defies gravity, much less is safe to inhabit. |
| 387 | * ''VideoGame/{{Psychonauts}}'' has very few levels outside the summer camp that don't have topography that would drive one insane. {{Justified|Trope}} in that many of the levels take place [[JourneyToTheCenterOfTheMind in the mental landscape]] of people who are questionably sane at best. Of special note is [[BedlamHouse the Thorney Towers asylum]], which starts looking like something out of the mind of Escher as you climb it but is set ''completely'' in the real world instead of someone's twisted imagination. |
| 388 | * ''VideoGame/{{Pushmo}}'' has giant objects in the shape of Mario, a strawberry, a duck, and more. |
| 389 | * Shows up several times in the ''VideoGame/QuestForGlory'' series: |
| 390 | ** [[spoiler: Yorick's]] room in ''VideoGame/QuestForGloryI'' is a maze of ScoobyDoobyDoors. There are stairs on the ceiling (that you don't use). Falling off the walkway into the bottomless pit sends the Hero tumbling out of ANOTHER door where he can recover and get back to his feet. The game even {{lampshade|Hanging}}s this by commenting how much Creator/MCEscher would love it. Justified because it was built by a Gnome. |
| 391 | ** Literature/{{Baba Yaga}}'s hut is a house on chicken legs. That can fly. |
| 392 | ** Erasmus's house in ''Quest for Glory I'' is fairly normal, if [[CloudCuckooLander eclectically furnished]], however his home in ''VideoGame/QuestForGloryV'' is a ''literal'' CloudCuckooLand. You actually access it by getting swallowed by a giant cloud after answering its challenge questions. |
| 393 | ** W.I.T. consists of a fairly normal-looking entry chamber. And a narrow pathway in empty space with no walls, ceiling or floor, that just goes on and on and on. Justified since it was built by wizards. So yes, AWizardDidIt. |
| 394 | ** The Cave of the Dark One in ''VideoGame/QuestForGloryIV'' doesn't just ''look'' like the interior of some giant creature carved from stone. [[spoiler: You're actually ''inside'' the body of [[EldritchAbomination Avoozl]] that's been [[SealedEvilInACan frozen in stone]]. Features that look like bones, hearts, sensory organs and alveoli actually ''are'' bones, hearts, sensory organs and alveoli.]] |
| 395 | * ''VideoGame/RealmOfImpossibility'' is a 2D adventure game from 1984 that features a number of floorplans that would be impossible in 3D. |
| 396 | * ''VideoGame/{{Rengoku}}'': |
| 397 | ** Each of the Rengoku Towers has the floors floating separated and misaligned from each other. |
| 398 | ** The doors on the 8th floor in the second game act more like portals, as the "rooms" are floating platforms that are separated from each other. |
| 399 | * ''Franchise/ResidentEvil'': |
| 400 | ** The [[VideoGame/ResidentEvil1 very first game]] averts this. Aside from the infamous DescendingCeiling room the mansion is aesthetically fairly clean and normal, and there's generally a good reason for the layout to be the way it is; for instance the caves may seem odd but they're the secret entrance to the laboratory. However the [[VideoGame/ResidentEvilRemake remake]] throws this out the window in favor of a much more standard HauntedHouse (the place looks like it's been abandoned for years, not a couple of months) look with some mind-boggling design choices. There are now not one but ''two'' graveyards, one of which conceals an inexplicable ''Silent Hill''-esque dungeon with a boss monster (hidden in a coffin suspended from the ceiling) which must be released by putting four death masks on nearby statues. The caves are now a gigantic abandoned mine that lead to a cabin in the middle of nowhere for some reason, and the only way to the labs is through a crypt set over a {{Bottomless Pit|s}}. Though the remake does partly justify it by introducing George Trevor, a MadArtist of an architect and designer of the Spencer Mansion who was hired for what was basically his dream project of having unlimited funding to design whatever bizarre traps and architecture he wanted. |
| 401 | ** Raccoon City as seen in ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil2'' and ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil3Nemesis'' takes it to an extreme. What sort of insane architect designs police stations, houses, and cities riddled with mind-numbingly difficult puzzles and deadly traps, and [[NobodyPoops no bathrooms]]? In the same vein, ''VideoGame/ResidentEvilCodeVeronica'' does it with Ashford Island and the Antarctic facility. |
| 402 | ** ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil4'' has the Salazar Castle, which is a mishmash of random settings and objects. It has everything: a room surrounded by water, a sewer system, a hedge maze, a furnace, an actual lava pit with fire-breathing dragon statues, a pit trap, ancient underground ruins, a mine cart ride, a giant clockwork mechanical statue of Salazar, and even a roller coaster. The [[VideoGame/ResidentEvil4Remake remake]] adds a partial justification by stating that one of the former Castellans was a bit of a paranoid nutcase who spent a fortune filling the castle with bizarre traps and contraptions. It also makes the clockwork Salazar much smaller and removes the lava room entirely, which were likely the two most outlandish parts of the whole thing in the original. |
| 403 | * ''VideoGame/{{Rime}}'': As the game progresses, the settings become more and more mind-bending. The "[[FiveStagesOfGrief Bargaining]]" section in particular is filled with stretching hallways and rooms that invert high and low without explanation. [[spoiler: This is perhaps symbolic of the father's grief at his boy's death -- his ability to think rationally is severely compromised while he spins the story as a coping mechanism.]] |
| 404 | * ''VideoGame/SagaFrontier'': As befitting the master of Space Magic, Kylin's Paradise features strange geometries, gravity changing orientations randomly, and size shifting. |
| 405 | * Stauf's mansion in ''VideoGame/TheSeventhGuest'' goes all out with this trope, on top of [[SolveTheSoupCans the absurdity of his puzzles]] that he ''does not want you to solve''. There's secret passages that not only lead a great distance from room to room (which can be a problem with the slow navigation system), but also make it look like you're shrinking to fit through them, and eject you in the most unlikely places. |
| 406 | * In ''VideoGame/TheSexyBrutale'', the basement consists of [[spoiler:a graveyard in the open air, a giant record player, and a bottomless room full of stacks upon stacks of playing cards]]. There's also a bottomless belfry in the same story as the guestrooms. [[spoiler: This is justified by the mansion [[AllJustADream not actually being real]].]] |
| 407 | * The castle where ''VideoGame/ShironeTheDragonGirl'' takes place is weird, impractical, and barely makes sense spatially. Additionally, the layout of the castle changes each time someone walks through the "exit" door or destroys a big orb, creating new paths and removing some existing paths. [[spoiler:Justified because the castle is an illusion created from the memories of the people who lived here.]] |
| 408 | * ''Franchise/SilentHill'', being a town made of the stuff of nightmares, invokes this trope on purpose when you're wandering in the DarkWorld. Or in the (for lack of a better term) Light World, for that matter. Silent Hill Historical Society is one of the most famous examples, particularly being BiggerOnTheInside, having numerous holes that James descends into but which eventually lead him back to ground level (with an absurdly long staircase and elevator ride along the way), and a corridor that's turned vertically MC Escher-style so that the prison gate acts like a trapdoor, leading James down one of said holes. |
| 409 | * The Darco, or deconstructed arcology, in ''VideoGame/SimCity 2000''. Purposely built to be weird and twisty. All the arcologies in the Sim City series exhibit this trope to varying degrees. |
| 410 | * It's quite easy to create bizarre-looking buildings in ''VideoGame/TheSims'' (and its sequels), either on purpose or just through not knowing anything about architecture. Buildings that break topography are more or less impossible, but through either cheats or removing load-bearing elements after building on top of them, you can violate physics quite a bit. Specifically, you can build or edit any structure that has solid ground beneath it. Thus, you can build a 2 or 3-story house and then remove parts of the lower floor(s), so that the upper floor(s) is now partially/wholly unsupported. Taken to the extremes, the game will allow you to have a building that consists of only a 3rd floor+roof, accessible only by a ladder from a small block of land located in the middle of a swimming pool that takes up all of the property's land. |
| 411 | * The Purple Moon civilization of Glacia, from ''VideoGame/SkiesOfArcadia'' is comprised of upside down buildings reminiscent of stalactites. The city itself is located on the bottom of the Purple Continent, which is the equivalent of one of the real world's poles... except [[FloatingContinent floating in midair]]. |
| 412 | ** The [[spoiler:Great Silver Shrine takes it even further - a twisty three-dimensional maze where "down" is relative to the surface you're standing on]]. |
| 413 | * In ''VideoGame/SonicBattle'', Tails' house is shaped like his head. |
| 414 | * Happens quite often in ''VideoGame/TheStanleyParable''. It's not uncommon to see corridors and staircases that lead to nowhere, or being able to turn 90 degrees right five times in a row before coming to the next part of the corridor. [[spoiler: Later sections become even worse with corridors that look far shorter than they are before you traverse them, doorways that lead to the doorway you just came from, and chunks of the area deliberately failing to load with texture. It gets so bad at one point that the narrator has to employ the help of The Stanley Parable Adventure Line™. The Line™ subsequently decides that the best path is to twist around itself to where it wasn't before, until the narrator decides to ignore The Line™. You then later run into The Line™ randomly bursting through the ceiling and are advised to ignore It™.]] |
| 415 | * ''VideoGame/StarTrekJudgmentRites'': |
| 416 | ** The spaceship ''Compassion'' is specifically mentioned as having something weird about it when it is first scanned by the ''Enterprise''. Once the team beams aboard, they discover that the ship's interiors are arranged in a way that makes absolutely no sense: you can keep walking in a straight line (no vertical loop involved) and still get back to where you started. |
| 417 | ** Then later, you find a trapdoor in one of the rooms that leads directly into the ship's computer. Not into a room inside the ship's computer - space itself is warped and miniaturized. This is speculated by Spock to be a sort of engineering feature, allowing engineers easy access to the computer's innards. |
| 418 | ** Both of the above are eventually [[TheUnTwist revealed to be meaningless]], since the whole thing turns out to have been a carefully-constructed illusion. |
| 419 | * ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy2'': |
| 420 | ** Flipsville Galaxy looks like a suburban house built by a [[ThisIsYourPremiseOnDrugs completely stoned]] intergalactic architect. |
| 421 | ** Bowser's Gravity Gauntlet is Bowser's Castle if it was designed by Creator/MCEscher. |
| 422 | * ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'', in accordance with its cartoonish, over the top style, is made of this trope in its map layouts. [=2Fort=] is the most obvious--the opposing sides' bases are placed within a stone's throw from one another, and the power lines in the intelligence rooms just run from one outlet to another. User-made maps (such as Orange Box or Mario Kart) can be even more deliberately bizarre. |
| 423 | * Constantine's Mansion in ''VideoGame/ThiefTheDarkProject'' and ''Thief Gold'' contains giant objects (in the ''Gold'' version's Brobdignag section), much of the ground floor and the floor above it have interiors rotated either 90 or 180 degrees from normal, with furniture either fastened to the walls or ceilings, some of the rooms and corridors have oddly slanted walls, in one case forming a spiral pattern; some of the gardens also have this; one floor is a mixture of jungle-type tunnels, ordinary corridors and corridors with odd perspectives, and one room is entered through the roof of a greenhouse -- you come up through a pool of water inside the room. [[spoiler:This hints at Constantine's true identity as the chaotic demigod known as the Trickster.]] |
| 424 | * Many locations in ''VideoGame/TRIOfFriendshipAndMadness'' showcase some strange buildings - some of which, like the Tower of Nowhere, move into AlienGeometries and BiggerOnTheInside territory. In particular, Chapter 12 (''Out of the Box''), takes place inside several large buildings that are, in turn, within one giant room. There are pillars, gears, and even a way to rotate the entire layout of the area. |
| 425 | * ''VideoGame/VagrantStory'' has Snowfly Forest and Iron Maiden B2, where trying to navigate in the traditional manner will just get you teleported to a completely different part of the area, sometimes nowhere near where you where a moment ago, and attempts to retrace your steps could result in you getting even more lost. The map isn't much help in these areas either. |
| 426 | * ''VideoGame/VampireTheMasqueradeBloodlines'': Grout's Mansion looks like an OldDarkHouse on the outside, but the interior is a disjointed nightmare of nonsensical staircases, [[BookcasePassage secret passages]], {{Booby Trap}}s, meandering halls, secret [[MadScientistLaboratory labs]], and truly unsettling decorations. {{Justified|Trope}} since it's the home of an insane elder vampire and the prison of his {{Mind Rape}}d test subjects. |
| 427 | * ''VideoGame/VermintideII'': The Citadel of Eternity is both [[EldritchLocation warped by Chaos]] and [[PlaceOfPower touched by the Gods]], leaving it a nonsensical, sometimes-changing maze of staircases, platforms, bottomless pits, and odd rooms. |
| 428 | -->'''Victor:''' [[OhMyGods BY THE HAMMER!]] DESIST THIS ARCHITECTURAL MOCKERY! |
| 429 | * ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'': |
| 430 | ** The Sunken Temple. Built by a snake cult, the building features twisting passages, enormous spiral stairs, and a deeply, deeply unintuitive layout (going up two floors to get to a stair that takes you down one is a mild example). And all four of its wings are like that. |
| 431 | ** Blackrock Mountain is this. Why is there a dead end? Why are half of this city's walkways suspended over a lake of lava? No real reason. |
| 432 | ** Karazhan is both this and AlienGeometries. The interior layout is demented, and the exterior and interior don't match up at all. Justified by being the home tower of one of the most powerful mages in history, whose sanity was questionable at best, but ''still''. |
| 433 | [[/folder]] |
| 434 | |
| 435 | [[folder:Web Animation]] |
| 436 | * The ''WebAnimation/{{CCC}}'' series features some pretty strange, but cool looking architecture, that clearly mixes a Mexican/Latin American style with a impossibly high towers, futuristic buildings and crazy colors. |
| 437 | * ''WebAnimation/DoodleToons'' gives us Bellybutton and Jellybean's houses, which are shaped like a banana and a teapot respectively. |
| 438 | * In the ''WebAnimation/HappyTreeFriends'' episode "[[Recap/HTFHomeIsWhereTheHurtIs Home Is Where The Hurt Is]], the characters work together to rebuild one character's house. Whether the original blueprints would have created a normal house is debatable, as while the house is being built, [[CloudCuckooLander Lumpy]] folds the blueprints into an origami crane, inexplicably causing the building to be shaped like a giant origami crane that even moves. In any other series, this would be pretty awesome, but since it's [[CrapsaccharineWorld this show]], there are virtually no exits and dozens of [[MalevolentArchitecture death traps]]. |
| 439 | * In [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlKiiur1LGo this]] ''Franchise/TouhouProject'' MMD fanimation, Eientei is depicted as an enormous, intimidating and jumbled mess with myriads of windows and some sections that seem to be tilted on their side. On the inside, it is equally distorted, not to mention stuffed with traps. This is [[JustifiedTrope justified]] because [[spoiler:the whole fight is actually a [[MindRape hallucination]] induced by [[MoonRabbit Reisen]], and when the real Eientei is shown at the very end of the animation, it is perfectly normal]]. |
| 440 | [[/folder]] |
| 441 | |
| 442 | [[folder:Web Comics]] |
| 443 | * ''Webcomic/ABeginnersGuideToTheEndOfTheUniverse'': The building complexes that the Everyman and his allies explore are less so actual buildings and more convoluted series of various types of rooms and passages that only tangentially relate to their immediate neighbors, all hanging in the infinite void. In his early explorations, for instance, the Everyman begins in a hallway connecting a number of apartments, finds a door leading into a palatial mansion, passes through its swimming pool to find a long stone tunnel with a single pantry at its far end, goes down a hatch into another tunnel further down, and follows the train tracks there to another agglomeration of office buildings and seaside docks. This is eventually explained as being a result of [[spoiler:the story taking place in a PocketDimension created by the Everyman after the universe's heat death; the rooms were created as a manifestation of jumbled and disconnected memories of human civilization]]. |
| 444 | * ''Webcomic/CityUnderTheHill'' has the entire eponymous City of Bablyon based on this Trope. Buildings in Babylon aren't so much built as magicked into being, and in a pocket dimension they prove unstable. It's not uncommon for buildings, fences, or even walls on the outskirts of the City to simply phase out of existence. |
| 445 | * ''Webcomic/ExterminatusNow'': After a ScoobyDoobyDoors scene, [[http://exterminatusnow.co.uk/2014-07-13/comic/tangled-web/time-and-relative-dimensions/ this page]] features a textbook example of Escher's room as seen in the trope image. |
| 446 | * In ''Webcomic/GirlGenius'': |
| 447 | ** Castle Heterodyne [[http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20070420 had a reputation of being able to reconfigure itself at will.]] The stories turn out to be true, and even though it's been seriously damaged at the time of the current story, [[http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20090304 it still can.]] |
| 448 | --> '''Tiktoffen:''' "The door we came through -- It never led ''here'' before!" |
| 449 | ** [[http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20120109 Here]], Agatha has an impossible fork as a work tool. |
| 450 | * All of the kids' houses (and [[AllTrollsAreDifferent trolls' hives]]) in ''Webcomic/{{Homestuck}}'' are built up to be impossibly tall by copy-pasting bits of the original house on top of each other. [[https://www.homestuck.com/story/2681 The results tend to be a little strange.]] Even before entering the Medium, the trolls' hives were bizarre constructs, since a troll designs and constructs his/her own hive (with the help of carpenter droids) right after exiting the caverns in their early youth. The design judgement of one-sweep olds is questionable, as Vriska laments at one point. |
| 451 | * In ''ComicStrip/KnightsOfTheDinnerTable'', the Tic Tac Taco restaurant has a giant sombrero on the roof. |
| 452 | * The eponymous structure in ''Webcomic/TheMansionOfE''. |
| 453 | * ''Webcomic/QuantumVibe'' has [[http://www.quantumvibe.com/strip?page=573 The Weapons Shop Of Escher.]][[note]]Punning on Creator/AEVanVogt's novel ''The Weapon Shops of Isher''[[/note]] Fortunately the firing range next door is more normal. |
| 454 | * In ''Webcomic/SluggyFreelance'', the Demon King lives in a [[http://pics.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=041123 house on top of a giant pile of bones.]] While suitably menacing, you gotta figure bones make for a pretty unreliable foundation. There are also weird things that look like wisps of fire or smoke built into the house itself. |
| 455 | * ''Webcomic/VoldemortsChildren'' portrays [[http://www.elidupree.com/main/posts/174-voldemort%27s-children-page-15 Hogwarts]] this way. |
| 456 | * ''Webcomic/ZebraGirl'': Sandra's house became quite an odd place after the timeskip, gaining several floors and having walls made of stairs. |
| 457 | * ''Webcomic/{{Chiasmata}}'': |
| 458 | ** The first Location. While not especially fancy, it's a (seemingly?) huge place with 'doors' that act akin to in-house portals, multiple secret passageways, plus weird (and sometimes sadistic) puzzles. Basically, like a disorienting not-quite-nightmare in Location form. If it weren't for the symbols on the walls, they would get lost every time they turn a corner. And it's still unknown what the walls are made of. |
| 459 | --->It can't burn the... concrete? Concrete-like substance? Pseudoconcrete? You're not sure. It looks a bit like concrete, but it's smoother and more evenly colored, and it doesn't seem to be painted. |
| 460 | ** The second Location is ''even stranger'', resembling a baby's "put the blocks in the slots" puzzle. ([[http://mspfanventures.com/?s=7068&p=327 From this page on]]) |
| 461 | --->'''Daniel:''' Confusing. Strange. [[RhymesOnADime Something's wrong with how everything's arranged]].\ |
| 462 | [...]\ |
| 463 | You can hear Daniel talking to... Jacqueline, you think. She's the third person on this floor, which apparently bends the rules of space and geometry into pretzels. Each room borders the other two on two sides? Maybe? Your head hurts. |
| 464 | * ''Webcomic/TheRedacverse'' introduces a house shaped like a giant toilet in Chapter 9. |
| 465 | [[/folder]] |
| 466 | |
| 467 | [[folder:Web Videos]] |
| 468 | * ''WebVideo/{{Highcraft}}'': Everything Cooper builds tends to fall under this, but especially the bridge he made entirely out of ''chains''. |
| 469 | * The ''WebVideo/SMPLive'' server is practically a world of it, especially at [[QuirkyTown Spawn City]], where there are things like a giant skyscraper built entirely of melons and a giant cube that features a Doge meme on each side. |
| 470 | [[/folder]] |
| 471 | |
| 472 | [[folder:Western Animation]] |
| 473 | * In ''WesternAnimation/TheAddamsFamily1992'', the intro has the house interior look just like the trope pic above. Plus it has plenty of rooms filled with monsters and death traps. |
| 474 | * In ''WesternAnimation/TheAdventuresOfJimmyNeutronBoyGenius'', the burger-shaped restaurant [=McSpanky=]'s. Worse yet the drive-through window has a massive [[{{Scotireland}} Scotirish]] man's head to serve as it. In "Men at Work" Jimmy upgrades the inside to be sleek and futuristic and then sends it into the sun to destroy it... only for the aliens Zix, Travoltron, and Tee to find it and turn it into a spaceship as it floats through the solar system. |
| 475 | * The Western Air Temples in ''WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender'' are built upside down on the bottom face of a cliff. Perhaps not impossible, but certainly questionable. The DVDCommentary half-jokingly suggests they had to contract the construction to a bunch of [[DishingOutDirt Earthbenders]]. There are also examples of a temple built on the cracks of an active volcano, and a prison built of metal on a lake which somehow sits inside a volcano. |
| 476 | * Almost every building in ''WesternAnimation/CatDog'' is a giant object -- Catdog's fish/bone house, the bowling alley shaped like a bowling ball, the local taco joint shaped like a giant taco... |
| 477 | * Castle Bodhran is this in the card game of ''WesternAnimation/{{Chaotic}}''. Supposedly there are are doors below your feet, stairs ascend sideways and floors are seen where ceilings should be, but no matter where you stand, you’re always right side up. The card's flavor text even uses the trope name: This strange stronghold is built in a style that might be best called "bizzarechitecture". |
| 478 | * In the pilot of ''WesternAnimation/CodeMonkeys'', the office hallways were deadly video game levels and the characters treated it as a regular thing. Later episodes dropped this. |
| 479 | * TheNewTens remake of ''WesternAnimation/DangerMouse'' is set in a WorldOfFunnyAnimals rather than the original series's MouseWorld. So instead of having an HQ inside a pillar box, DM is based in a skyscraper ... which is shaped like a giant pillar box for no apparent reason. The opening episode also establishes London as the city of weird-shaped glass buildings (using a mix of real ones like the Gherkin and parodies like the Tennis Racquet) before DM's supersonic FlyingCar shatters them all. |
| 480 | * In ''WesternAnimation/{{Dogstar}}'', Bob Santino's private satellite is shaped like a giant Robog (the robot dog he made his fortune manufacturing). |
| 481 | * Beebe Bluff Middle School in ''WesternAnimation/{{Doug}}''. The name wasn't chosen until the first day of school, yet it's shaped like Beebe's head when seen from above and has a purple roof. It's pretty bizarre inside too. Hallways lead to nowhere, there are windows right up against another wall, and the door to one of the men's rooms leads to the auditorium stage. |
| 482 | * ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'' has one of their classic cutaways feature one of these, with Peter commenting "This is weirder than that music video by M.C. Escher": |
| 483 | -->[[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SvFsIrfhVPs "Goin' up the stairs, and goin' down the stairs, and goin' up the stairs, and goin' down the stairs, and goin' up the sideways stairs!"]] |
| 484 | * An episode of ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'' features Fry and Bender looking for a new apartment. One of the ones they visit and reject is an M. C. Escher painting brought to life, with the various doors and passages acting like ScoobyDoobyDoors. Bender trips and falls down the M.C. Escher stairs, then up a different flight of stairs, then across another different flight of stairs... |
| 485 | * One episode of ''WesternAnimation/TheGrimAdventuresOfBillyAndMandy'' shows that Endsville Elementary is built on a cliff overlooking a desert. This was probably only there for a one-time gag, as later episodes show that the school has a football field, which are typically built behind the school. |
| 486 | * In the stop-motion animated short film ''WesternAnimation/HeadOverHeels'', an old married couple lives in a house where each person's floor is the other one's ceiling. |
| 487 | * The House in the Woods in ''WesternAnimation/{{Hilda}}'' turns into this when Hilda and the Wood Man attempt to leave; it starts with the Wood Man falling down the chimney after trying to climb out of a window and rapidly gets weirder. |
| 488 | * ''WesternAnimation/{{Inhumanoids}}'' features a medieval castle inverted and attached to the ceiling of a cavern. |
| 489 | * The Bueno Nacho restaurants on ''WesternAnimation/KimPossible'' have sombrero roofs, and look positively mundane next to some of the things on this list. Also of note, deep-fried snack food king Pop-Pop Porter maintained a fleet of blimps in the shape of various snacks of his line. His favorite was shaped like a giant popcorn shrimp, but the corndog was more aerodynamic. There's also the giant cheese wheel, which is an actual building made of cheese, [[RunningGag not a cheese-covered building as many people believe]]. |
| 490 | * In ''WesternAnimation/KryptoTheSuperdog'', the fire hydrant-shaped space station. |
| 491 | * In ''The Mouse That Jack Built'', a Warner Brothers short featuring [[AnimatedAdaptation mouse expies]] of [[Radio/TheJackBennyProgram Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone]], Benny receives a flyer for the "Kit Kat Club", which is actually the family cat with little tables and chairs in its mouth. Benny thinks it is just a gimmick until the mouth starts to close, with them in it. |
| 492 | * ''WesternAnimation/TheOwlHouse'': In "Knock, Knock, Knockin' on Hooty's Door", Hooty was able to construct a Tunnel of Love beneath the Owl House in under a single day, with the entrance being a trap door in the basement and the exit leading to the cellar... with the tunnel being larger than the Owl House is wide, raising the question of how he built it. |
| 493 | * ''WesternAnimation/PhineasAndFerb'': |
| 494 | ** Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated is shaped like a wrench. Or Ferb's head, sort of. The interior also often moves around, sometimes the lab is the only thing on the top floor, other times Doof's apartment is up there too. Sometimes the entire lab is under the retractable roof, sometimes it's a large empty room up there. Vanessa's room can be in the apartment or same floor as the lab, while Norm's seems to be up by the lab all the time. It doesn't help that the place blows up enough to justify being rebuilt in different ways multiple times ''and'' that Doofenshmirtz sometimes puts up fake windows to trick agents. |
| 495 | ** The Flynn-Fletcher basement has a panic room accessed via ladder down a chute. Also Phineas and Ferb engineered the house to open up between floors like a hinge, surprising their father. They can also cause the entire garage to flip upside down, without affecting the rest of the house or the exterior walls. |
| 496 | ** The myriad entrances into O.W.C.A. lairs. Some outright break the laws of physics and/or reality. |
| 497 | ** The interiors of several of Phineas and Ferb's inventions also count, as do the exteriors in some cases. The boys have a habit of mixing building styles when they go big, which can lead to things like a simple wooden fort on top of a concert hall on top of a building with marble columns on top of a castle. |
| 498 | * In ''WesternAnimation/TheRenAndStimpyShow'', some of the houses the titular duo live in are decidedly strange. In particular, one episode has them living in a hollowed-out, upside-down cow carcass. |
| 499 | * ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': |
| 500 | ** Used in a one-off gag in the episode "Grift of the Magi". Mr. Burns watches a short play in his office put on by students looking for school funding. Unconvinced, Burns opens a trapdoor underneath the students, but a few seconds later [[TrapDoorFail they fall through another trapdoor in the ceiling and land back on the stage.]] |
| 501 | --->'''Mr. Burns''': Oh, it's doing that ''thing'' again! |
| 502 | ** In the earlier episode "Hurricane Neddy," the citizens of Springfield club together to build Ned Flanders a replacement house after his original one is destroyed in a hurricane. They have absolutely no idea what they're doing. The bathroom is in the kitchen, the ceiling is held up by a poster, and the upstairs hallway narrows like a funnel to a bedroom door the size of a breadbox. |
| 503 | * "Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? WesternAnimation/SpongebobSquarepants!" Some of the other characters live in giant objects too. Presumably, they were discarded or lost by humans and then used by resourceful sea creatures. Squidward lives in an Easter Island head, Mr. Krabs lives in an anchor, and Plankton lives in a bucket. The only home that's realistic for an aquatic invertebrate is Patrick's rock. Note that the objects are only "giant" in comparison to the little sea critters. Interestingly enough, Patrick's rock, despite being the most "normal-looking" on the outside, has some of the ''weirdest'' architecture on the inside. Sometimes, it's just a small flat space while Patrick clings to the underside of the rock (much like a real starfish). Other times, it's a shallow pit containing his furniture (bed, television, armchair, etc.). Sometimes, it's got all sorts of twisty passages leading away from it. And the rock itself? It always flips up on end, like it's on hinges. |
| 504 | * ''WesternAnimation/TaleSpin'': "In Search of Ancient Blunders" involves a search for a lost pyramid--Which is discovered to have been built ''upside-down'' and embedded right in the ground, which resulted in a curse being placed on the builder of the pyramid. |
| 505 | * ''WesternAnimation/TeenTitans2003'': The Teen Titans live in a giant T-shaped tower on an island in the middle of a bay. It was modified into an H when the Hive took over. |
| 506 | * Sumdac Tower in ''WesternAnimation/TransformersAnimated'' is inexplicably shaped like a giant spark plug. How it remains standing is a mystery for the ages. Quite possibly because [[spoiler: of the technology Sumdac reverse engineered from Megatron's head. No, really, that's why Earth has robots]]. |
| 507 | * ''WesternAnimation/TucaAndBertie'' is rife with this. One example, a building with bouncing breasts, even appears in the intro. |
| 508 | * ''WesternAnimation/{{Wakfu}}'': |
| 509 | ** Nox's Giant Clock Mecha is a mindbending clockwork nightmare, as much from the outside than from the inside. |
| 510 | ** The cursed castle of the ugly princesses is quite weird too. |
| 511 | ** Many of the decrepit buildings in Rubilaxia qualify, as well. |
| 512 | * The eponymous WesternAnimation/{{Wayside}} Elementary School, like in its literary counterpart, is a thirty-story-tall school with only one class on each floor. |
| 513 | * ''WesternAnimation/{{Wishfart}}'' is set in a magical city, so it's everywhere. Skyscrapers are wrapped in enormous beanstalks or have giant toadstools growing on them; [[EyesDoNotBelongThere there's a building covered in eyeballs]]; a giant bird's nest on top of the airport; and the comic book shop grows chicken legs to run about when not tended to properly! |
| 514 | [[/folder]] |
| 515 | |
| 516 | [[folder:Real Life]] |
| 517 | * ArtNouveau (''Jugend'') style. It was so radically different from both Classical and Modernist styles that it is used as the template for Elvish architecture in ''Film/TheLordOfTheRings''. |
| 518 | * The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House Winchester Mystery House.]] |
| 519 | ** Sarah Winchester, widow of gun magnate William Winchester, supposedly consulted a spirit medium after his death and was told that she needed to travel west and "continuously" build a house for both herself and the countless people killed by the products of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. She bought a California farm house, got together a construction crew (but never consulted an architect), and did just that - and according to legend, the house was being worked on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from Sarah's purchase of it in 1886 to her death on September 5, 1922. The mansion was originally seven stories tall, but the 1906 San Francisco earthquake wrecked the upper three floors, so Sarah had them demolished and expanded outward instead of upward. Some of the odder design choices, like the extremely long and shallow "easy riser" staircases, were made to accomodate Winchester's arthritis, but others were allegedly meant to confound any hostile ghosts or spirits. There's a section of the building where there are nails and screws only partially-embedded in surfaces, no paint or wall paper, and exposed wall spaces - as soon as the construction company found out that Mrs. Winchester had died, they [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere immediately left the place without finishing what they were doing.]] |
| 520 | ** The result of all this? A beautiful, luxurious, 24,000-square-foot Victorian mansion with Aesthetic decorations, state-of-the-art plumbing, heating, elevators, comunication systems... and several staircases that lead into the ceiling. Over ten thousand windows (more than in the Empire State Building!), many of them overlooking other interior rooms. A legion of hallways that crisscross themselves and go nowhere. Two thousand doors, some of them with solid walls behind them, some set in the ''floor'', and one "door to nowhere" on a second-story exterior wall with nothing but a sheer drop behind it. There's a staircase that turns seven times and runs 150 feet to ascend a total of ''nine'' feet. One closet exactly one inch deep, another the size of a proper room. An otherwise finished upper-story room conspicuously missing a floor. At least 17 chimneys, but fully 47 fireplaces. 161 rooms total, with 40 bedrooms so Sarah Winchester could sleep in a different place each night to elude spirits. Originally it had just one working toilet, all the others were decoys. Naturally, the place is said to be haunted. |
| 521 | * The giant object buildings typical of American roadsides. Examples can be [[http://www.roadsidepeek.com/archit/vernac/index.htm seen here,]] including the Donut Hole (a drive-through donut shop in the shape of a pair of giant donuts) and the famous Wigwam Motel. |
| 522 | * [[https://web.archive.org/web/20120511142138/https://slog.thestranger.com/files/2008/06/06-Tatlin-tower.jpg Tatlin Tower]], a never-built monument to avant-garde modernism, a vast radio antenna / monument to the [[GloriousMotherRussia Russian Revolution]]. |
| 523 | * [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horton_Plaza_Mall Horton Plaza]] in San Diego, which doesn't really have stories, as different bits of what ought to be the same floor are at different levels. |
| 524 | * Just by Frank Gehry: |
| 525 | ** The ugliest building on the MIT campus (which is saying something), the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Center Stata Center.]] |
| 526 | ** The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_Concert_Hall Walt Disney Concert Hall]] is less a building than a parabolic reflector dish aimed at the offices across the street, as well as some of the sidewalk, which it occasionally melts. It contains a pipe organ shaped like a logjam. |
| 527 | ** [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Pop_Culture The Experience Music Project]] in Seattle. Apparently it's supposed to be [[RockersSmashGuitars a smashed guitar]], but obviously [[GovernmentConspiracy this is a cover-up for the crashed alien spacecraft that was aiming for the Space Needle]]. |
| 528 | ** There's also the [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Ohr-OKeefeMuseum.jpg Ohr-O'Keefe Museum in Biloxi.]] It's not finished yet, but what good can come out of four giant metal pods with cages on the top? |
| 529 | ** Gehry's own California home: before Gehry, a nice looking traditional two-story home. Now? Imagine an accumulation of sheds designed by toddlers which have collapsed against each other during a massive earthquake. |
| 530 | * The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_House Dancing House]] in Prague, designed by Czech architect Vlado Milunić with a little help from Frank Gehry. |
| 531 | * [[http://www.wonderworksonline.com "Wonderworks,"]] an interactive kids' science museum/indoor amusement park found in several U.S. tourist attraction cities, is built to resemble a stately museum... lifted off its foundations and turned-upside-down. |
| 532 | * [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_the_Elephant Lucy the Elephant,]] who makes her home in Margate, NJ |
| 533 | * The Guggenheim. The chase that introduces J in ''Film/MenInBlack'' goes through it specifically because it's so bizarre. The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guggenheim_Museum_Bilbao Bilbao branch of the Guggenheim]] is another example. Done by Frank Gehry. |
| 534 | * In Australia, the Sydney Opera House, and some of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%27s_big_things the Big Things,]] although not all of them are buildings. |
| 535 | ** Comedian Creator/RossNoble has been stopping at these in ''Ross Noble's Australian Trip'', including pretending that a giant oyster shaped car showroom is his SupervillainLair; "Welcome to my oyster domain!" |
| 536 | ** Creator/BillBryson stopped at the Giant Lobster in his Australian travelogue, and has a conversation with an enthusiast about the others around the country, especially a giant anatomically correct bull; "Beware of Falling Bullock's Bollocks!" |
| 537 | ** Sydney also has [[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-31087980 Frank Gehry's Brown]] [[http://imgur.com/gallery/1lu0C Paper Bag.]] |
| 538 | * Vienna's [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundertwasserhaus Hundertwasserhaus]] |
| 539 | * Rejected Real Life example: [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_and_Albert_Museum_Spiral The V&A Spiral]]. London had a narrow escape there. |
| 540 | * The (in)famous ''[[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Braunschweig%2C_Happy_RIZZI_House.jpg Happy RIZZI House]]'' at the edge of the Magniviertel of the city of Brunswick (Braunschweig), Germany. The monstrosity was perpetrated by the American Pop-art commercial artist James Rizzi who designed it and the German architect who built the house, and somehow the officials were pressured or bribed to go along with it, despite everyone else hating it. The house's right at the edge of what was once the center of the medieval town, right next to some traditional timber-framed houses and the St. Magni church that survived UsefulNotes/WorldWarII. It was ''supposed'' to look similar to the famous Hundertwasser House in Vienna, but where the Hundertwasser House is playful and colorful with gentle organic lines, the RIZZI House is just... just... stupid. Like a cartoon house in a kindergarten. It's neither functional nor aesthetic. Actually trying to work in there must be a nightmare. Worse, it's now right between the old church on one side and the newly reconstructed classicist facade of the [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/ECE_Schloss_06u07_1b.jpg Braunschweiger Residenzschloss,]] first built in 1718, rebuilt in 1830 after a fire, heavily damaged in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, demolished and rebuilt as a shopping center in 2007. |
| 541 | * The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_Art_Museum Milwaukee Art Museum,]] with its brise soleil "wings", which have a 217 wingspan when fully open. |
| 542 | * Nearly all of the structures of Santiago Calatrava, the architect who designed the Milwaukee Art Museum, along with things like [[https://brabbu.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Modern-Architecture-by-Top-Architect-Santiago-Calatrava-2.jpg this broadcast tower in Barcelona]], would be at home in this category. |
| 543 | * In fact, just about any art museum built within the past couple of decades, at least in the U.S., will be of a rather unusual design, ranging from fanciful to paint-eatingly insane. Especially if it's a museum of ''modern'' art. Ironically, the M.C. Escher Museum in the Netherlands is [[http://images.google.com/images?q=%22m.c.+escher+museum%22 quite normal looking.]] |
| 544 | * Appropriately enough, the [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Geisel_library.jpg Ted Geisel Library]] at the University of California San Diego. "Appropriately", because "Ted Geisel" is none other than Creator/DrSeuss--and it looks like a cross between something from one of Seuss' books, and the spaceship from ''Film/CloseEncountersOfTheThirdKind''. It sits within a pit lined by jagged mirrors positioned at such an angle as to give the basements natural lighting. |
| 545 | * Toronto, Canada has the [[http://media.hgtv.ca/blogimages/up-and-coming-industrial-design-talent-ocad-video-and-exhibition-0.jpg Ontario College of Art and Design]] building, part of which looks like a floating black and white cube held up by skinny colorful poles --they had to built it that way because due to space limitations, the only direction the OCAD building can expand is upwards, however, the old building cannot support any additional weight because of problems with it's foundation; hence, the floating cube. The city also contains the new wing of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ROM_Crystal.jpg Royal Ontario Museum,]] which looks like a Victorian building in the process of being overrun by Tiberium crystals. Oddly enough, both are additions on perfectly normal buildings. There's also Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, a building done in the 'brutalist' style of architecture... which also has the misfortune of looking like a very large concrete [[http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llgiaajbVg1qa0yp3o1_500.jpg peacock or turkey]] when viewed from the front. By comparison, the [[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Art_Gallery_of_Ontario#/media/File:Art_Gallery_of_Ontario_from_McCaul_Street.jpg Art Gallery of Ontario,]] designed by the above-mentioned Frank Gehry, looks downright mundane. |
| 546 | * The Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí built some very different but beautiful examples of gothic architecture, getting his inspiration from organic shapes. The best known is the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Familia Sagrada Familia,]] but one has to wonder about the people who lived at [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Pedrera La Pedrera/Casa Milà]] or [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_Batllo Casa Batlló.]] Barcelona [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_G%C3%BCell Parc Güell]] (by Gaudí) is a surrealistic experience of Bizarrchitecture itself. |
| 547 | * The Fine Arts Center at [=UMass=] Amherst is supposed to look like a piano from above. From normal perspective, it's just a weird looking building. It says something when one internal classroom is so hard to find that it has to be approached from another part of the building, utilizing both up and down staircases to reach while touring the backstage area of the main theater. |
| 548 | * Several of the buildings on the Sussex University campus are built in deliberate shapes, visible from above. For example, the library looks like an open book and another building is said to look like a cat. |
| 549 | * Quite a few of the ''Franchise/RipleysBelieveItOrNot'' museums are built with bizarre architecture. The one in Gatlinburg, TN looks like it's been hit by a hurricane, the one in Panama City beach, FL looks like a cruise ship that's run aground, and the one in Atlantic City, NJ looks like it was decorated by a giant globe that fell off its hook and cracked the awning over the entrance. See more information on [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripley%27s_Believe_It_or_Not!#Museums the Other Wiki]]. |
| 550 | * The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_International_Airport Denver Airport.]] It looks like a bunch of tents... very unusual. And it comes complete with a [[https://web.archive.org/web/20011215082815/http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Denver_Airport.html conspiracy theory]] that's just plausible enough to be entertaining, although it is [[http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4194 complete nonsense.]] |
| 551 | * Colorado also has the Student Services building at Colorado State University. The legend around it is that the architect was insane, and intended to entomb himself inside the building. There's no confirmation on that, but even then, the hallways get narrow enough you can't get furniture in (unless it's through the windows) and it's extremely hard to get stuff into the higher floors due to the cramped stairways. Not to mention, people have said that you can walk down a hallway and wind up on the second floor without going to the stairs at all. |
| 552 | * The [[https://www.thehouseontherock.com House on the Rock]]. Approaching it from the front, it looks similar to a traditional Japanese castle with one section of roof inexplicably upside down (slanting in instead of out). On the inside, though, the rooms are all distinctly designed, including the "infinity room" which is designed as an optical illusion to appear like it stretches on forever. In reality, it's "only" about 220 feet long with no physical supports underneath and has over 3000 windows. Yes, just the one room. After that, it gets weirder. |
| 553 | * The "Victor Hugo House" in Saint Peter Port, the capital of the island of Guernsey, where Creator/VictorHugo spent the years of his exile from UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte's France. The house is tall, narrow, rambling, dark and oppressive, with secret passages and mirrors and optical illusions that the author of ''Literature/LesMiserables'' was so fond of. The view from the balcony/sun terrace on the roof is nice, though. Because it means you don't have to look at the house. |
| 554 | * The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wienermobile Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.]] And the ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star-Ledger Star-Ledger]]'' [[http://hoboken411.com/archives/7503 Munchmobile,]] albeit less so because the Big Dog is a van with a giant hot dog on top rather than a giant hot dog in its own right. |
| 555 | * The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Longaberger_Company Longaberger Headquarters.]] |
| 556 | * The [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Big Apple]] in Cobourg, Ontario. There's not really much in it, just exhibits on apples and stairs to the top. The main building (which is ''not'' shaped like anything weird, unfortunately) has pictures of other giant object buildings. |
| 557 | * [[http://www.doney.net/aroundaz/tempe.htm Tempe City Hall]] in Arizona. Interestingly, this is not the only building in the vicinity of Phoenix shaped like an upside-down pyramid. |
| 558 | * In the upside-down pyramid category: St. Petersburg, Florida's "Pier." |
| 559 | * Altgeld Hall at the University of Illinois. Home of the Mathematics department, a running joke on campus is that you need to be a math major to figure out where your class is. It started out fairly normal, but was later given four additions, none of which had floor levels aligning with each other. The [[http://www.math.uiuc.edu/Maps/0026PLAN1.html official floor plan]] shows 14 actual levels on three nominal floors, not including the basement, bell tower, or library stacks, but including the classroom with its door built in the middle of a long ramp, and the post office. |
| 560 | ** The Burrowes Building at Penn State is similar. Because of the way it's built into the sloping campus (there's a reason it's called "Happy Valley", after all), the first floor, which starts underground, rises into the second floor and then lowers again. Every story does the same. Thankfully it's mostly an administration building... |
| 561 | * The [[http://www.traveladventures.org/continents/europe/cubichouses.shtml Cube Houses]] in Rotterdam. They look stranger than they sound. |
| 562 | * The Cornett building on the University of Victoria campus was supposed to house the psychology department and be modeled after the human brain. It has staircases that don't go anywhere and far too much basement than a building that size should. |
| 563 | * Sheffield Hallam [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Centre_for_Popular_Music University student's union.]] the former National Centre for Popular Music. Seemingly designed to look like four curling stones. |
| 564 | * The Giant Artichoke, a restaurant in Gilroy, California, artichoke-growing capital of the world. Looks just the way you'd expect. |
| 565 | * Some Hard Rock Café locations have unusual architecture. |
| 566 | ** There have been two Cafes in Orlando, FL, next to Universal Studios. The original, opened in 1990, was not unusual in and of itself, but sat upon a platform that was designed to look like an electric guitar laying flat on the ground. The current Café building, located about a quarter of a mile away, is modeled in part after the Coliseum in Rome. |
| 567 | ** The Hard Rock Café in Myrtle Beach, SC is a pyramid with an Egyptian theme inside and out. |
| 568 | * Before it went out of business in 1997, the Best Products catalog store chain was known for the ... odd ... architecture of several of its branches, born of a long relationship with [[http://www.siteenvirodesign.com/proj.best.php an innovative architectural firm.]] |
| 569 | ** Its Houston, TX store had a facade that looked it was crumbling in the wake of an earthquake or other destructive force. |
| 570 | ** A store in Richmond, VA looked like its facade was peeling off. |
| 571 | ** Another in Richmond looked like it had been abandoned and open to the elements for decades, and had a small forest growing in it. |
| 572 | ** The store in Sacramento, CA looked like an earthquake had broken it diagonally and shifted part of it to the side. |
| 573 | ** A New Jersey store was designed to look like ''two'' store buildings, one stacked on top of the other and twisted at a slight angle. |
| 574 | ** Other stores included a giant terrarium, a store that looked it had been lifted by one corner and put back down crooked, another where the façade had been "broken" into several pieces and "pulled out" in front of the building proper, and one where an entire corner of the building would actually physically "break free" and roll away to reveal its entrance. |
| 575 | ** A short documentary on the Best architecture can be [[http://archidose.blogspot.com/2009/01/site-best-stores.html found here.]] |
| 576 | * The [[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/picturesoftheday/5976524/Pictures-of-the-day-5-August-2009.html Tianzi Hotel]] in Langfang, China is designed in the image of three Chinese gods. It goes without saying that the deities are fittingly huge, measuring 10 stories high. |
| 577 | ** Speaking of China, Beijing has a few odd-looking landmarks itself, including the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_National_Stadium Bird's Nest stadium]] (designed for the 2008 Olympics) and the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Central_Television_Headquarters CCTV headquarters,]] which looks like it might collapse at any minute. |
| 578 | * Anything done by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, like the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monumental_Axis major landmarks of Brazil's capital.]] His most recognizable works ([[TheCapitalOfBrazilIsBuenosAires all in Brasília]]) are the [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/TheSymbolofBrasiliaByXavierDonat.jpg Cathedral of Brasília,]] the [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Palacio_do_Planalto.jpeg Planalto Palace]] and the [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Congresso_brasilia.jpg National Congress of Brazil.]] He's also responsible for the street plan of Brasilia, which is probably the only city on Earth designed to look like a giant airplane when seen from the air. |
| 579 | ** Neighboring Bolivia has the [[https://vintagegeekculture.tumblr.com/post/181617096036/the-single-greatest-and-most-fascinating Neo-Andean or ''Cholet'' style]] pioneered by Freddy Mamani, which combines indigenous Aymara styles with modern customs and can be found all across El Alto, the country's highest city. Not only do the buildings convey indigenous artwork with their vast shapes and colors, they may [[https://twitter.com/CTropes/status/1299731590122094593 remind comics fans]] of Creator/JackKirby's art. |
| 580 | * Located in Espoo, Finland, [[http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiedosto:Dipoli_käpyovi.jpg Dipoli]], a convention center owned by the Helsinki University Technology, is often jokingly referred as being non-euclidian. The building has a very irregular shape and extremely few right angles (even the roof is slightly tilted). It has proven to be too much style over substance and extremely difficult to use. |
| 581 | * In Ottawa, in Canada, the Museum of Civilization is built in a manner that has no right angles. It actually has ''more'' space than you'd expect. The same architect (or possibly a copycat) also designed the York Region Regional Government building in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada. It is apparently a real pain, as it functions as an office building, and ''none'' of the offices are regular. |
| 582 | * The [[http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_National_Conference_Center National Conference Center]] in Virginia, built in the mid-70's by Xerox, has an odd terraced layout that's apparently even weirder on the inside. Legend has it that the complex was designed to be confusing on purpose to promote team-building among lost employees. |
| 583 | * Any time you repurpose a building, you face the possibility that rooms turned to new uses will be odd compared to what you'd normally expect for that kind of use. It gets worse when you significantly remodel to try and make rooms fit their intended use. Just outside uptown Charlotte is the Central High building. It was a high school built in the fifties, and it looks like it. It is now part of the community college, and it was remodeled, as the needs of a community college today differ greatly from a high school in the fifties. It has some classrooms, but needs significantly more office space. From a hallway, you can go into a cramped office with a door in the back corner. The door opens onto a narrow staircase made narrower by lots of shelving overflowing with... stuff. It gets more open at a landing, but that doesn't help as the staircase ends in a blank wall. The building has several staircases to nowhere, and odd dimensions in several areas. |
| 584 | * The [[https://www.uniqhotels.com/hang-nga-guesthouse-aka-crazy-house Crazy House Hotel]] in Dalat, Vietnam. Designed by famously eccentric Vietnamese architect Hang Nga, it's a mishmash of fairy tale and surrealist elements, including giant animals coming out of the walls, ten foot tall mushrooms, and staircases that go nowhere - and a working hotel. |
| 585 | * The [[http://www.joindes.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/The-new-Inntel-hotel-in-Zaandam.jpg Inntel Hotel]] in Zaandam, Netherlands, which is currently being built, looks like a bunch of Dutch houses piled up. |
| 586 | * Usen Castle at Brandeis University has stairways and hallways that lead nowhere. Supposedly this is because it was based on a European castle a beneficiary fell in love with and wished to recreate. Since he wasn't allowed inside, he drew pictures of the outside and then the inside had to be extrapolated. |
| 587 | * [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_hotel Ice hotels.]] |
| 588 | * [[https://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/4834216208 This]] very unusually shaped Hilton hotel in Manchester. |
| 589 | * [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evoluon Evoluon]]: the conference center. Or something. |
| 590 | ** Evoluon was originally built in the 60s to house a science exhibition. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mOX4hu4Za8 See this groovy contemporary film for more details.]] |
| 591 | * Oddee has [[http://www.oddee.com/item_94046.aspx a couple]] [[http://www.oddee.com/item_97273.aspx of pages]] worth looking at, although some of the buildings have already been covered. |
| 592 | * [[http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/38/stbibikov.d/0_12e65_ed20ff_orig Barcode building in Saint-Petersburg, Russia.]] |
| 593 | * [[http://media.eblog.ru/32008/3/neboskreb_02.jpg Woodeon skyscraper in Arhangelsk]]. Unfortunately the building was destroyed in 2009. |
| 594 | * [[http://www.pleyad.ru/i/spaw1/1-5%20vid%20s%20moria.jpg Sanatorium "Druzhba", Crimea.]] |
| 595 | * [[http://www.clubhotelcasapueblo.com/contenido.asp?idmenu=133 Casapueblo,]] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casapueblo in Uruguay.]] Built by the late artist Carlos Paez Vilaró, it began as a more or less normal house; then Vilaró added a tower to celebrate the return of his son Carlitos (one of the survivors of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571 Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 disaster]]) and then kept adding more and more buildings... |
| 596 | * [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Public_Library The main branch of the Seattle Public Library]] is rather unusual looking. The interior is equally strange, but grand. More or less conventional on the first four floors (aside from that ''massive'' lecture hall/auditorium taking up a large chunk of those floors), but the non-fiction section on floors 5-9 is set up as a ''spiral.'' You can use the escalators, stairs, or elevators to go to the part of the Dewey Decimal System you want, or just follow the path upward as your browse. The top floor is all for local history, a reading area, and a massive observation area that lets you look out over downtown. |
| 597 | * [[http://www.kornersfolly.org Körner's Folly,]] dubbed by some to be the "strangest home in the world", looks fairly normal from the outside. The inside almost defies description. Three stories are divided into seven different functioning levels, and rooms range from ones with grand high 25-foot ceilings to 5-foot rooms scaled down for a child. There are hallways that go nowhere, trap doors, murals, and a fully-operational performance theater in the attic. Jule Körner was a bit eccentric, indeed. |
| 598 | * [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_Castle Bishop Castle]]- built by one guy over the last 40 years or so, and he just keeps on adding to it. |
| 599 | * [[https://web.archive.org/web/20051102003729/https://www.wexarts.org/about/architecture/ The Wexner Center for the Arts]] at Ohio State University. A "hubbed spine" between two older buildings with underground sections. |
| 600 | * [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCTV_Headquarters The China Central Television headquarters]] building. Also known as the Big Pants or Big Boxer Shorts. |
| 601 | * Montreal's [[https://web.archive.org/web/20081110110821/http://unusual-architecture.com/habitat-67-montreal-canada Habitat 67.]] Imagine piling up a bunch of cardboard boxes any which way until it forms a mound-like shape. Imagine someone decided this was the future of architecture and made it happen for real. It looks as strange as it sounds, but it's also one of the most sought-after residential complexes in the city. |
| 602 | * The Michigan League at the University of Michigan. It looks normal enough on the outside, but on the inside it's full of convoluted staircases and hallways that branch off in unusual directions. |
| 603 | * The universally loathed, over-budget and fuck ugly [[http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/01/be/42/e7/the-scottish-parliament.jpg Scottish Parliament Building.]] (The actual Scottish Parliament chamber [[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Scottish_Parliament_Debating_Chamber_2.jpg does look]] [[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Debating_chamber%2C_Scottish_Parliament_%2831-05-2006%29.jpg reasonably cool on the inside,]] but that's about it.) |
| 604 | * [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramot_Polin Ramot Polin,]] a suburb of Jerusalem. The buildings there are universally weird: resembling honeycombs or egg cartons on their sides from the outside, the rooms inside are laid out in any shape but cubical. When you have a bedroom shaped like a dodecahedron, where do you put the bed? |
| 605 | * Urban supermarkets, by virtue of sometimes having to be crammed into rather small buildings, can often take on very strange shapes; an extremish case is the Whole Foods near Symphony Hall in Boston, which is wedged into the bottom floor of a parking garage and is more or less crescent-shaped. The aisles don't really track, so despite the fact that it's a relatively small store, it's very easy to get lost in. |
| 606 | * There's [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BostonCityHall2.JPG the City Hall.]] Perhaps not quite as bizarre as some other buildings on this list, but you can't quite shake off the impression that they built it ''upside-down.'' |
| 607 | * The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_Tower_Building Gate Tower Building]] in Osaka, Japan, which has the Hanshin Expressway going right through it. It is sufficiently cushioned and soundproofed so the workers inside don't really notice the noise and vibrations from passing cars. |
| 608 | * Probably innumerable mundane examples. For example, a hotel in London (name unremembered) in what had been a series of row houses. They had bought out the houses on either side and incorporated them, but the floors did not line up, so to get to your room you might have to go right up a half flight of stairs, left down a hallway, then left again down 3 steps. And so on. Combined with the fact that all the hallways were narrow and short, so that there was very little line-of-sight, made traversing it a very disorienting proposal. Something similar occurs in the South Houses at Caltech, but they were made that way by the architect. There are many rooms on fractional floors, and navigating the place is rather disorienting for someone who hasn't lived there before. |
| 609 | * The new Selfridges store in Birmingham, UK's Bullring area has a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Selfridges_Birmingham_at_night.jpg unique design]] that has to be [[http://www.flickr.com/photos/rjt208/3032805464/sizes/l/ seen to be believed.]] |
| 610 | * OK, so a lot of buildings end up having parts added later on. Some end up with a rather unusual plan, such as many UK houses which ended up shorter due to floors being eliminated (see the above Doctor Who example in Live-Action TV), bricked-up portals, blocked-off doors that open in midair (Australian houses can also suffer that one, due to verandahs being removed without removing the doors) and stairs and halls that just end at solid walls or ceilings, often cited as being due to repairs after the Second World War, caused by budget constraints preventing the buildings from being repaired as they originally were. Sometimes repairs end up in completely different styles, making it obvious when the extra parts were added. That said, compare these [[http://thoughtengine.deviantart.com/art/Holy-light-582317403 front]] and [[http://thoughtengine.deviantart.com/art/Round-end-582321570 rear views]] of Saint James' Cathedral in Townsville, Queensland, Australia, and see if you can come up with a reason for that facade on that building. It's Victorian red brick Neo-Gothic, outside and inside - but what caused the decision on that facade? |
| 611 | * The Port House Building in Antwerp, Belgium, consists of a fairly unassuming refurbished fire station... that [[https://www.flickr.com/photos/durr-architect/30762200886/ looks as if]] [[http://www.archdaily.com/795920/step-inside-zaha-hadid-architects-antwerp-port-house-with-thomas-mayers-photos an alien spaceship has landed on top of it!]] |
| 612 | * Marina Bay Sands Hotel in Singapore. Incorporates [[http://wallpapershome.com/images/pages/pic_hs/333.jpg three sets of twin towers with curving verticals,]] [[http://foundtheworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Marina-Bay-Sands-5.jpg all surmounted by a "sky park" that resembles a very shallow, curved ocean liner.]] Astonishing. |
| 613 | * If the economical crisis had not scrapped that project,[[note]]New plans are to build a tall tower in the style of the other four ones of the immediate [[https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuatro_Torres_Business_Area Cuatro Torres Business Area]][[/note]] UsefulNotes/{{Madrid}}, Spain's capital, would have had the [[https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centro_Internacional_de_Convenciones_de_Madrid Centro Internacional de Convenciones de Madrid]], a 120 meters-tall round building described as a "rising Sun". However it did not take very long to find an alternate name for [[http://i201.photobucket.com/albums/aa256/varo69/rendercompletonoche.jpg it]] (Mmmmmm... cheese). |
| 614 | * One tourist attraction in Washington State is the "World Famous" [[http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2977 Bob's Java Jive]] in Tacoma, a coffee shop-turned-karaoke bar shaped like (you guessed it) a giant coffee pot. |
| 615 | * [[https://www.boredpanda.com/palace-of-mystery-quinta-da-regaleira-by-taylor-moore/ Quinta da Regaleira]] in Sintra, Portugal, started as just a nice romantic palace, until it fell into the hands of wealthy student/philanthropist/occultist [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Augusto_Carvalho_Monteiro Carvalho Monteiro.]] He [[https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-ancient-places-europe/masonic-initiation-wells-quinta-da-regaleira-002263 redesigned it]] as [[http://www.akicederberg.com/new-page-1 a deliberately confusing but beautiful complex]] of graceful carvings, spiral staircases, stained glass windows, lofty pinnacles, gargoyles and swirls, and decor related to ceremonial magic, Rosicrucianism, and Masonic rites. It has two underground shrines, commonly termed [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emP9JzlCOhk initiation wells,]] with Tarot symbolism, and a regular Roman Catholic chapel. The parkland around the palace has a ''Theatre/AMidsummerNightsDream'' ambience of wild woods, winding paths, statues of nymphs and animals, and many fountains. |
| 616 | * ''[[https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/le-palais-ideal Le Palais Ideal]]'' in Hauterives in southeastern France is kind of France's Watts Towers. Like Simon Rodia, mailman [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Cheval Ferdinand Cheval]] collected stones on his route and built the palace on land that had been part of his wife's dowry. It has elements of Southeast Asian and Ancient Egyptian art, with carvings of animals and Biblical quotations, poems and aphorisms. He was recognized by artists in his own time including Andre Breton, Pablo Picasso, Anais Nin and many others. |
| 617 | * Bloomington's Indiana University has many attractive and interesting older buildings, but the [[https://66.media.tumblr.com/6d1e848b2d07d4a7edeb7391dfed51c9/tumblr_n2tc3bflPf1qzglyyo1_1280.jpg Musical Arts Center]] on Eagleson Avenue is ''not'' one of them. As a performance venue, it's fine, but on the outside it is a massive pile of Brutalist concrete with nothing to suggest musical arts.[[note]]In fact, students in the 1970s used to refer to it as "the giant toilet". The Metz Carrillon and I.M. Pei's Eskenazi Museum of Art are built along the same lines.[[/note]] To add insult to injury, there's an Alexander Calder sculpture out front, ''Peau Rouge,'' (Redskin), which is meant to suggest a Native American on horseback. Because it's in ''Indiana,'' get it... |
| 618 | * [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower#/media/File:Nakagin.jpg Nakagin Capsule Tower]] in the Ginza district of Tokyo looks like a stack of washing machines which are made out of prefabricated micro apartment units. Designed and completed in 1972 following the metabolist architectural movement of how cities will become in the future. This may look good on paper, but due to high maintenance costs and broken promises, the structure is falling into disrepair and years of debates for demolition. The building has been slated for demolition in April, 2022 coinciding with the building's 50th anniversary. |
| 619 | * The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City Kowloon Walled City]] is an example almost by the necessity of its circumstances. The city occupied a tiny 6.4 acre enclave of territory under the official control of the mainland Chinese government, surrounded by British-occupied Hong Kong. The sheer jurisdictional nightmare this entailed meant both governments basically told the people of the Walled City they were on their own, resulting in a sprawling, densely-packed, loosely-regulated concrete jungle. Because there were no building codes enforced (beyond a height limit due to air traffic at the nearby Kai Tak Aiport), the buildings of the Walled City were very strangely designed and tightly packed in order to fit within its borders. |
| 620 | * [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Downing_Street 10 Downing Street]] has been compared to a [[Series/DoctorWho TARDIS]] because the interior is much larger than the house's exterior suggests. This is because a second house hidden away to the rear of Number 10 was grafted onto the original to provide the Prime Minister with more office space. Plus, there are connecting doors to neighboring houses -- such as Number 11, the workspace and home of the Chancellor of the Exchequer -- as well as to the Cabinet Office, meaning those with the proper clearance can get lost in a maze of corridors and end up in a different building entirely. |
| 621 | [[/folder]] |
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