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alt title(s): Bizarchitecture
There would be one long staircase just going up & one even longer coming down
And one more leading nowhere just for show...
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).
Can also apply to vehicles too. Compare Alien Geometries, Artists Are Not Architects, Benevolent Architecture, and Malevolent Architecture. Taken to the extreme, this can result in a man-made Eldritch Location. If looking for M.C. Escher, head on down to True Art Is Incomprehensible 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.
Common variations include:
- Giant Objects: Buildings that look like giant versions of everyday items;
- Jumbled Buildings: Jumbled assortments of walls, roofs, windows and doors;
- Strange Orientations: Normal buildings with odd orientations (Leaning Tower Of Pisa being a Real Life example);
- Unlikely Foundations: Regular buildings with unlikely foundations (such as stilts).
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Examples
Anime and Manga
- Kuukaku Shiba's ever-moving house in Bleach is an instance of Unlikely Foundations.
- The upside-down pyramid from the first season of Digimon is an instance of Strange Orientations.
- In the fifth season of Digimon, there's a mansion situated upside down on the bottom of a cliff. Oddly enough, the inside of the mansion is right-side-up.
- The Medical Mechanica factory in FLCL looks like and works as a giant steam iron.
Comics
- Silver Age Batman comics used to have all sorts of Giant Objects building, which was also reflected in the '60s TV show: the Batman: Black and White 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.
- Titans Tower, or the "T-Building", from Teen Titans; brought over into the cartoon, as seen under Western Animation.
Fairy Tales
- The witch that lived in a giant gingerbread house, the woman who lived in a shoe, Baba Yaga's chicken-legged hut, and many more make this trope a cornerstone of traditional fairy tales.
- Unlikely Foundations: Baba Yaga's house sits atop outwards facing chicken legs, often walking in circles...
Film
- Appropriately, every set in the live-action film The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T (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.
- The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari: Holstenwall, probably the only fictitious town whose architecture alone is High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
- Cube (1997) is set in a building made up of a 3 dimensional moving matrix of cube shaped cells, most equiped with various booby traps that will kill the prisoners inside.
- Cube 2: Hypercube (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, probably some kind of mathematical fractal construct.
- Hill House, the house born bad in The Haunting Of Hill House. There isn't a single right angle in the place.
- Jareth's Escherian castle in Labyrinth.
- Ohtori Academy in the movie version of Revolutionary Girl Utena is an example of Jumbled Buildings.
- The Rocketeer: the Bulldog Cafe is an example of the Giant Objects variant. No points for guessing what it's shaped like.
- This is an example of Aluminum Christmas Trees, since diners shaped like animals used to be quite common in Los Angeles.
- The villains' ice palace in Die Another Day was made of...ice. Handwaved because it was set in Iceland, where it would be cold enough for that to work at least some of the time. Bond destroys it in the car chase sequence.
- A number of the locations in 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.
- Word Of God is that the folks at Pixar calculated that the roof of the Pizza Planet restaurant would collapse on itself if it was built in Real Life.
- Die Hard spends a lot of time in a very common bit of Bizarre Architecture. In the real world, by the time a duct gets to where its going, they tend to be much smaller than human sized. Like eight inches in diameter ...
Literature
- The house in Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves is Bigger On The Inside, and that's the most normal thing about it.
- Giant Objects: The house is a rather large labyrinth disguised as a house.
- Jumbled Buildings: The house changes a lot.
- Strange Orientations: The house appears to be non-Euclidean, and even changes size.
- Unlikely Foundations: The foundation of the house stretches farther down than the diametre of the earth.
- Teresa Edgerton examples:
- The Castle of the Silver Wheel. 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).
- Dame Ceinwen's house has Unlikely Foundations, as it is sometimes in the Marshes-Between-Here-and-There (as in The Grail and the Ring) and sometimes in other places. It seems to be Bigger On The Inside, 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.
- In Robert A Heinlein's short story "And He Built a Crooked House", the titular house extends into a heretofore undiscovered fourth dimension of space, producing a 4-dimensional house built in 3D. Which is fine until there's an earthquake and it 'folds' to become fully 4D.
- Diana Wynne Jones examples:
- Howl's Moving Castle has
- Unlikely Foundations (although 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).
- 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 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.
- Strange Orientations: 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 Cool Gate (which leads to Wales) goes to the side of the castle that no one can walk around.
- The titular 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.
- In Betty MacDonald's Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's house was built upside-down.
- In Robin McKinley's Rose Daughter, 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.
- In Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard, the building in which Werner is being housed has very Unlikely Foundations indeed; at some point since his arrival, Werner's body has become spliced into the building itself, such that if he is killed or removed from the influence of the nephilim, the building will collapse.
- Terry Pratchett's Discworld has the Jumbled Buildings of Unseen University, whose staircases go somewhere different depending on the time of day (later...ahem...inspiring Hogwarts from Harry Potter) and which includes rooms with infinite floor space. Any map made of the university is only valid for a few days, and resembles an exploding chrysanthemum.
- Don't forget the tower at Bugarup University in The Last Continent, which in a confusing inversion of Bigger On The Inside is taller on the outside. Or possibly the inside. Or is it taller at the top? Argh.
- It was actually 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.
- And there's also 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.
- Which brings us to Hogwarts from Harry Potter. 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, which handwaves the fact that a 1000-year-old castle wouldn't be anything like what Hogwarts is.
- The art of Dr. Seuss books.
- Black House by Stephen King 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.
- Why did nobody mention R'lyeh yet from HP Lovecraft? An architecture so bizarre humans go crazy even when seeing only a small part of it.
Live Action TV
- Twilight Zone (1985): 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 & found shop, with everything that anybody has ever lost.
- Doctor Who: the serial "Castrovalva" is made of this trope.
- Stargate: SG-1: In the episode Abyss season 6 episode 6, there is a jail cell where Jack O'Neill is trapped inside by a shifting gravity field that turns the wall into the floor.
- The Brady Bunch: A client, Beebee Gallini, seems to like the Giant Objects variant; she 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.
- In Pushing Daisies, the "Pie Hole" has a roof shaped like pie crust.
- On 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.
Real Life
- The Giant Objects variety of Bizarrchitecture is actually the real-world Vernacular architectural style. Examples can be 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.
- Tatlin Tower◊, a never-built monument to avant-garde modernism, a vast radio antenna / monument to the Russian Revolution.
- Just by Frank Gehry:
- The Dancing House in Prague, designed by Czech architect Vlado Miluni? with a little help from... you guessed it, Frank Gehry.
- A spectacular Real Life example of Strange Orientations is Orlando, Florida's "Wonderworks," which is built to resemble a stately musesum... lifted off its foundations and turned-upside-down.
- Lucy the Elephant, who makes her home in Margate, NJ
- And what about the Guggenheim? The chase that introduces J in Men In Black goes through it specifically because it's so bizarre.
- In Australia, the Sydney Opera House, and some of the Big Things, although not all of them are buildings.
- Comedian Ross Noble has been stopping at these in Ross Noble's Australian Trip, including pretending that a giant oyster shaped car showroom is his Supervillain Lair; "Welcome to my oyster domain!"
- Bill Bryson 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!"
- Vienna's Hundertwasserhaus
- Rejected Real Life example: The V&A Spiral. London had a narrow escape there.
- The (in)famous Happy RIZZI House◊ at the edge of the Magniviertel of the city of Brunswick (Braunschweig), Germany. The monstrosity was perpetrated by the 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 World War II. 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 classicistic facade of the Braunschweiger Residenzschloss◊, first built in 1718, rebuilt in 1830 after a fire, heavily damaged in World War II, demolished and rebuilt as a shopping center in 2007. Yeah, Rizzi must've been pretty "happy"... after all, he got a paycheck. Sucker.
- The Milwaukee Art Museum, with its brise soleil 'wings', which have a 217 wingspan when fully open.
- 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. True Art Is Incomprehensible, after all.
- Appropriately enough, the Ted Geisel Library◊ at the University of California San Diego, which looks like a cross between something from one of Seuss' books, and the spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
- Toronto (Canada) has the Ontario College of Art and Design building and the new wing of the Royal Ontario Museum. Oddly enough, both are additions on perfectly normal buildings.
- The Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí built some unsettling but beautiful examples of modernist architecture, getting his inspiration from organic shapes. The best known is the Sagrada Familia, but one has to wonder about the people who lived at La Pedrera or Casa Batlló.
- It's worth noting that this architect's name is where we actually get the word "gaudy" from. He's that well known for his designs being elaborate.
- The Fine Arts Center at U Mass Amherst is supposed to look like a piano from above. From normal perspective, it's just a weird looking building.
- 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.
- Quite a few of the Ripley's Believe It Or Not museums are built with bizarre architecture. See the relevant information on the Other Wiki.
- The Denver Airport◊. It looks like a bunch of tents... very unusual. And it comes complete with a conspiracy theory that's just plausible enough to be entertaining.
- Supposedly, it's supposed to look like the Rocky Mountains, which...is sort of true, in an abstract sort of way. Other notable bizarre buildings in Colorado are the Coney Island Hot Dog Stand (shaped like a hotdog) and the Fredrich C. Hamilton building at the Denver Art Museum (which is very...pointy).
- The Winchester Mansion.
- The House on the Rock.
- The "Victor Hugo House" in Saint Peter Port, the capital of the island of Guernsey, where Victor Hugo spent the years of his exile from Napoleon Bonaparte's France. The house is tall, narrow, rambling, dark and oppressive, with secret passages and mirrors and optical illusions that the author of Les Miserables 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.
- The Oscar Meyer Wienermobile.
- And the Star-Ledger 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.
- The Longaberger Headquarters.
- The 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.
- In the upside-down pyramid category of Strange Orientations: Tempe City Hall in Arizona. Interestingly, this is not the only building in the vicinity of Phoenix shaped like an upside-down pyramid.
- In the upside-down pyramid category of Strange Orientations: St. Petersburg, Florida's "Pier."
- The Cube Houses in Rotterdam. They look stranger than they sound.
- 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. (Some sort of metaphor?)
- Sheffield Hallam University student's union, the former National Centre for Popular Music. Seemingly designed to look like four curling stones.
- Spaceship Earth, the iconic building at the entrance to Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center. It's spherical.
- The Giant Artichoke, a restaurant in Gilroy, California, artichoke-growing capital of the world. Looks just the way you'd expect.
- Some Hard Rock Cafe locations have unusual architecture.
- 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 Cafe building, located about a quarter of a mile away, is modeled in part after the Coliseum in Rome.
- The Hard Rock Cafe in Myrtle Beach, SC is a pyramid with an Egyptian theme inside and out.
- 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 an innovative architectural firm.
- Its Houston, TX store had a facade that looked it was crumbling in the wake of an earthquake or other destructive force.
- A store in Richmond, VA looked like its facade was peeling off.
- Another in Richmond looked like it had been abandoned and open to the elements for decades, and had a small forest growing in it.
- The store in Sacramento, CA looked like an earthquake had broken it diagonally and shifted part of it to the side.
- 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.
- 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 facade 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.
- A short documentary on the Best architecture can be found here.
Tabletop Games
- The Al Amarjan airport terminal is shaped like an cone standing on its point. This is a trick, though — the actual terminal is underground and the cone is an empty shell.
Theater
- Obviously, the Forest Temple from Ocarina of Time fits this trope, mainly because of the corridors that end up becoming "twisted" as you activate certain switches, really screwing with your mind when you realize that as you walk through them, you stay on the red carpet decorating the floor instead of walking onto the walls or ceiling midway. The laws of gravity be damned.
- In the Banjo-Kazooie series, Mumbo Jumbo's house is shaped like his skull mask and feathers, an example of the Giant Objects variant of this trope.
- In Diablo II, act II, the Arcane Sanctuary consists of many paths and stairways with Unlikely Foundations (actually, no foundations at all).
- Ibsen's Castle in Final Fantasy IX features Strange Orientations: it is mirror-imaged on the underside.
- Some of the desert tourist traps that lay abandoned in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas are restaurants shaped like the animals they serve, in a representation of a real trend in now-dated 50's-60's architecture toward Giant Objects.
- Some blocks of Tartarus in Persona 3 (and the Desert of Time in FES) feature the Jumbled Buildings variant in the form of 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.
- The Purple Moon civilization of Glacia, from Skies Of Arcadia features Strange Orientations, as it is comprised of upside down buildings reminiscent of stalagmites. The city is itself located on the bottom of the Purple Continent, which is the equivalent of one of the real world's poles... except floating in midair.
- In Sonic Battle, Tails's house is shaped like his head, in an example of the Giant Objects variant of this trope.
- Constantine's Mansion in the Thief: The Dark Project and Thief Gold games manages to combine:
- Giant Objects (in the Gold version's Brobdignag section)
- Strange Orientations (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)
- Jumbled Buildings (some of the rooms and corridors that aren't of the Strange Orientation variety 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)
- Unlikely Foundations (one room is entered through the roof of a greenhouse - you come up through a pool of water inside the room)
- The Sunken Temple in World Of Warcraft Is an example of Strange Orientation. 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.
- Grandma's house in indie horror game The Path.
- In the second half of Castlevania Symphony of the Night, you fight in Dracula's Castle...which is now upside down.
- The Polyhedron in Pathologic. Lampshaded and then justified in that it has a massive spike through the centre that keeps the building up. This was the wound that became 'infected' and caused the plague.
- Every building in The Neverhood... especially the giant piece of toast with the fries sticking out of the top.
- Psychonauts has very few levels outside the summer camp that don't have topography that would drive one insane. Justified in that many of the levels take place in the mental landscape of people who are questionably sane at best.
- It's quite easy to create bizarre-looking buildings in The Sims (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.
- The buildings in City Of Heroes 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.) And don't even get me started about the one mission where an ordinary door in a Casino takes you to HELL.
Web Comics
- In Knights Of The Dinner Table, the Tic Tac Taco restaurant has a giant sombrero on the roof, in an example of the Giant Objects variant.
- In Sluggy Freelance, the Demon King lives in a house on top of a giant pile of bones. While suitably menacing as an Unlikely Foundation, 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.
Western Animation
- Giant Objects are played with in "The Mouse That Jack Built," a Warner Brothers short featuring mouse expies of 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...
- In The Adventures Of Jimmy Neutron, the Giant Object burger-shaped restaurant McSpanky's.
- The Western Air Temples in Avatar The Last Airbender are built upside down on the bottom face of a cliff - Strange Orientations indeed. Perhaps not impossible, but certainly questionable. There are also examples of Unlikely Foundations - 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. How the heck did they even build these things?
- I'm sure that having people who could fly and manipulate lava respectively helped in the construction of the former two somewhat.
- Lava is made of Earth, not fire, but they can manipulate heat, so it's all good.
- In Pixar's Cars, Sally Carera's Cozy Cone motel is a set of one-car garages that look like road cones, in an example of the Giant Objects variant of the trope. 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.
- Almost every building in CatDog was an example of Giant Objects - Catdog's fish/bone house, the bowling alley shaped like a bowling ball, the local taco joint shaped like a giant taco... the list goes on.
- An episode of 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 Scooby Dooby Doors.
- The Bueno Nacho restaurants on Kim Possible have sombrero roofs as Giant Objects, 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.
- In Krypto the Superdog, the fire hydrant-shaped space station is an example of Giant Objects.
- Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
- The Teen Titans live in a giant T-shaped tower on an island in the middle of a bay. Granted, it's not as cool as some of the other examples of Giant Objects, but has anyone ever seen a T-shaped tower in real life?
- Sumdac Tower in Transformers Animated is inexplicably shaped like a giant sparkplug. How this Giant Object remains standing is a mystery for the ages.
- Quite possibly because of the technology Sumdac reverse engineered from Megatron's head. No, really, that's why Earth has robots.
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