History Main / BizarrChitecture

** 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.]]
** 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.

* 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.

** 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 they fall through another trapdoor in the ceiling and land back on the stage.

* ''VideoGame/CodeVein'': The Cathedral Of The Sacred Blood can best be described as a convoluted maze in three dimensions: the entire building danlges 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]].

* [[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 belies. 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.