When architects and engineers stop making fun of each other and cooperate, they can build some really beautiful and stunning structures.
Neuschwanstein Castle, for instance.
German efficiency?
Even the Golden Gate Bridge.
I know it’s foggy, but use your imagination
Some buildings have… questionable, for lack of better word, beauty.
Antilla, for example.
Kaem cho Mukesh bhai? Maja ma?
And the WonderWorks building in Tennessee.
Can someone explain this to me?
When they don’t get along though, there is absolutely no hope what so ever.
The Elephant Building, Bangkok.
I honestly thought it was a duck at first.
And then there’s the entire Los Angeles skyline.
#sodone
But what about when their lunacy gets a hold of them (and someone is willing to pay them)?
Then they build Follies.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a folly as ‘a popular name for any costly structure considered to have shown folly in the builder’. These projects were often named after the person who designed or commissioned the project, like Conolly’s Folly in Ireland.
Although not built because someone was bored, it was made as a decorative item in the Castlestone Estate. The philanthropic widow of Mr. Conolly had it built 1740, when the Irish Potato Famine was at its worst to provide employment (I’m not exactly sure, but was her plan to employ people to build an obelisk, thereby making those people even hungrier, so that she could pay them to buy food that didn’t exist?).
The Ballandean Pyramid in Australia was built when a local resident asked the land owner what he’d do with all the rocks on his property.
Pretty sure he had no social life..
But the greatest ever folly has to be the Broadway Tower, in Worcestershire. This 55 foot tower is located on a hill a little more than one thousand feet above sea level, and was built for a certain Lady Coventry because she wanted to know if a beacon from that hill would be visible from her house, a mere 35 km away. It was.
Didn’t Brienne of Tarth look for a beacon in a tower too?
Although some of these buildings look really funny or don’t really have a use besides odd Instagram pictures, there’s nothing objectively wrong with them. As any builder will tell you, in the field of architecture and construction, unless a building falls, there’s no such thing as a bad building. (Architects will tell you something entirely different, though.) Buildings are an art form, and any structure that gives us something to talk about has value to add to the world.