To find out more about our fascination with bizarre buildings and structures, we reached out to Lisa Yaszek, a Regents Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech where she researches and teaches science fiction as a global language crossing centuries, continents, and cultures. Lisa was happy to share some very interesting insights into the cultural significance of such buildings, and why they never cease to capture our imagination.
“We’re fascinated by strange-looking human-made structures because they remind us that, as humans, we don’t just create buildings to shelter ourselves from bad weather and dangerous animals. Rather, our buildings are also always expressions of our cultural values. When a building looks bizarre to us, it’s because it somehow challenges or defies those values,” Lisa explained.
The professor of science fiction studies argues that for the past two hundred years, many of us across the world have lived in cultures informed by the rhythms of industrial and mass production. It turns out that there are two specific values associated with these patterns of production that clearly inform most of the structures built in that time, Lisa said.
“First, industrial-era buildings tend to be uniform, clean-edged, and box-like in terms of their basic structures, ready for mass production; they may have elaborate and asymmetric details, like Victorian-era gingerbread, but those details are simply placed on top of the uniform, box-like structure as nonfunctional decoration.”
She continued: “second, industrial-era buildings tend to be designed with the assumption that infrastructure is more important than and in fact directly opposed to nature: we change the natural world to accommodate our uniform, box-like structures rather than designing unique structures to fit the particulars of different landscapes, and we create buildings that are meant to keep out elements, plants, and animals rather than accommodate them.”
Lisa explained that when a building looks bizarre to us as modern people, it’s often because it challenges the primacy of those industrial-era values that are so much part of our daily lives that we rarely even think about them.
Interestingly, according to Lisa, for most part we’re not threatened by bizarre buildings; “instead, they inspire our curiosity and wonder: who made these buildings and why? What purpose did or do they serve? What are the people like who used or still use these buildings, and how do these buildings help them live long and prosper? When we look at responses to the images posted the Bizarre Buildings Twitter feed—and in this article!—we can see that these strange structures inspired people from around the world to pool their different cultural knowledges and experiences to answer such questions.”
Lisa also said that “as someone who has lived my whole life in the United States, it’s exciting to learn, for instance, that the walking house from the Baba Yaga myth was probably inspired by the storehuts on stilts that people build across Northern Europe, and to see fully painted religious temples in contemporary India that give us a better sense of what ancient Greek temples really looked like!”
The professor argues that when we learn the stories behind these unusual structures, we are reminded that people have always built for diverse but often geographically and culturally specific needs that were, to them, just as important as our own are to us.
“It’s also fun to see how contemporary artists and architects around the world play with the idea of the industrially inspired uniform box building—by painting it so it looks asymmetric even if it is really square or manipulating hard brick to look like soft fabric; by multiplying boxes and joining them at surprising angles; by adding smaller 'parasitic' boxes to larger ones, and so on.”
“Meanwhile, other contemporary designers show how infrastructure can accommodate and respond to the natural world rather than eliminating or changing it, as with buildings that have trees growing inside and houses that are open to the elements. If old bizarre buildings remind us that the people made structures in the past to meet needs and express values different from ours, new ones show us how people continue to create buildings that express a range of values and ideals today as well,” Lisa explained.
