I like this house.
[quote=“Hobbes”]
Bonus points awarded for guessing which of these items are actually owned by posters contributing to this thread.[/quote]
bonus points to you if you really own that house. 
That reminds me I also kinda like the Bilbao guggenheim.
The Luce Chapel in Taichung is wonderful. IM Pei.
Falling Water, designed by FLW, was once owned by the Kaufmanns, Pittsburgh department store owners. But, its now owned by the Pennsylvania Conservatory.
I don’t think they post here.
Been to Falling Water many times. Truly, truly amazing.
FLW designed all of the interior furnishings also. Some very cool and functional stuff. I heard the place has recently under gone or is still undergoing a complete renovation per his original design plans.
another Falling Water factoid… apparently and aside from obvious historical importance, the reason it was purchased by the Penn Conn is that residents couldnt live there… the waterfall apparently drove people mad.
Hmm… 
Thanks for the heads-up, AWOL. I was thinking about making the Pennsylvania Conservatory an offer for it, but now I may need to give it some more thought. At the very least I’d insist on staying in the house for a few days before I signed the papers to make sure that the waterfall didn’t bother me.
TC: Do you know if FLW was into hidden doorways and secret passages and the like? I remember seeing some neat stuff like this in an FLW copy house when I was a kid. Naturally I thought it was the best house I’d ever seen (there was a secret door which looked like a wall panel that had a pole you could slide down to the floor beneath). But I was never sure if these features were “after market”…
I have heard that FLW did in fact put a lot of quirky things into certain houses like hidden rooms, tunnels etc. Given the variety of horrid and/or bizarre things that happened to him one can understand why he just might put in odd extras.
Perhaps the mod could split off the discussion re the FLW house and that stuff could spin off to discuss neatly designed houses???
This guy, Sir John Soane, had some wacky designs. I love his residence in London.
[quote][url=http://www.speel.demon.co.uk/londart.htm#soane]John Soane Museum, Holborn
Tube: Holborn, turn left out of the station onto High Holborn, two minutes walk and turn left again in to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where the museum is nos. 13-14.
Not really Victorian, as the architect John Soane, famous for designing the Bank of England, died in 1837, but it fits as my other favorite small museum in London, along with Leighton House. It is the house Soane himself designed and lived in, and a fascinating place both from the point of view of the complex architecture, and the astonishing amount of sculpture, paintings (lots of Hogarths) and other artefacts (including an Egyptian mummy case) crammed inside. There is enough ancient Greek and Roman sculpture to inspire any budding Pre-Raphaelite artist. J. E. Hodgson, the eminent secretary of the Royal Academy, complained about the outside of the building: ‘Its facade is singularly mean, to which meanness a touch of vulgarity has been added by two plaster figures perched upon the cornice’. (In fact the figures are apparently of Coade Stone.) Just down the road, there is a Victorian connection - no. 17/18 Lincoln’s Inn Fields is Victorian gothic by Waterhouse (1871/2), and no. 19 is by Philip Webb (1868), who built William Morris’s Red House in Bexleyheath.[/url][/quote]
Another FLW design - his Imperial Hotel: only the facade and lobby remain at Meiji Mura Architecture Park near Nagoya
I hope this isn’t too cliche for this thread, but I’ll never forget the first image I saw of Manhattan I saw when I stepped off the plane after leaving NZ:
The Chrysler Building
How about this, from the National Mosque in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Worship space for 8,000.
Interesting. Without a person in the photo, it is hard to tell how big that place is.
It also looks to me like the columns are warped/bent. Surely that cannot be the case? Optical illusion? Distortion caused by camera lense? Figment of my imagination?
I like the ceiling.
Interesting. Without a person in the photo, it is hard to tell how big that place is.
It also looks to me like the columns are warped/bent. Surely that cannot be the case? Optical illusion? Distortion caused by camera lense? Figment of my imagination?
I like the ceiling.[/quote]
Is that a math challenge? 
I was gonna bust out with some geometry but ah well. From looking at it, the ceiling looks to be about 4 door heights.
There is barrel distortion from a wide-angle lens.
Interesting. Without a person in the photo, it is hard to tell how big that place is.
It also looks to me like the columns are warped/bent. Surely that cannot be the case? Optical illusion? Distortion caused by camera lense? Figment of my imagination?
I like the ceiling.[/quote]
No warping. That’s just the effect most tall structures take on unless they are designed to narrow at the top to eliminate that effect (eg Petronas Towers).
The columns are about 8 metres (27 feet) high as I recall.
The ceiling is undoubtedly the coolest part.
This photo is only in the “outer courtyard” area (which means even women can go there). The inside is, in my opinion, less spectacular.
The Turning Torso in Sweden.
And speaking of the Pepper Pots, they are pretty special themselves.
As mentioned, they are designed to recede see toward the top so that they don’t appear to be falling over on top of you as you look at them from the ground as most tall buildings do (eg TPE 101). eg. compare them to the other 2 buildings in the first photo below, which both seem to be falling in on me as I take the shot. Again, in the 2nd photo, I am literally standing right outside the towers, and yet they don’t seem to be falling on me quite so much as other buildings seem to, eg. TPE 101.
The shape of the floorplan of each tower comes from a principle of Islamic architecture, based on 2 squares placed over each other at 45 degree angles, with each point of the 8 points joined by a semi-circle, so you see alternating right angled and curved facades on the sides of the building (very difficult to explain this clearly 
). You should be able to make this out fairly clearly from the 2nd picture.
Might be OT here, but it is interesting that of the two most prominent Twin Tower buildings ever built, one was destroyed as a result of one perception of Islam, while the other was built as a result of another perception of Islam.
To avoid the appearance of the building falling over, pro photographers use a tilt-shift or PC (perspective control) lens. They are pricy.
shutterbug.net/features/0801sb_tilt/
photo.net/equipment/canon/tilt-shift
archiphoto.com/personal%20pa … 0Tilt.html
[quote=“Comrade Stalin”]To avoid the appearance of the building falling over, pro photographers use a tilt-shift or PC (perspective control) lens. They are pricy.
shutterbug.net/features/0801sb_tilt/
photo.net/equipment/canon/tilt-shift
archiphoto.com/personal%20pa … 0Tilt.html[/quote]
Very interesting links, CS. (I particularly liked the title “How do take bad pictures”)
I didn’t see any prices in those links. How much are we talking? (When someone is discussing lenses used by pro photographers, and says that a certain lens is expensive, I start thinking about amounts of money large enough for the lens manufacturer to throw in a Volkswagon as a free gift with any purchase…)