Affordable Housing Institute : US

Once before, I posted seriously that you are what you live in:

I has a haddock

In Jungian dream interpretation, the house is the self:

A house in a dream generally speaks of one’s psychological house, the house of the “soul.” We often see different homes that we’ve lived in. Ask yourself, if the home in your dream is a childhood home, or a current home. Each of these may have different meaning that relate to an overall sense of what you were like or struggling with at that time.

Why do you have these fantasies of living in a shoe?

Perhaps that’s because the house is a shell around our selves, just as our skull is a shell around our minds. Certainly our childhood residence imprints itself indelibly on our minds – we learn about the universe as the world outside our front door, and within our house – be it single-family, condo, apartment, or shared – is the space that defines our family.

If so, then the individuals featured in this humorous rogue’s gallery listing from Web Urbanist are in serious trouble:

Top 15 Most Amazing Houses in the World

Written by Steph on December 9th, 2008 – Topics: Architecture, Travel, Urban

Little boxes on the hillside aren’t for everyone.

They’re identical … until the people move in (photo credit Oscar Ruiz)

While some people might be content with a cookie-cutter home in a bland suburban neighborhood, others create truly one-of-a-kind homes with incredibly imaginative shapes and materials. In addition to the 70 amazing houses around the world that we’ve featured before, here are 15 jaw-dropping examples of architecture from a decaying wooden skyscraper in Russia to a mushroom-shaped home in Cincinnati that looks like it was custom-made for Dr. Seuss.

There’s really not too much to say about these, except to present them:

Bart Prince House – Albuquerque, New Mexico
(images via: BartPrince.com)

Architect Bart Prince is renowned for his incredibly creative approach to designing structures. The homes he has created look nothing like the boxy houses you and I live in; they’re quirky, they’re organic, and they’re most definitely one-of-a-kind. Prince says his designs start from the inside out, and that every home he builds has an idea behind it.

Pictured are Prince’s own home in Albuquerque (top) and the Seymour residence in Los Altos, California.

Didn’t that thing eat Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black?

Oh, did I just step on your relative?

Space House – Signal Mountain, Tennessee
(image via: Coast to Coast AM)

The ‘Space House’ in Signal Mountain, Tennessee was built by Curtis King and his sons in the 1970s and is quite a draw for curiosity seekers in the area, who have been filing by and taking photos for decades. Six concrete support pillars look like landing gear beneath the main part of the building. The Space House sold on the auction block in March 2008 but the buyer defaulted, so it’s being offered for “whatever the public is willing to pay” on December 14th.

Previously owned by Gidney and Cloyd?

You mean you’re homeless now?

Inversion House – Houston, Texas (images via: Flickr user Kevin O’Mara)

When two old studio buildings owned by The Art League in Houston were set to be demolished, they decided to take the opportunity to turn them into a temporary art installation. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck sculpturally altered the two buildings, peeling off the exterior siding of the front building to simulate the appearance of a funnel-like vortex. The opening was actually a tiny hallway (only kids could fit through it) that passed through the two structures and emptied out into an adjacent courtyard.

Made by the giant sucking sound of jobs moving to Mexico?

And speaking of giant sucking sounds …

Toilet-Shaped House – Suweon, South Korea (images via: Reuters)

The world’s one and only toilet-shaped house was built to mark the launch of the World Toilet Association, a campaign for more sanitary restrooms worldwide. Sim Jae-Duck, nicknamed “Mayor Toilet”, had the 4,508-square-foot concrete and glass structure built in his native city of Suweon, South Korea. At the center of the home is a glass-walled “showcase loo” that produces mist to make users feel more secure. Sim, who was born into a toilet and has made clean restrooms his life’s work, now lives in the home.

This is the first of several, houses where the building configuration is intended as an explicit political or social statement, proving that not only do people use houses to cocoon themselves, but also to display their individuality. Improvability is a fundamental attribute of true homeownership, and just as tattoos and piercings are an assertion of self – it’s my body and I’ll decorate or mutilate it as I choose – so is the housing configuration an assertion of ownership over a space. This is where I live, and I state who I am by what I present.

When we said we wanted the walls flush, perhaps you misunderstood …

Mushroom House – Cincinnati, Ohio (images via: Agility Nut)

Architect Terry Brown created this much-maligned ‘mushroom house’, an unusual piece of architecture situated in a rather upscale area of Cincinnati. Brown’s architectural style developed when he began experimenting with materials like wood, colored glass, shell, ceramics and various metals to create irregular shapes that mimic those found in nature.  A professor of architecture and interior design at the University of Cincinnati, Brown frequently had to defend the unique design of the house against complaints by neighbors before passing away in 2008.

This is what we meant when we talked about houses springing up overnight …

Floating House – Ukraine (images via: Aphasia Design)

An optical illusion? Trick of Photoshop? Nobody really seems to know much about this supposed ‘floating barn’ which was reportedly located in Ukraine and may or may not still be standing. Cantilevered barns do exist – mostly in the Appalachian region of the United States – but usually aren’t quite this dramatic looking. Real or fake, it’s certainly pretty striking.

Imported straight from Laputa!

Wooden Skyscraper – Arkhangelsk, Russia (images via: The Telegraph + English Russia)

Nikolai Sutyagin, a former gangster, began building this ‘wooden skyscraper’ in Arkhangelsk, Russia with the intention of it being only a two-story building. But, a trip to see wooden houses in Japan and Norway convinced him that he hadn’t used roof space efficiently enough, so he kept building. “First I added three floors but then the house looked ungainly, like a mushroom,” he said. “So I added another and it still didn’t look right so I kept going. What you see today is a happy accident.”

Self-building is remarkably common throughout the world. The famous San Jose Winchester Mystery House of roughly 160 rooms was begun in 1884 by a wealthy widow, who never stopped extending and improving it until she died.

More than likely, she was obsessive-compulsive, as the house has neither rhyme nor reason, with among other things stairs to the ceiling:

And stairs to nowhere:

Building can be impoverishing:

The multimillionaire became a pauper after his possessions were destroyed during a stint in prison, and the house is now decaying around him, but he still lives in the bottom floor with his wife.

I may be cash-poor, but I’m house rich!

The Upside-Down House – Szymbark, Poland
(images via: Fresh Home)

Polish businessman and philanthropist Daniel Czapiewski built The Upside Down House as a statement about the Communist era and the end of the world.

Another example, like the toilet house, of using the building as a visible expression of a political view.

It took 114 days to build because the workers were so disoriented by the angles of the walls. It certainly attracts its fair share of tourists to the tiny village of Szymbark, who often become dizzy and ‘seasick’ after just a few moments inside.

We are so used to right angles representing horizontal and vertical that when we are encased in a titled environment, our brains seek to rewire the neurological impulses coming from our eyes and inner ears to make things align. As a kid, I remember visiting a tilted house where water appeared to run uphill, an illusion that never fails to draw attention.

Which brings me, in a slightly serious way, back to the original point: we are what we live in, and what home we inhabit in some way outwardly expresses ourselves and inwardly defines how we see ourselves. As I wrote in the original post:

Charles Karelis, a professor at George Washington University, has a simpler but far more radical argument to make: traditional economics just doesn’t apply to the poor. When we’re poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated.

My family never owned a new car. Not for me the 00000 odometer. It was always used cars of one sort or another – always bought cheap, always driven until they died underneath us.

Ours always had big numbers on it

[Snip]

Count me among those who think Karelis is on to something – and if you’re going to change something to help change people’s poverty, it starts with housing.

You are what you live in.

Change your housing, change your self

And they’re all made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same?

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