World's Most Weird Structures

These odd, eye-popping structures — in England, China, and elsewhere — are worth a detour.

Between all the bubbly novelties that went up in pre-Olympics Beijing, and Dubai’s feverish invention over the past decade, nothing should surprise us. Except that some buildings still do. And these eccentric edifices, breathtaking in their strangeness, are worth a detour—if only to ginger up your worldview a bit.


Selfridges Department Store

Birmingham, England

The Birmingham branch of Selfridges is a billowy mattress of a building, clad in 15,000 shimmery aluminum discs like that famous Paco Rabanne dress. It was designed by Future Systems—the name tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the firm—to be a landmark and a catalyst for the revitalization of a largely moribund city center. “An ersatz urban cliff, a giant sea anemone, a friendly, blob-like alien, the mother of all magic mushrooms,” wrote Guardian architecture critic Jonathan Glancey. “This is the department store as unalloyed architectural entertainment.”

Step Inside: The interior, with floaty white escalators crisscrossing in an open atrium, looks like a scene from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

The Bar Code Building, St. Petersburg, Russia
Anton Chmelev
The Bar Code Building

St. Petersburg, Russia


Near the banks of the Neva River, this trade complex by Vitruvius & Sons transforms the world’s most ubiquitous symbol of commerce—the bar code—into a powerful architectural motif. It can be read as an update of American-style roadside classics like the giant Dixie Cup water tower of Lexington, KY, or Detroit’s giant Uniroyal Tire. The rust-red steel building brightens an otherwise bleak urban setting.

Strange Trend: There’s also a Barcode House by the Dutch architecture firm MVRDV on the outskirts of Munich, but it’s much more subtle.

Bioscleave House,East Hampton, N.Y.
Eric Striffler/The New York Times/Redux
Bioscleave House

East Hampton, N.Y.

Husband and wife artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins designed this intentionally unsettling house in 2008. With its bumpy, hilly floors and a wildly asymmetrical plan—even the electrical outlets are at weird angles—it’s supposed to stimulate the immune systems of its occupants by keeping them from ever becoming comfortable. This relentless “tentativeness,” the artists believe, is the key to immortality.

Embrace the Strange: This house can be yours. It’s currently offered by Sotheby’s Realty for $4 million.

Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto
Richard Johnson
Ontario College of Art and Design

Toronto

This crossword puzzle checked box appears, at a distance, to be hovering Close Encounters–style above an otherwise mundane Toronto neighborhood. As you approach, its improbability only increases. British architect Will Alsop planted this collection of galleries and studio spaces on brightly colored columns so insouciantly angled and skinny that they barely look like they can support themselves.

Nearby Oddity: There goes the neighborhood: Daniel Libeskind’s bizarre 2007 crystalline addition to Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum is just a mile away.

Ramot Polin Apartments, Jerusalem, Israel
Israel images/Alamy
Ramot Polin Apartments

Jerusalem, Israel

Polish-born architect Zvi Hecker’s experiment in multi-unit residential construction is not as well known as the Habitat housing Moshe Safdie designed for Expo 67 in Montreal, but at 720 units is much larger. It was also an exercise in using prefabricated components, at least in the first two of its five phases. With its crazy pentagonal design, the Ramot Polin Apartments resemble a housing project for honeybees.

Behind the Scenes: This highly unorthodox complex was commissioned by the Israeli ministry of housing specifically for highly orthodox Jewish families.

Columbus Lighthouse, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
M. Timothy O'Keefe/Alamy
Columbus Lighthouse

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Under construction for some 40 years, and inaugurated in time for the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s initial landing in the New World (which was not on Hispaniola, but in the Bahamas), this monstrously spooky concrete monument, half a mile long and 688 feet tall, reputedly cost the impoverished nation some $70 million to build. The lighthouse contains what are purported to be the explorer’s bones.

Weird Wiring: When the lighthouse projects a cross-shaped beam into the night sky, it’s so bright that not only can it be seen in Puerto Rico, but it drains electrical power from surrounding neighborhoods. It’s not turned on very often.

Oriental Pearl TV Tower, Shanghai, China
iStock
Oriental Pearl TV Tower

Shanghai, China

Nothing else on earth quite looks like the Oriental Pearl. It was once the tallest structure on the Pudong side of Shanghai’s Huangpu River until it was overshadowed by the Shanghai World Financial Center in 2007. Designed by Jiang Huan Cheng of the Shanghai Modern Architectural Design Co. and completed in 1995, it stands 1,535 feet tall and is easily the world’s greatest assemblage of habitable disco balls (11!), housing several sightseeing observatories, a revolving restaurant, and a “space hotel.”

Tall Tale: Both Shanghai towers have recently been dwarfed by the 2,001-foot-tall Guangzhou TV and Sightseeing Tower.

Spittelau District Heating Plant, Vienna, Austria
imagebroker/Alamy
Spittelau District Heating Plant

Vienna, Austria

Highly eccentric painter and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, fond of bright colors, crooked lines, and overall visual cacophony, designed this garbage-burning heating plant on the Donau Canal to look like Vienna’s answer to the Magic Kingdom. With its crazy quilt façade, decorative columns topped with gold balls, and a pollution-scrubbing smokestack, it suggests a mirage rather than a working piece of urban infrastructure.

Odd Couple: There are two of these oddities. The Maishima Incineration Plant in Osaka, Japan, is an exact replica.

Elbe Philharmonic, Hamburg, Germany
Herzog & de Meuron
Elbe Philharmonic

Hamburg, Germany

What’s really freakish here is the contrast between the new building—a liquidy-looking glass thingamajig—and the old building it uses for its podium: a stolid, workaday 1960s waterfront warehouse. This odd couple, united by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and scheduled for completion in 2012, will be a new cultural complex for Hamburg’s harbor, featuring a public plaza on the old warehouse roof, a hotel, some apartments, and a wildly biomorphic philharmonic hall.

Odd Trend: This new building atop old building thing is a bona fide trend. See: New York’s Hearst Tower by Foster + Partners.

The Atomium, Brussels, Belgium
nagelestock.com/Alamy
The Atomium

Brussels, Belgium


A 1958 World’s Fair leftover, the Atomium is far more eccentric than the 1964 Unisphere in New York or the 1962 Space Needle in Seattle. Conceived by an engineer, André Waterkeyn, it is a gigantic replica of an iron crystal molecule and was intended to symbolize “the peaceful use of atomic energy for scientific purposes.” Five of its nine spheres are accessible to visitors, as is its maze of interconnecting tubes.

Quirky Quote: According to the Atomium website: “The completely steel-clad Atomium is a kind of UFO in the cultural history of Humanity, a mirror turned simultaneously towards the past and the future, comparing our Utopias of yesterday with our dreams for tomorrow.”

For Freddy Adu, Timing is everything

American soccer's million-dollar baby saw his World Cup dream extinguished on Tuesday, a full month before the sport's greatest showpiece has even begun.

Based on how Freddy Adu's career has faltered in recent years, it was no shock that he was left off the United States' preliminary World Cup roster, ensuring him a summer spent in front of a television screen instead of packed stadiums in South Africa.

Yet given the outlandish projections made for Adu in 2003 – when, as a 13-year-old, he was handed a million-dollar endorsement deal with Nike and touted as the future of the national team – the decline has been both sad and dramatic.

By now, according to the experts, Adu was supposed to be one of the best players in the world – the first American to become a global star. Instead, he is floundering in the lowly regarded Greek league, and Tuesday's announcement means U.S. head coach Bob Bradley does not even rate him among this country's 30 best players.

Adu's backstory used to resemble the first few chapters of a fairy tale but is now little more than a cautionary tale against overhyping young phenomena. He emigrated to the States from Ghana as an 8-year-old after his mother won the Green Card lottery, and was quickly spotted in the junior ranks in Maryland.

Observers could barely believe their eyes when witnessing such skills in one so young, and the soccer world soon caught on. Giant Italian club Inter Milan offered him a contract as a 10-year-old. US Soccer chiefs positively salivated at the prospect of a future superstar.

In 2004, Adu made U.S. sports history by becoming the top overall pick in the Major League Soccer draft and making his debut for D.C. United at age 14. In hindsight, such acceleration into the senior ranks smacks of madness. Back then, it was seen as merely the first stepping stone on the path to greatness.

Growing up in the spotlight didn't do Adu much good, with the big contract, big expectations and constant scrutiny weighing heavily on his shoulders.

Since 2006, he has resembled a soccer nomad, bouncing from D.C. to Real Salt Lake and then Benfica, the Portuguese club that retains his rights but has now farmed him out on loan to three separate clubs in three years. Some positive performances for the national team in age-restricted events were interspersed, in the Under 20 World Cup in 2007 and the Beijing Olympics (where most players must be 23 or younger) the following year.

The regular spot on the senior team never came, a decision effectively taken out of the hands of Bradley by Adu's failure to lock down regular playing time for his European clubs.

Back when the draw for the World Cup was made in December, Adu still retained some hope of being selected for Bradley's squad.

"I'm gonna say something right now," he wrote on his Twitter account. "I have never wanted to be a part of something as bad as I wanna be in this World Cup. Work and prayer."

This year's World Cup was earmarked as Adu's time to stamp his mark on the world game. From that time years earlier, when Nike hurled cash in his direction and his future looked golden, there was always an eye on 2010.

The 2006 World Cup was seen as too soon. This one, on the African continent of his birth, was perfect.

In the end, it just wasn't to be. The culmination of that plan did not take place in Bafokeng Stadium in Rustenburg, where the United States will meet England on June 12. It was instead in Adu's club apartment in Thessaloniki, with the announcement of a roster that didn't feature his name. Back to the drawing board.

So where did it all go wrong for Adu? Were the hype and expectations too much to handle? Or was he just never destined for stardom?

"It is difficult when young players do not have enough time to develop, when too much is asked too soon," said Hector Cuper, a well-respected Argentinean coach now in charge of Adu's Greek team, Aris. "Extra time allows for a more well-rounded game. He has ability, we can all see that."

Yet if Adu is ever to ascend to the heights he still dreams of, it will be a grind through the ranks and a constant battle to overturn perception of him as a bust. European soccer is a cutthroat world, and there won't be anything easy about it.

"I want to be one of the best players to play this sport one day," Adu said in a recent interview with Sports Illustrated. "I still have the chance to do that, and I want to work hard to get there."

"Getting there" is no longer a given. Recent signs have been reasonable, with some solid performances for Aris taking him to the brink of the 30-man U.S. squad after he was barely in contention months earlier. However, there is still a long and uncertain way to go.

"Freddy is still young and he will tell you there are things along the way he did right and things he did wrong," Bradley said. "Now he has to take all those things to the situation he is in and show he is continuing to grow."

Adu's Twitter account was silent early Tuesday, perhaps a reflection of the bitter disappointment he must have seen coming.

Freddy Adu is 20 years old and he feels like yesterday's man. Maybe his time will still come, but it won't be this summer.

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Britney Spears & Jason Trawick Call It Quits - Professionally: Tie the Knot

LOS ANGELES, Calif. -- Britney Spears and agent Jason Trawick have split ways - at least when it comes to work.

The pop star and her agent/boyfriend are no longer mixing business with pleasure.

"[Britney and Jason] have decided to end their professional relationship and focus on their personal relationship," a rep for the Brit said in a statement to Access Hollywood, which was first reported by People.


Britney may no longer have Jason on her professional team, but she's reportedly still hard at work.


"Since wrapping her recent world tour, Spears has been busy in the studio working on her next album," the rep continued.

The duo, who have reportedly been an item since last summer, are apparently in the midst of relationship bliss.

"They are very happy," a source told People. "Things are really good with them."