Thread by @culturaltutor

A brief tour of the world's strangest architecture:

Beginning with this snake-shaped temple in India...

Discussions about architecture are usually framed in terms of ugliness versus beauty, but sometimes we forget that buildings can also be funny.

The Dunmore Pineapple in Scotland, a folly built during the 18th century, is architecture with a sense of humour.

It's easy to get caught up in talk of architectural "styles" — but sometimes a building is downright bizarre and evades classification.

Like the Buzludzha Monument in Bulgaria, built by the Communists in the 1970s and now abandoned.

A concrete UFO in the mountains.

Even a whole settlement can be strikingly odd.

Like Bourtange in the Netherlands, one of several villages built in old 18th century star forts.

The result looks like something generated by AI, but this is a real place and there are others just like it.

But there's a big range here.

Some buildings are intentionally strange, and there may be no better example of this than the National Fisheries Development Board building in Hyderabad, India:

This is what we might call novelty or gimmick architecture, where the design is knowingly silly.

As with something obviously playful like an upside-down house, or when a building's shape references what it is used for.

A piano showroom in Huainan, China:

Otherwise some buildings are unintentionally bizarre, and were made because of some historical coincidence or necessity.

Like the inexplicably thin Five Thurloe Square in London, built on an oddly-shaped plot of land next to the local underground station.

Or the keyhole-shaped tombs of Japan, known as kofu, built for ancient emperors.

Much ancient architecture is mysterious to us, but few are quite so strange — when seen from above — as the Mozu Tombs in Sakai, built during the 5th century:

With some structures, like the Gate Tower Building in Osaka, Japan — a 16 storey tower with a highway running through it — you can only wonder what happened.

Well, bureaucracy and land law can lead to strange decisions and peculiar compromises...

Some buildings, however, are consciously and provocatively odd.

In recent decades there has been a trend of combining an historical, masonry building with a glass-and-steel structure.

Like the Port Authority Building in Antwerp:

There are other buildings we might call whimsical rather than bizarre, like the now-demolished Cabaret de l'Enfer in Paris:

Or the House with Chimaeras in Kyiv, designed in 1901 by the Polish architect Władysław Horodecki.

A more or less normal house... apart from the fact he decorated it with dozens of sculptures of animals, some real and others fantastical.

Other buildings, though not bizarre, are certainly unusual — and show what creative freedom can do.

Like the phenomenon, now long gone, of designing water towers as if they were "real" buildings.

Consider the Wrocław Water Tower, built in 1905 as a Gothic fantasy:

Or something like The Jealous Wall in Ireland.

This is not a real ruin; it's a "folly" built in the 18th — what you see here is what the building always looked like.

Follies were architectural fantasies built on the estates of the aristocracy.

These follies ranged from imitation Greek temples to fake Gothic ruins to wonderful oddities like the Apennine Colossus.

A 12-metre tall statue of a giant, built in the 1580s for Francesco de' Medici, with several rooms inside — including a miniature concert hall.

If all architecture was gimmicky, provocative, or oddly-shaped, the impact of such strangeness would be taken away.

But sometimes it's good to be stopped in your tracks and think, "what have I just seen?"

Consider the Lakshmi Narasimha Swamy Temple near Vemulawada, India:

Strange buildings also push us to wonder whether buildings need to be designed as we have always designed them.

In an age of box-shaped structures, Frank Gehry has been trying for years to do things differently.

Whether inspired by dancers or paper bags:

Indeed, that was the whole point of Art Nouveau.

Think of Antoni Gaudí and his world-famous architecture in Catalunya; he bent the rules (literally) with his organic shapes and colourful designs.

Playful, comical, bizarre architecture at its finest:

The point is that buildings can be funny or surprising.

And given how much distress and anxiety there is in the world, given how frequently we spend our days in worry and doubt, we mustn't forget that buildings can, even for a moment, raise our spirits.

Of course, there's a thin line between kitsch and comical, between egregiously weird and enjoyably witty.

Apple-shaped bus stops make sense — seen here, it certainly makes what is usually a boring place more interesting — but a town of apple-shaped houses might be too much.

A world filled with exclusively whimsical buildings sounds overwhelming.

But these strange structures remind us that architecture doesn't only need to be functional, nor must always aspire to be beautiful.

Sometimes a building can just be funny — and maybe we need more of that.