Three Examples of Wild and Innovative Architecture

This piano and cello house is located in Huainan City, An Hui Province in China. A staircase or an escalator inside the glass cello takes visitors up to the piano building which serves as a performance and practice hall for music students from the local college. It also acts as a planning exhibition hall for the developing region, displaying city development plans.

What an intriguing place to visit! I wonder if you would feel like you were "in a fishbowl" while in that transparent cello. Perhaps you would, but the view from inside must be so spectacular.

How would you like to stay in the hotel above? This is the Inntel Hotel in Zaandam, near Amsterdam, in The Netherlands. My mother would call this structure "hockerjawed," a term that does not seem to be a real term at all. I've never found "hockerjawed" in a dictionary. Maybe, somewhere down the line, one of my Midwestern ancestors invented their own word. Whopperjawed, however, is a real term of sorts I found in online slang dictionaries, and hockerjawed is synonymous with it, meaning askew or crooked.

This crazy hotel looks like a lot of of traditional Dutch houses stacked Jenga style. I imagine a child creatively stacking a series of Lego houses one upon another. I'm sure, however, the architect, Wilfried Van Winden, had an entirely different method.

According to Jonathan Glancey in "The Guardian" online, the architect based the appearance of these stacked houses on traditional homes ranging from a stately notary's dwelling to workers' cottages. On the top of the structure is a blue house based on one that was painted by Claude Monet on a trip to Zaandam.

Below is Claude Monet's "Blue House in Zaandam."

I like the Monet painting, but the house is painted at such an angle that you do not see the curvy Dutch style gable as visible in the hotel.

How about an upside-down house? Is that sufficiently hocker/whopper...askew for you?

This house is not really a home but an exhibit open to the public on the island of Usedom in Germany. According to "The Telegraph," the house was designed by Polish partners, Klausdiusz Golos and Sebastian Mikiciuk, for the Edutainment exhibition company.

There is even furniture affixed to the ceiling. It looks like something Hildi Santo-Tomas of "Trading Spaces" would do. (In fact, she did affix furniture to the ceiling in one episode.)

Wandering through this upside-down exhibit, I think you'd feel a bit like Fred Astaire doing his famous dance on the ceiling.

If walls slanted inward at the bottom, rather than at the top, is not sufficiently confusing, how must it feel to stand beneath an upside-down toilet?

What's next? A room based on M.C. Escher's "Relativity?"