1:20 replica of the Bird’s Nest Stadium in bamboo Most of you will be familiar with the “Bird’s Nest” stadium where the Olympics were staged in China in summer 2008. The quirky stadium (designed by Herzog and de Meuron) was certainly an interesting and eclectic structure but it could not really be called a folly. Now [...]
Archive for the ‘Build Your Own’ Category
Stadium comes to Confucius?
Posted in Build Your Own, Modern Folly, tagged bamboo, birds nest, stadium on November 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Park in a Skip
Posted in Build Your Own, Folly-esque, tagged public art on October 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The young London based artist Oliver Bishop-Young has had the brilliant idea of creating mini landscapes in that most prosaic of urban artefacts, the builder’s skip. Seen here is one of his most popular and successful designs, a park in a skip, featuring a park bench and [...]
Shed on top of the world
Posted in Build Your Own, Folly-esque, tagged mountain, shed on May 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
image by hyperfocusing.jpg This shed, perched precariously on a ridge on Whistler Mountain, in British Columbia in Canada recently caught our eye. More information has been hard to find. If anyone knows anything about who built it and how it got there, indeed why it has been put there, please let us know. Folly Fancier
A"butt-er" class of goat shed
Posted in Build Your Own, Modern Folly, tagged goats, shed on March 22, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Goat tower in Illinois (those are real goats) Farmer David Johnson of Findlay, Illinois built this magnificent structure for his 11 Swiss mountain goats, who unfortunately didn’t have a peak worth climbing within hundreds of miles. The tower contains 5,000 handmade bricks, 276 concrete steps, a copper turret and is 31 feet tall. “There are [...]
Is it a shed, is it a tower? Who cares, it’s a folly!
Posted in Build Your Own, Folly-esque, Modern Folly, tagged shed, Tower on January 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Shed-tower-folly by Jayne Tarasun, 2007 What better way to start 2008 than with a new folly design by a new folly builder, the self styled folly-smith, Jayne Tarasun of Cornwall? Artist Jayne has brought the concept of the folly tower into the 21st century, reviving this unique and celebrated slice of British eccentricity and fusing [...]
Flights of Fancy
Posted in Build Your Own, Folly-esque, Modern Folly, tagged airplane house, architecture, Folly on November 18, 2007 | 1 Comment »
The Airplane House Nigeria by Said Jammal Strictly speaking a folly should be a building with no useful purpose. So houses don’t really qualify, or do they? What if the convention that form follows function has been completely abandoned, if the builder has not just torn up the form book but comprehensively trashed it to realise [...]
Pure Folly but Fun
Posted in Build Your Own, Folly-esque, Modern Folly, Retro folly, tagged architecture, Folly, grotto, shed on November 13, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
If you fancy a modern garden folly, but lack the imagination or time, to build one, you can always consult the folly designer Phil Game. Phil’s work has recently been brought to my attention by Shedworking and includes some very cheerful and eccentric sheds. But his scope is wider than that. Pictured above is a folly [...]
More Bathing Beauty Beach Huts…..
Posted in Build Your Own, Folly-esque, Modern Folly, Uncategorized, tagged architecture, beach hut, Folly, shed on October 20, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Halcyon Hut by Atelier NU Montreal (Quebec) Well I couldn’t resist, the beach huts in the competition at Mablethorpe last month are so scrummy that I have put up some more pictures (and to hell with the storage implications). Left: Eyes Wide sHut Right: Jabba the Hut by Feix&Merlin London by i-am associates London [...]
Can a Beach Hut ever be a Folly?
Posted in Build Your Own, Folly-esque, Modern Folly, Uncategorized, tagged architecture, beach hut, Folly, shed on October 17, 2007 | 6 Comments »
Article from Building Design – the Architects website Building Design – the Architects website by Mike Oades 5 October 2007 What looks like a stripey, tactile pear nestles gently in the sand dunes at Mablethorpe, Lincolnshire. Nearby, an ornate hut-sized mirror offers reflections of the sea. On the promenade is a giant glass of gin [...]
Lost in the Boxwood
Posted in Build Your Own, Folly-esque, Retro folly, tagged box, labyrinth, maze, Topiary on September 4, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
After LA antiques dealer Richard Shapiro created a Palladian folly in his Holmby Hills garden in Los Angeles, (see previous blog post “Palladio in Hollywood”), he decided to enhance its setting with a maze. Thumbing through a magazine, shortly after completing the Palladian pavilion, he came across a photograph of the Chateau Marqueyssac in the Dordogne [...]
