OK so hotels aren’t strictly speaking follies, but when the owners have allowed themselves licence to indulge their imaginations to construct buildings which serve as hotels while at the same time indulging their wildest fantasies in design and construction, we let them in. Hotels like the Magic Mountain in Chile are almost always found in the [...]
Archive for the ‘Modern Folly’ Category
The Magic Mountain casts its spell
Posted in Modern Folly, tagged architecture, Folly, mountain, trees on April 30, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Good Heavens – a chapel in the garden
Posted in Modern Folly, tagged architecture, chapel on April 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Jon and Muriel Richards outside the tiny chapel “Chapel of the Crosses” in their back garden A couple fulfilled a two-and-a-half year “labour of love” by building a fully functional miniature chapel in their back garden. Jon and Muriel Richards spent around £25,000 assembling the sanctuary next to their house in Mappleborough Green, Worcestershire, [...]
The House that Books built
Posted in Modern Folly, Uncategorized, tagged architecture, chalet, Folly on February 17, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Case di Libri No 1 Livio De Marchi is a man obsessed with wood. The Italian carver was born in Venezia where, still a child, he worked on ornamental sculpture in the Venetian tradition in the workshop of a joiner and studied art and drawing at the “Accademia di Belle Arti” in Venice. During [...]
Life’s a ball in a concrete tree
Posted in Modern Folly, Uncategorized, tagged architecture, concrete tree, Folly, treehouse on February 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The Hang Nga Hotel in Vietnam This offbeat hotel in Dalat in Vietnam goes by various names, among them The Spider Web Chalet, the Hang Nga Tree House and the Crazy House, depending on who you ask. It is in fact a hotel, designed by Dang Viet Na, a former model and daughter of Truong [...]
Stadium comes to Confucius?
Posted in Build Your Own, Modern Folly, tagged bamboo, birds nest, stadium on November 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
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 [...]
Have those Druids been at it again?
Posted in Modern Folly, tagged druids, stone circle on January 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Standing stone at Brierley, overlooking South Kirby Hillfort (photo by Mothy) Local folklore had a stone circle located on Ringstone Hill near Brierley in South Yorkshire, overlooking South Kirkby Hillfort. It disappeared many years ago but recently there were reports that it might have been rediscovered, guarded by a nearby standing stone. Exploration on the [...]
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 [...]
Eerie fusion of past and present
Posted in Folly-esque, Modern Folly, Retro folly, Uncategorized, tagged architecture, artwork, Folly, public art on November 27, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Often today it seems the line between follies and works of art in public places, is increasingly blurred. With fewer opportunities to build permanent follies, in urban environments, artists and architects are constructing temporary sculptures and fanciful buildings which reference the past and the future to stir our imagination. One such artist is the Auckland [...]
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 [...]
