More Week: More Amazing Buildings

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More Week continues with some more amazing buildings, some of which have previously appeared in Bytes.

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The Crooked House, Poland:

Krzywy Domek (Polish for "crooked little house") is an unusually shaped building in Sopot, Poland. It was built in 2004 and is part of the Rezydent shopping centre. It was designed by Szotyńscy & Zaleski, who were inspired by the fairytale illustrations and drawings of Jan Marcin Szancer and Per Dahlberg.

A Per Dahlberg illustration

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Tiny house, Japan:

Located on a small, triangular shaped piece of land between a river and a road, this tiny house is actually surprisingly large inside and makes optimum use of space. Comprising 55 square metres (594 sq feet), it has 2 floors with the bedroom on the first floor, the kitchen and living room on the second, plus a family playroom on a mezzanine level accessible by ladder. 

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The Torre Galatea Figueras, Spain:

The Dalí Theatre and Museum is a museum of the artist Salvador Dalí in his home town of Figueres, in Catalonia, Spain. Dali is buried there in a crypt below the stage. The museum displays the single largest and most diverse collection of works by Salvador Dalí, the core of which was from the artist's personal collection. In addition to Dalí paintings from all decades of his career, there are Dalí sculptures, 3-dimensional collages, mechanical devices, and other curiosities from Dalí's imagination. A highlight is a 3-dimensional anamorphic living-room installation with custom furniture that looks like the face of Mae West when viewed from a certain spot.

The face of Mae West appears from a certain viewing point.

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The Basket Building, USA:

The Basket Building is the former headquarters of the basket-making Longaberger Company. Located near Columbus, Ohio, the building has been built to look like the company’s best-selling Medium Market Basket. It was completed in 1997 at the behest of founder Dave Longaberger. Longaberger moved out of the building in 2016 and relocated employees to a factory nearby. Attempts to sell the building since then have been unsuccessful despite price reductions from $7.5m to $5m.

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Container City, London:

Container City is the name of a project in London which uses discarded shipping containers to produce flexible accommodation and offices at low cost. The first (Container City I) was installed in 2001, in four days, and fitted out over five months. A second phase (Container City II) was carried out in 2002 and offices were constructed on the same site in the Riverside Building in 2005. The company carrying out the installations have now completed sixteen projects utilising the technique, which is suited to short and medium term land use. When the land becomes required for other uses, the containers can be reused elsewhere.

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The Lloyd’s Building, London:

The Lloyd's building, constructed in 1986, has been called the Inside-Out Building insofar as ducts and lifts, are located on the exterior to maximise space in the interior.

(This style of architecture – where the services for the building, such as ducts, sewage pipes and lifts, are located on the exterior – has been termed “Bowelism”. The style originated in 1957 with a design by Michael Webb. The term was coined by Webb in response to a 1961 lkecture comment on his design by architecture historian and critic Sir Nikolaus Pevsner "within the schools there are some disturbing trends; I saw the other day a design for a building that looked like a series of stomachs sitting on a plate. Or bowels, connected by bits of bristle". Thus this inside-out style was termed 'Bowellism' because of how it recalled the way the human body works.)

The building is the home of the insurance institution Lloyd's of London. It received a Grade I listing in 2011, the youngest structure ever to obtain this status. It is said by Historic England to be "universally recognised as one of the key buildings of the modern epoch".

Interior view

The rostrum where the Lutine Bell hangs.

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Bonus item: The Lutine Bell

The bell is from the frigate HMS Lutine, originally a French ship launched in 1779. 

During the French Revolution, Lutine came under French Royalist control. In 1793 she was one of sixteen ships handed over to a British fleet at the end of the Siege of Toulon, to prevent her being captured by the French Republicans. Rebuilt by the British, HMS Lutine served in the North Sea, where she was part of the blockade of Amsterdam. She sank in the West Frisian Islands in 1799, whilst carrying a large shipment of gold. The majority of the cargo has never been recovered. 

The ship's bell was recovered on 17 July 1858 and now hangs in the building of Lloyd’s of London 

According to Wikipedia:

The bell was traditionally struck when news of an overdue ship arrived - once for the loss of a ship (i.e. bad news), and twice for her return (i.e. good news). The bell was sounded to ensure that all brokers and underwriters were made aware of the news simultaneously. The bell has developed a crack and the traditional practice of ringing news has ended: the last time it was rung to tell of a lost ship was in 1979 and the last time it was rung to herald the return of an overdue ship was in 1989.

During World War II, the Nazi radio propagandist Lord Haw-Haw asserted that the bell was being rung continuously because of allied shipping losses during the Battle of the Atlantic. In fact, the bell was rung once, with one ring, during the war, when the Bismarck was sunk. 

It tolls when a member of the Royal Family dies and was heard after the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. It is now rung for ceremonial purposes to commemorate disasters such as the 9/11 disaster, the Asian Tsunami, and the London Bombings, and is always rung at the start and end of the two minutes silence on Armistice Day.