Casa do Penedo is a house built between four enormous boulders in the mountains of northern Portugal. Completed in 1974 as a family retreat, the rocks serve as its foundation, walls and parts of its ceiling, with smaller stones filling the gaps between them. Despite standing beside a wind farm, the house has no electricity. Its attempt to disappear into the landscape instead made it one of Portugal’s most recognizable homes.
The Choux de Créteil are ten cylindrical apartment towers completed in 1974 in Créteil, a suburb southeast of Paris. Each is covered in two-metre-high concrete balconies shaped like petals, giving the complex the appearance of a field of enormous cabbages. The balconies were intended to provide privacy and support cascading plants that would change colour with the seasons. Developers cancelled the planting, leaving the residents to live inside bare concrete vegetables.
Musgum mud huts are tall earthen dwellings traditionally built by the Musgum people of Cameroon and Chad. Their pointed, shell-like walls are covered in raised geometric ribs that strengthen the structure while providing footholds for construction and annual repairs. A small opening at the peak releases heat and smoke. The decoration is also the ladder.
Above the abandoned mud-brick village of Kharanaq in central Iran stands a fifteen-metre clay minaret that can be made to sway by pushing against its upper walls. Wooden supports allow the entire tower to visibly tremble without collapsing. Its precise age and the reason for its unusual flexibility remain disputed. Below it, much of the rigid village has crumbled. The tower survives by moving.
Casa Sperimentale is a concrete treehouse hidden in the pinewoods of Fregene, a coastal town near Rome. Built as a family holiday home, it became a seven-year experiment of suspended rooms, external staircases, red pipes and spherical concrete chambers. Its modular parts were designed to be rearranged as the family changed. The house is now abandoned, overgrown and somehow still unfinished.
Mudhifs are monumental guest houses built by the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq entirely from reeds and papyrus. Thick bundles are planted in the ground, bent together into arches and covered with woven screens—without conventional timber. The form appears on a 5,000-year-old carving from Uruk and remains in use for meetings, ceremonies and receiving guests. Few buildings have changed so little, partly because their construction material continues growing outside the door.
La Grande-Motte is a seaside resort near Montpellier, built almost entirely from scratch by the French government during the 1960s and 1970s. The project was intended to transform a marshy, mosquito-heavy coast into a domestic rival to Spain’s increasingly popular beaches. Architect Jean Balladur responded with an entire town of white concrete pyramids, curved apartment blocks and geometric sun screens, drawing inspiration from Mesoamerican temples and his idea of the 21st century
The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace is an immense Catholic church built by Côte d’Ivoire’s first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, in his hometown and newly appointed capital, Yamoussoukro. Completed in 1989, it closely resembles St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, only larger by some measurements: its dome rises 158 metres and its interior holds 18,000 people. Each of its 7,000 seats has an individual air vent, while one stained-glass window includes Houphouët-Boigny kneeling beside Jesus.
Gbadolite is a city in northern Democratic Republic of the Congo and the ancestral home of Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled the country—then called Zaire—from 1965 to 1997. Mobutu transformed the remote settlement into his personal capital, complete with three palaces, a five-star hotel, hospital, Coca-Cola plant and a 3,200-metre runway built to receive chartered Concordes from Europe. Foreign leaders were entertained among marble, fountains and Chinese pagodas in what became known as the “Versailles of the Jungle.” When Mobutu fell in 1997, the palaces were looted and abandoned. Vegetation entered the ballrooms and the airport nearly emptied.
The Vittoriale degli Italiani is Gabriele D’Annunzio’s nine-hectare monument to Gabriele D’Annunzio. Created above Lake Garda from 1921, it contains his darkened house, 33,000 books and thousands of objects arranged according to a private system of symbols and mottos. The entrance has separate waiting rooms for welcome and unwelcome guests; the dining room displays a tortoise that supposedly died from overeating. Outside are D’Annunzio’s aeroplane, a torpedo boat and the prow of the warship Puglia, transported in pieces on twenty railway carriages and rebuilt in the hillside.