Bomarzo monster park is filled with bizarre sculptures for which only the accompanying inscriptions provide any explanation. Among the pieces are a war elephant, a monstrous fish-head, a giant tearing another giant in half, and a house built on a tilt to disorient the viewer. Perhaps the most frightening piece in the garden is an enormous head, mouth opened wide in a scream. The accompanying inscription reads “all reason departs.”
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Mirabell Dwarf Garden is a strange garden in the equally strange country Austria.
The Coney Island Elephant was a hotel and brothel built in the shape of an elephant, and located on Coney Island.
The Niederfinow boat lift is the oldest working boat lift in Germany.
The Palacio Barolo was designed in accordance with the cosmology of Dante's Divine Comedy, motivated by the architect's admiration for Alighieri. There are 22 floors, divided into three sections. The basement and ground floor represent hell, floors 1-14 are the purgatory, and 15-22 represent heaven. The building is 100 meters tall, one meter for each canto of the Divine Comedy. The lighthouse at the top of the building can be seen all the way in Montevideo, Uruguay.
The Majorelle Garden is a botanical garden in Marrakech, Morocco. It was designed by the expatriate French artist Jacques Majorelle in 1924, during the colonial period when Morocco was a protectorate of France. The garden has been open to the public since 1947. Since 1980 the garden has been owned by Yves Saint-Laurent and Pierre Bergé. After Yves Saint Laurent died in 2008 his ashes were scattered in the Majorelle Garden.
The Four Books of Architecture by Andrea Palladio was the most successful architectural treatise of the Renaissance and one of the two or three most important books in the literature of architecture. First published in Italian in 1570, it has been translated into every major Western language.
The Blur building was a temporary pavilion built for the 2002 Swiss Expo in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. Rising out of Lake Neuchatel, a system of rectilinear struts and diagonal rods cantilevered over the water. The rods were fitted with over 30,000 fog nozzles shooting a fine mist pulled from the lake and controlled with a complex weather system. This fog created a man-made cloud that encompassed the metal framework to create the illusion of a vaporous building.
The Great Man-Made River is a network of pipes that supplies water to the Sahara Desert in Libya. It is the world's largest irrigation project. According to its website, it is the largest underground network of pipes (2820 km) and aqueducts in the world. It consists of more than 1,300 wells, most more than 500 m deep, and supplies 6,500,000 m3 of fresh water per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirt and elsewhere. Muammar al-Gaddafi has described it as the Eighth Wonder of the World.