#HTE

2018 Most Interesting Architectural Solutions

This year a bunch of fascinating architecture came up on our screens–but not all of it was modern. We’ll start this entry off by going back to ancient times, then work our way up to the new stuff.

Creative director Przemyslaw Sobiecki and architect Maja Wronska looked at some of the world’s most famous ancient ruins, then created animated renderings to show you what they looked like in their original glory:

In the 1400s, a very clever non-architect figured out how to erect the world’s largest dome:

This year we took a trip out to L.A., and got to see some crazy, not-for-the-acrophobic cantilevered houses built in the 1950s by architect Harry Gesner:

Also in the 1950s, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a pre-Guggenheim spiral house for his son. It went up for sale this year:

A popular non-residential structure in the 1950s was the nuclear missile silo. This couple bought a decommissioned one–and transformed it into an AirBNB rental:

Decommissioned silos aside, plenty of folks are still worried about nuclear war or other global disasters. Rich folks can wait out the apocalypse in style, as evinced by these floorplans and video walkthrough of luxury underground bomb shelters:

Assuming we are spared the apocalypse, the trend of more people moving to cities will continue, meaning more people will be living with roommates. This year Muji showed off their shared apartment concept of featuring cantilevered wooden caves for bedrooms:

This quirky automotive engineer figured out how to build a perfectly spherical structure for his freestanding home office:

An architect with no place to park his car devised a way to transform a bedroom into a hidden garage:

We got to see an incredible mega-library in China, with one feature that the architects were denied:

Yves Béhar wandered into the architecture lane, designing this customizable system for tiny homes:

This architect quit designing buildings and started designing cakes, with visually stunning and presumably delicious results:

McMansion Hell had a hell of a time critting up Betsy DeVos’ 22,000-square-foot summer home:

And speaking of parodies, here’s a video on what architects actually do.