Who cares about land value when you could live in the water instead! No we aren’t dreaming of Atlantis or the likes. We’re talking about house-boats! Architects from Germany, Rost Niderehe, came up with these floating homes located on the Eilbek canal in Hamburg. Now living on a boat hasn’t been closer to home before. The upper deck has enough space for public use, which is also the entrance to these homes. The lower decks include the private spaces, work, living rooms and bedrooms. Using materials like steel and wood for construction, this home can be moved around with the help of tugs.

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Beautifully designed stairs at home do add the aesthetic value of your living space. Here’s a house that takes its stairs really seriously. Now you might’ve come across closets being built beneath the stairs. You probably might never have heard of a house built beneath the stairs though. And that’s exactly what we stumbled across in Japan. The house, located in Shimane, Japan, is an architectural masterpiece. The house is shaped like stairs, with the gaps between each step using glass to let in natural lighting. The design also keeps away the rain water from entering in. most of all, this house is as sturdy as can get, taken that its shape makes it immune to earthquakes, just like a pyramid.

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Remember the story of the three pigs and the big bad wolf? One built a house a straw, one a house of wood, and the wise one, a house of bricks. Well, Amsterdam-based office Zeinstra Van Gelderen Architecten thought the three pigs to be rather silly to use such building materials and decided on rubber instead! On display at the Museumbahnsteig in Oberhausen, Germany, the Rubber House is ideal for someone who needs some lone time, meditation or just loves sitting in places extra ordinary. Measuring around 2.3m high and built as a perfect square of 1.5m X 1.5m, the “house” has a cave-like atmosphere and glutinous, partly translucent walls, one with a small bench and the other with a viewless window frame.

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Pavilions were never made to be rotating, until now, probably because no-one really thought of a concept like that. The NL Architects came up with a design for a new entertainment venue in Amsterdam’s Madison Square Garden. An outdoor catwalk, a cinema, and a theater in one, this one sure as hell doesn’t look like any pavilion we’ve come across before. To be built at the harbor, this cultural meeting place is indeed innovative in design, taken that it makes use of space efficiently, without too much of space hogging. At a touch of a button, the entire pavilion spins, to have a backdrop change. Known as the Multi Mill, this one took the first prize in a design competition too.

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Smashing bottles or tossing them in a bin isn’t as attractive as building a home using them, or at least that’s what the designers of these buildings thought. Why use those boring old bricks and stones when you could stack up bottles and live inside instead! Using wine bottles, beer bottles and water bottles that we discard, these buildings have sprung up from the ground. Take the Earthship houses for example. The main building material used for these completely self-sufficient homes were bottles. Earthship Biotecture volunteers in Haiti are using bottles and old tires to build houses. That’s not all. The Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew Buddhist temple was constructed out of over a million recycled beer bottles. Brown Chang bottles and green Heineken were used. The aipei EcoARK, created for a Taipei exposition, uses POLLI-Bricks made from 1.5 million plastic bottles. An Argentinean family built a home from bottles and has christened it ’La Casa de Botellas’ or the ‘The Ecological Bottle House’ with furniture and a playhouse built too.

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There are a few lucky individuals on the face of this earth who have the utmost pleasure of working from home. No corporate mess ups or dress codes, no annoying boss peeking down at your work, and no flirty colleagues trying to grab you attention. Some of them set up offices in their backyards too! And this one’s just for them, the Office Pod, by Manuel Villa with the help of architect Alberto González. Built in the back of a family home in Bogota, Columbia, the 7.5 meter office space is polyhedron-shaped with a pine-wood interior and a front deck made of teak.

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You probably have come across or at times, taken the trouble to enter a bookstore before. For the not-so-intellectual mind, a bookstore seems like a blank brick wall to look at. Well, bookstores get a lot more interesting than the books they hold, at least the Times bookstore in Indonesia does. The 1300 sq m place boasts some 100,000 books, all lined up neatly. The store was designed by a firm known as The Asylum. The building is two-stories high and looks like a glowing light box from a distance. The bookstore, situated in the Karawachi Village also has an indoor garden with two tree structures, made out of cane into which you can crawl and snuggle into cushioned seats to read a book.

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As part of the Denver International Airport’s South Terminal Redevelopment Program, architect Santiago Calatrava just unveiled his design for a new rail station at the airport. The new design reveals a rail station that will add a rail link from downtown Denver that to the airport. Besides this ambitious rail project, the plans also show a hotel, a retail plaza and a rail bridge over Pena Boulevard. The rail line will travel across a new rail bridge over Pena Boulevard and then head straight into the heart of the commercial plaza and adjacent hotel. On alighting from the train, travelers will enter the airport through bright, white vaulted rooms with translucent ceilings that let in natural light. Of course, you can expect Calatrava to add his signature style of sweeping arches and impressive facades to this recent project as well.

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A holiday is an experience that comes once in a blue moon in a busy individual’s life full of schedules. And making the most of a holiday means that the enjoyment levels need to be pushed above the top, be it a waterfront resort or living amongst clouds. Well, the best way to experience a great holiday is living in a hotel that’s different and doesn’t confirm to the usual design layouts we usually come across and live in. one such hotel with a difference is the 9 Hours Capsule Hotel whose veil was pulled of by Tokyo-based Cubic Corp in collaboration with designer Fumie Shibata of Design Studio S. basically a hotel with extremely small rooms, a capsule hotel like the 9 Hours can be found in Japan, wherein the “room” is just big enough for a person to sleep. More like a bunk actually.

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Ever wondered what it feels like to see someone swim in a block of water? Well, here’s something that could simply take your breath away. Who needs those boring old swimming pools in your backyard when you could have one of these above-ground pools? First of all, this pool needs no digging. So you can very well throw that shovel away. Also, it works as a patio too, combined with a pool, saving a hell load of space. This helps create an elevated deck platform. Also, this works as a great view, and keeping kids in mind, it also helps view pool deepness before you can actually step in.

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Now if we’d have to come across this one in the dead of the night, we’d probably scare our pants off into thinking it’s a space ship. Well it hardly is anything near to extra terrestrial. It’s a home and an extremely green one too! By the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), the Fab Lab house shows us just how well a person can live in harmony with nature and the environment. This home, unlike any other we’ve seen before generates more energy than it actually consumes, around three times more that is. Besides producing energy, the orchid it houses also provides food. Taking into consideration the usability of wind and solar energy, this house took shape.

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Mathieu Lehanneur has recently opened up an education center at the Centre Pompidou in Paris for kids. The area developed is just great for a child to spend time in making education a fun filled learning experience. Christened as the L’Atelier des Enfants, this one’s inspired by skate parks, with its white curvy surfaces. The education center will have facilities for arts, crafts, and video and dance projects too. Equipped with specific areas specially designed for children form the age of 2-5 and another area for children aged 6-12, the education center also includes a bathroom and entrance lobby.

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The Halong Bay area in Vietnam is home to 1600 inhabitants, none of whom have access to proper housing, though the area is a popular tourist destination. Family life in this area suffers, due to lack of space and adequate room. An average family living in this area uses just 10-15sqm of land for their residence, which really is incredibly low. Well, to solve their woes, an entry at the THE SELF-SUFFICIENT CITY: Envisioning the habitat of the future contest seems just right. Organized by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and HP, the project aims at creating a hexagonal floating community. Using bamboo for construction, a foam float system will be built, whereupon a double layer module of 450m of bamboo will be supported.

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Lumenhaus is another green architectural design that will surely be loved by green lovers. An energy efficient home, the Lumenhaus has been designed by students of Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University. A solar powered structure; it makes use of smart appliances to help meet the needs of the residents and environment at the same time. The entire structure is made from recyclable/renewable materials and boasts of solar panels on its roof. The house also features an advanced building façade called the Eclipsys System. This fully automated façade has two layers: a metal shutter shade that protects from sunlight and a translucent insulating panel that provides insulation without blocking natural light. A meter records the home’s energy requirements, so any extra energy generated can be sold to the power company. Inside, the house is equipped with computer controls that can be operated with the iPhone or iPad, allowing the house to automatically adapt to changing environmental conditions.

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Now we’ve heard of our lunches being packed in tin foil to keep the food warm and fresh. Well, someone decided to go a step further, and ended up covering everything he came across in his home with nothing else but tin foil. It may seem weird at first, but then again, it looks completely sci-fi and awesome! Now who in their right mind would use so much tin foil to cover up everything at home? Well, the creator of this sure did, and we wonder why! Everything in the house is covered by tin foil, except, judging by the pictures, the food lying around. Pretty ironic isn’t it?

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