Everything about your comment surprises me, Marie - starting with the fact that you've heard of R Steiner

I'd have to disagree with this because to me those buildings are just as good as Steiner. Partly because of their extent, so much bigger than anything RS was ever commissioned to do, and partly because of the colours. It's a nice combination, the bluish windows and the walls that remind me of when I've put too much milk in my coffee.
I think the architect has got the lesson of Steiner just right; buildings that are both sensible and strange. I would just love to walk around that whole complex myself. If I was in your company at the time, yeah, I could live with that. ;)
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So yours is a difficult post to follow, Marie! I've been scratching my head for a day or two, but haven't come up with much. There's a video for anyone curious about Washington's civic buildings:


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And an old stand-by of eccentric British architecture to fall back on, Portmeirion, which Plankton and I have both enthused about in the past:-



A village on the coast of North Wales, it became famous as the setting for that stylish tv series of the 60s, The Prisoner:

That village looks lovely in the thumbnail already! I'll definitely watch those videos later.
And yeah, I've come across quite a lot of the Steiner sect through some random circumstances, weird ass people

edit: watched the second video, I love how colourful it all looks. It has a bit of a Southern European feeling
the first video is really cool and well made, imagine being able to do something like that :o

here's an insane but also beautiful apartment complex from China. I love all the little oddities you can spot.

wow^ those are interesting^

Must be a hell of a view from the top of that! I wonder how many people have committed suicide from that building and ended up making a mess on someone else's balcony?

oh I'm glad that I'm not the only one immediately getting into dark speculations like that lol. The building definitely speaks to the imagination. I think life in a Chinese city is fascinating anyhow; it must be so different from what I'm used to.

I'm sure there's plenty more smog and new weird smells at the local wet market.

If I lived at that apartment complex and had a couple drones, it'd be a great place to record and film a DJ set.

Or you deposit your dog's poo on their balcony without it being obvious it was you.

Bombs away! Could very well be the next hot (and moist) TikTok trend.

https://media.tenor.com/images/1ceb9...0186/tenor.gif

Wow! That's an extraordinary building, Marie!
Two things I like most: that it doesn't take much tweaking of conventional geometric shapes to come up with something completely new, and that the architect is modest enough to let the tenants' choices dictate how his building will ultimately look.

Famous for the opposite approach, to the point of bolting furniture to the floor so that tenants wouldn't move pieces around and "spoil" his building, is Frank Lloyd Wright. Plenty of other architects see a commission as an opportunity to thrust their ego and arrogance on others imo.

Still, to go back and defend FLW, his designs could be incredible. In this thread, 15 minutes is a long time to spend on one building, but when you see what an absolute jewel this building is, I hope you'll consider it justified:



By today's standards, there's perhaps too much inventiveness in this building: decoration everywhere you look, and rather cleverly, the only rest from it all is in the hotel bedrooms.