|
 Why settle for a spherical room
when you can have a spherical house? That is what Dr.
Johann Ludowici thought in 1961 when he designed
the Kugelhaus; a twelve-foot diameter sphere that crammed an entire
house inside like Japanese commuters on the Tokyo Metro.
This
German idea for handling the postwar housing shortage is admirable in
its simplicity; prefabricate spherical homes and then to install them
simply scoop out a little cup in the ground, drop the ball into the
depression, hook up the utilities and you're away.
 Of
course, there is one small difficulty with this. True, the
sphere is the most efficient way of enclosing a volume of space, but
unfortunately, as you may have noticed, as a sphere tapers towards its
base the amount of floor space reduces rather alarmingly, resulting in
a globe home with the volume of caravan, but the foot room of a phone
box.
Also, it is not advised to use
the Kugelhaus on steep hillsides in earthquake zones. Otherwise,
you could be woken up one morning at the start of a rather alarming,
albeit brief, career. |
