Tongkonan are the traditional Torajan ancestral houses. They stand high on wooden piles, topped with a layered split-bamboo roof shaped in a sweeping curved arc, and they are incised with red, black, and yellow detailed wood carvings on the exterior walls. The word "tongkonan" comes from the Torajan tongkon ("to sit"). Tongkonan are the center of Torajan social life.
Meet Gaudi’s Casa Mila, more affectionately known as la Pedrera in Barcelona. The roofs of most buildings are stale and industrial, flat and square, dotted with aluminium vents and plain brick chimneys. Gaudi turned his vents and chimneys into sentinels who, through the narrow slits in their helmets, would keep permanent watch over the building’s residents. The undulating roof is tiled and dotted not only by the helmeted warriors, but also by several bulbous sculptures covered in a mosaic of white tiles.
This proposed village for Heden, a sleepy cityblock in Sweden’s Gothenburg, has more than a touch of Hobbiton about it.
California’s Academy of Sciences (SF) is covered in rolling hills - the perfect place for students to grab their lunch in the sun.
One of the earliest strange but beautiful objects to be seen in Google Earth is the roof of Water Reservoir at Mina near holy city of Makkah, Saudi Arabia. The water reservoir caters to about 2 millions pilgrims who gather every year at Mina, during Hajj and it is covered by this huge reinforced concrete shell roof which has a diameter of 365 metres. It is one the largest cable-stayed concrete shell roofs in the world.
Outside of Rio de Janeiro, on a beautiful little beach with amazing blue water, sits a little house with a flowering roof that shades and protects like a big tropical banana leaf. Designed by Mareines + Patalano, the open air abode is meant to encourage interaction and connection between man and nature. With verandas and open spaces in between rooms and no corridors, the tropical beach house is an ideal place for social gatherings and parties. The open layout also takes advantage of trade winds that blow in from the sea, providing natural ventilation and passive cooling.
