Ter's Video Summary #11 (Architects Jokers)

Ter's new video is about how there are jokes in buildings that normal people don't notice but when architects see it, they understand the joke the original architect that designed it was trying to make.

Windsor Guildhall Building - Christopher Wren (1689)

Christopher Wren was an architect that designed a bunch of England's buildings, and one day, he had the job to build the Windsor City Hall and below it, it needed free space because a market would take place there. When he built it it was like the first picture and the guys from the city hall were freaking out because they thought the builiding was gonna colapse because it didn't have any column in the middle. Wren told them it wasn't going to colapse (and he was right), but the guys from the city hall didn't believe him and basically forced him to "fix" it.

So, this is what he did:

He added columns as the other guys wanted, BUT the columns by centimeters didn't touch the ceiling, and Wren was totally right that the building didn't need it because almost 400 years later, the ceiling is as it was when created.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum - Antonio Lopez Aguado (1805)

This is a door that when you are entering it looks like those stones are going to fall right over you head, BUT

From the backside of the door (when you are inside the museum) you can see that there are trapezium-shaped stones behind it, and when an architect stops to think about it, they realize it is impossible for the stones to fall, and they get the joke is to scare people with it.

Stand-alone House - Frank Lloyd Wright

These flowerpots look like only decoration, but they are not. There's a story that a woman lived at one of these houses and she was bored of the flowerpots so she removed them, and then, her house fell!

This was because the flowerpots weren't decoration, but important part of the structure, probably because the flowerpot was pushing the building vertically to cancel an external horizontally force (like a big hill at the side of the building).

(Diagram)

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Hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it!