Sanjhih is a small town on the north coast of Taiwan. It's near Taipei, the capital of Taiwan.
Our friends Emily and Devin lived close to them, but by the time the Mister and I got to Taiwan, I'd heard they'd been demolished only a few months before. The story goes, in the late 1970's, a keeper of a rubber company worked out the prototype of the modern space age UFO housing complex using his own factory. He wanted to build a contemporary modern style holiday resort. However, the rubber company closed down in the energy crisis in 1980 and the houses were left unfinished. The UFO houses were seized by the mortgage lender and sealed up by the bank.
In 1989, a development company bought the unfinished UFO houses. Their plan was to change the ailing modern UFO complex into a 5 star resort hotel with the first yacht dock in the north coast of Taiwan. The were supposeed to have have been painted white, and there would have been a beautiful modern swimming pool with slides that would start inside the UFO homes and would end in the pool! In the winter of 1989, almost a year after they started the reconstruction, they decided to shutdown because of fair of some of their investors. The development company abandoned the site and left the buildings, with many of them finished by that time.
The International space-age craze of the 1960's stirred interest among architects, but there was only one Finnish project that can be regarded as a "bona fide" sample of space-age architecture: the Futuro house designed by Matti Suuronen. The idea behind the design reflects the optimism of the sixties. At the time people believed technology could solve all problems for the human race. The ideal was of a new era, a space-age, where everybody would have more leisure time to spend on holidays away from home.
The Futuro house was completely furnished and could accommodate 8 people. It was constructed entirely out of reinforced plastic, a new, light and inexpensive material back then. The plan was to mass-produce it, so it would be cheap enough to house all people around the earth. Because it was so light-weight, it was easily transportable by helicopter. Mobile living was the new possibility for the future. People could now take their moveable home with them, to wherever they went, and live like modern nomads. Unfortunately the 1973 oil crisis spoiled all these plans. Prices of plastic raised production costs too high to be profitable. Only 96 Futuro houses were ever built.
Visionary architect John Lautner has a number of homes in California which are still today in use use and highly valued. Lautner was a structural pioneer, designing truss-roofed homes, mushroom-like homes (like the Chemosphere seen below), and thin-shelled, biomorphic homes of reinforced concrete - not plastic. Bringing about a sense of stability and longevity vs. the plastic, move-as-you go homes of the 60's and early 70's.
While nowhere near as architecturaly intereresting as each of these modular homes above, if UFOs are your thing, you can rent you very own UFO house in Tennesee.
The Spaceship House hovers on stilts on the side of Signal Mountain, TN. This house has been in private residence since it was built in 1972 but for the first time this spacey place is now available to the general public for over-night accommodations. Newly restored and updated, the spaceship house offers a unique back-in-time experience with a modern retro flair. This two-bedroom, two-bath house comes with a full kitchen, bar and a round bed master bedroom with a custom round 70’s tub. FAR OUT! It's a little heavily IKEA decorated, but really would you want to subject your best 60's atomic furniture to renters?
Taiwan Picture credits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cypherone/2285253051/