Surrealist building

Give us a swirl
Is there such a thing as a surrealist building? Of course - although it may not keep the rain out. Jonathan Glancey lists his favourite weird and wonderful designs

Surrealism was concerned with the unconscious, with dreams, with personal and political liberation, socially, sexually, psychologically. While it is possible to dream strange, swirling, madcap forms of liberating architecture, it is difficult, if not impossible, to realise such forms in the waking day. This didn't stop surrealists from trying - although only one architect, Romanian-born Frederick Kiesler, ever declared himself a member of the surrealist movement. He had great plans, yet built very little.

One of the high points of "surrealist architecture" was a Paris flat designed in 1930 for the wealthy art collector Charles de Beistegui; it was designed by none other than Le Corbusier, he of the famous dictum "the house is a machine for living in". Although the apartment is mostly what you would expect of Le Corbusier, it featured a surrealist roof garden complete with a false fireplace, incongruous living-room furniture and a mirror. The "carpet" of this living room was a lawn, and the Eiffel Tower popped up over the parapet. Today, you might well say: so what? Yet at the time, this sort of thing was just not done.

Cecil Beaton decorated the top floor of his Wiltshire country house, Ashcombe, with Jean Cocteau sconces in the form of human arms reaching out from the wall, and papier-mache versions of Victorian chairs. Champion of surrealism Edward James did his colourful thing at Monkton House, his West Sussex hunting lodge, with its dog-print stair-carpet, breathing wall, Dalí furniture and screaming colours. Yet perhaps the best surrealist architecture was in films; best of all in the sets by Christian Berard for Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête (1946).

The greatest work of surreal architecture wasn't actually by a card-carrying surrealist but by a French rural postman, Ferdinand Cheval, who built a dream-like structure with his own hands, stone by stone. While surrealists pontificated and analysed their dreams in Freudian terms, Cheval made his come true. Edward James did something of the same in the Mexican jungle, yet his jungle folly, although a delight, is knowing and contrived; in this sense alone, it is very different from Cheval's truly surreal creation.

Of course, many of the great surreal moments architecture has to offer were created without the help of the surrealists. Witness what happens when rain falls through the great "oculus" in the dome of the Pantheon in Rome: it disappears into a great decorative brass drain. It is beautiful to watch, and quite surreal. When US structural engineers investigated the enormous domed hall Albert Speer had designed for Germania (as Berlin rebuilt for Hitler, post-victory, was to be called), they found that, when the building was full of chanting crowds, clouds would form from their breath in the underside of the dome, and a light rain would fall. How Wagnerian. How surreal.

Today, with the help of powerful computers and materials that allow plenty of bending and twisting, we can make buildings that are more adventurous than ever. Look at what Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and others have done. But imagination is something separate from materials and the limits (and even the possibilities) of new technologies; throughout the centuries, architects have been able to play surreal games that outdid the surrealists of the interwar years of the 20th century. In any case, Ferdinand Cheval, the postman who left school at 13, out-surrealed the lot of them.

1 Experience Music Project
From the air, this museum of music history - set up by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and collector of Jimi Hendrix memorabilia - looks like a Fender Stratocaster guitar seen through Dalí's eyes. Distorted and bent, the roofscape, too, is something like a floppy Dalí wristwatch. As if to prove just how hard it is to realise surreal architecture (and this is about as surreal as it gets), this Frank Gehry design, in Seattle, Washington, has not gone down well with US critics. Herbert Muschamps said it was like "something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over, and died". Crawled out of the sea? The surrealists would have loved that.

2 Palais Idéal
A village postman from the remote Drome province of southern France, Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924) spent 33 years creating an "ideal palace" from stones gathered on his daily 32km round. Poorly educated and with no knowledge of architecture, he shaped his surreal palace from daydreams, without help.

Considered a madman by fellow locals (whose descendents live off his legacy today, the palace being a big tourist attraction), Cheval was hailed by artists and intellectuals, from Breton and the surrealists to Picasso. Here was - and is - a work of wholly spontaneous surrealist art, a man's dreams turned into a gloriously abstract work of architecture.The Palais Idéal is overwhelmingly bizarre, its handmade architecture drawing its inspiration from what appear to be sources as diverse as Khmer temples, Swiss chalets, Neuschwanstein castle in Bavaria and Hindu shrines - despite Cheval's lack of learning, books or photographs. Some of the palace looks as if Gaudí had a hand in it, and the petrified fountain could easily be by Dalí. Today, Cheval's lifelong work is a national monument.

3 Einstein Tower
Opened in 1924, this curious, boot-like building in Potsdam, Germany, was designed to test Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. A telescope in the observatory caught cosmic rays that were reflected by mirrors to the "spectrographic" equipment in the basement. Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953) was the architect. Fascinated by the cosmos, he made dreamlike sketches of fantastic buildings that owe nothing to conventional architectural logic or to constraints imposed by existing materials. The architect, who worked in Britain, Palestine and the US, said he designed the tower out of some unknown urge emanating from "the mystique around Einstein's universe".

Originally, he had imagined the Einstein Tower as a building made of just one super-elastic material - a form of modern concrete that didn't exist when he did his first drawings. In the end, he had to make do with bricks rendered in stucco. His masterpiece was fully restored in 1999 - not, happily, as a museum, but as a working laboratory, although there is an open day once a month.

4 Endless House
Imagine a voluptuously shaped, womb-like house on stilts, with curved walls indistinguishable from floors and ceilings; with sand, pebble, wood, grass and tile floors; with bathing pools instead of baths; with coloured lenses and mirrors bringing light into organically shaped rooms. This was Frederick Kiesler's 1959 vision of the Endless House, never built - it was far too surreal for that - yet worked on in intriguing drawings until the architect's death in 1965. It remains a house of endless speculation and possibilities.

Kiesler, born in Romania in 1890, emigrated to New York in 1926. In trying to build the surreal, he was always unlikely to receive many commissions for real buildings. One of his few, the Film Guild Cinema in New York, has been demolished.

He made his living designing opera sets, exhibition stands and, with Armand P Bartos, the extraordinary Shrine of the Book, built in Jerusalem in 1965 to house the Dead Sea Scrolls. This haunting, surreal building offers a glimpse of the world he might have created if someone had commissioned the Endless House for real. The drawings still exist. Any takers?

5 Surrealist Architecture
This is the name of a painting by Dalí, c1932, that hangs in the Kunstmuseum, Basle. What's it got to do with architecture, you may well ask. But perhaps it makes its point perfectly well: surrealist architecture cannot really exist; it's beyond reality. So it could look like this, a typical Dalí swirling thing, with some fried eggs emerging from the top. If this could be built, it would be a lot more interesting than most contemporary "iconic" architecture.

6 Las Pozas
This is the dream-like city, without a purpose, that the British champion of surrealism, Edward James, built from 1949 until his death in 1984. Situated in Mexico's San Luis Potosí state, it rises, writhes, and twists around nine artificial pools (or "pozas") between trees festooned with parrots. It appears to exist as much in the imagination as it does in reality.

Work on Las Pozas was most intense between 1962 and 1979, with some 150 craftsmen and labourers busy in the jungle. Flamingos, monkeys, parrots, turtles and crocodiles arrived during these years. Electricity, too; in the evenings, the whole spectacle can be lit up by coloured lights. Its layout is labyrinthine. Visitors can find themselves walking into a house that turns into a cave, or climbing a spiral stair that leads nowhere, except high into the sky. The three dozen or so structures were meant to be, in James's mind at least, stylised and everlasting flowers.

"Edward James is crazier than all the surrealists put together," Dalí said. "They pretend, but he is the real thing."

7 Casa Milà rooftop
The Casa Milà is no longer the apartment block it was built as, but the headquarters of an arts foundation. The good thing about this, for visitors to Barcelona, is that it is now easy to join a queue and tour Antoni Gaudí's extraordinary "organic" building. Everyone seems to love its dreamlike roofscape, where chimneys and ventilation shafts twist and turn above parapets. Each has its own character, each seems alive.

Gaudí (1852-1926) was a major inspiration for the surrealists, but their concerns were not his. Although his imagination was febrile and his architectural forms extraordinary and all but surreal, he saw himself as an inheritor of the gothic tradition brought into the modern age. His structures are like man-made plants; no wonder Dalí and Edward James loved them.

8 The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
his bizarre silent horror film, premiered in Berlin in 1920, has long been described as a masterpiece of German expressionist cinema, but its crazily angled, cartoon-like sets are the stuff of surrealism, too. It shows a nightmare world, brilliantly realised architecturally by set designers and art directors for director Robert Wiene. In the 1980s, London architect David Connor designed a flat for a member of Adam and the Ants in the guise of a Dr Caligari set, complete with sloping floors and walls.

9 Dream of Venus pavilion
Dalí's pink, coral-like pavilion was a highlight of the 1939 New York World's Fair. Venus, a topless model wreathed in flowers and lying on a rococo-style bed, was surrounded by her "dream"; this was composed of topless models swimming in water tanks around her, some milking a cow wrapped in bandages, others tapping away at typewriters that floated in seaweed-like strands. Lobsters lay cooking on underwater coals, while bottles of champagne littered the seabed. The pavilion was entered, once tickets had been bought from a fish-like booth, through a spread-leg archway (very Freudian) leading to halls covered in writhing female sculptures and a ceiling of upturned umbrellas.

Dalí's extended trip to New York made him famous - and surreally wealthy. Though it has been demolished, the pink pavilion survives in photographs.

10 Scottish Parliament building
This great and controversial Edinburgh masterwork by Enric Miralles (1955-2000) is nothing like a conventional parliament building. No wonder, cost aside, so many people were suspicious and unkind about the design; it boasts shades of Gaudí and his contemporary Josep Maria Jujol, overtones of Russian constructivism, and hints of something else altogether: a tendril-like architecture that snakes from townscape to landscape. Scots will say the only thing surreal about the building is its mind-blowing price, hopelessly over-budget, and there are plenty of detractors hoping for leaks and other flaws. They deserve a concrete box.
From The Guardian Unlimited