San Zhi Pod Houses

Photography by Jennifer Su

and also here a great flickr set

The End of Existence: A Tribute to the Flying Saucer Houses from Jason Chen on Vimeo.

Video by Jason Chen

At first it looks like a piece of scenery of a science-fiction film from the 60s. A stunning housing estate by the ocean in Taiwan, lying about 25 km away from Taipei. It seems impossible to have been “really” built. Put up in the 1970s, it appears to be another modernist utopia that did not work.

Module houses from strange material, located amid artificial rocks by a beautiful ocean make an amazing impression! It is not really clear whether anyone has ever lived there, but doors, wallpapers, some of the windows, a swimming pool with slides have remained. Everything looks real (because it is indeed real!). However, looking at the site you cannot escape the impression that this is a film … or a dream. It is very interesting (and instructive) to observe modern experiments that were put into effect. Houses near the Baishawan beach surely are not the only such designs. Similar attempts were made by Matti Suuronen, who in 1968 designed his Futuro – “flying” houses destined at mass production.

Modernism has offered several ideas for a better future. Most of them, however, remained only on paper. Some have awaited realization though. Not all have been mistakes, like for example the Sonneveld's villa, (about which we wrote). These failures as well as these successes are an equally fascinating adventure in the history of design!

Thanks to rzeczy: o dizajnie

I've found this photos from the construction site. AMAZING

but I don't understand anything