Fairy Tale Architecture

A princess is cursed with weightlessness, a prince is prepared to die to rescue her: the result is a psychological thriller with excellent special effects and a non-conformist heroine.

In this mathematical folktale, a young girl sets the rules of a methodical game in an unequal society and brings forth a glorious outcome for people who are hungry.

In this famous parable, Zhuangzi asks, What is the nature of reality? Are we the dreamers, or are we being dreamed?

Just as ‘girl, wolf, woods’ signals this familiar fairy tale, ‘gable, lintel, square cutout, arc’ signals Robert Venturi’s Mother’s House.

A fearful man seeks to escape death through an obsessive nesting of forms within forms and spaces within spaces.

An intrepid heroine undertakes a galactic journey through a willfully distorted event-space.

Play is a thing in itself. In this homage to Cedric Price, play is a thing to take seriously.

Flatness is a portal to the uncanny. What can designers and artists learn by studying flächenhaftigkeit?

When a parched frog swallows up all the water in the world, the other animals must act quickly to save the planet. They nearly fail.

Roses, knives, ice splinters, and a flurry of white bees. A fairy tale that transfixes and confuses children like no other can.

Home is a hospital room, an abandoned house, the place you run toward; home is what you hope to find somewhere amid all the wreckage.

What’s a mother to do? She decapitates the boy with the heavy metal lid of an apple chest.

A suicidal moon, a rope, and the love of two siblings: blueprint for a fairy-tale scene.

The space is infinite, the rooms are hexagons, the staircases are hexagons — and the story is terrifying.

A Monkey King born from a stone can transform into 72 other things: bug, bird, beast of prey, tree and so forth.

A young girl is sent out by her parents to sell matches on a winter’s eve; thus begins Hans Christian Anderson’s harrowing tale.

The story begins when a childless couple build a daughter from the snow; the ending is at once cold and sublime.

A design for the Grimm Brothers’ “The Boy Who Set Forth to Learn What Fear Was.”

Is Rapunzel’s tower an enchanted, magical home or a dreadful prison from which to escape?

What comes of Jack’s magical beanstalk? Usually, at the end, it’s cut down.

A design for the hut of the Russian witch Baba Yaga, who flies in a huge mortar, using the the pestle as a rudder.