Bent Out of Shape (9 Photos)

Buildings and objects that bend like they shouldn’t

A house front slides into its garden. A post box ties itself in a knot. A bench loops into the air, and a whole shop front ripples like a reflection in water. These nine works make familiar shapes look unexpectedly soft.

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📮 “Alphabetti Spaghetti” — By Alex Chinneck in London, UK 🇬🇧

A classic red pillar box outside Caxton Works in Canning Town, tied in a loose knot halfway up. The shadow on the paving makes the knot look even softer. It is a sculpture, so don’t try to post anything in it.

💡 Knot Fact: There are three of them. Identical knotted post boxes stand in London, Margate and Sheffield, and they appeared overnight in 2019.

📷 Photo: The wub / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

More: Alex Chinneck’s Architectural Illusions

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🏠 Krzywy Domek (Crooked House) — By Szotyńscy & Zaleski in Sopot, Poland 🇵🇱

Walls, windows and roof all sag and ripple at once, as if the building is melting into the pavement. It is a real shopping building on Monte Cassino Street, and the shops inside open as normal.

💡 Fairytale Fact: The architects built it in 2004 and took the shapes from the fairytale drawings of illustrators Jan Marcin Szancer and Per Dahlberg.

📷 Photo: Аимаина хикари / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

More: Buildings That Won’t Behave (10 Photos)

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🕯️ “A Pound of Flesh for 50p” — By Alex Chinneck in London, UK 🇬🇧

This is the one that really did give way. The house on Southwark Street was built from 7,500 paraffin wax bricks that slowly melted in 2014. Here the walls have already run down into red heaps on the paving.

💡 Roof Fact: The roof could not simply sink with the walls. It sat on six telescopic lifting platforms that lowered it as Chinneck melted the brickwork with a hot air gun over four weeks.

📷 Photo: Aurelien Guichard / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

More: Alex Chinneck’s Architectural Illusions

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🦵 “A Week at the Knees” — By Alex Chinneck in London, UK 🇬🇧

Twelve years after Margate, Chinneck bent a facade again. In Charterhouse Square the lower two floors of a Georgian-style front ripple over a path, as if the building has sat down with its knees up. It stood there for Clerkenwell Design Week 2025.

💡 Brick Fact: The curve needed 7,000 bricks on 320 meters of repurposed steel. The work is about five meters tall and weighs 12 tons.

📷 Photo: Matt Brown / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

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🌀 Untitled — By Shozy in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Russia 🇷🇺

This wall is completely flat. Shozy painted it so the middle of the apartment block seems to swell and twist, with the windows bending along. He made it in 2024 on Komsomolskaya Street for the Vzglyady public art program, which describes the work as one that deceptively changes the geometry of the facade.

More: Amazing 3D Murals By Shozy!

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🪡 “Six Pins and Half a Dozen Needles” — By Alex Chinneck in London, UK 🇬🇧

Here the brick doesn’t bend; it tears. A strip of facade on Fulham Palace Road peels open like paper, its edges curling outward. Chinneck made it in 2017, and it makes the building look cracked into two halves.

📷 Photo: Loco Steve / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0), cropped

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🪩 Melted Disco Ball — By Rotganzen

A disco ball should be a hard, perfect sphere. This one droops over a ledge like it was left out in the sun. The Rotterdam collective Rotganzen builds them from a mosaic skin of mirror pieces on a base of styrofoam and polyurethane foam, and calls the shapes “overly voluptuous but sagging.”

More: Melting Disco Balls by Rotganzen

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🏚️ “From the Knees of My Nose to the Belly of My Toes” — By Alex Chinneck in Margate, UK 🇬🇧

The whole brick front of a house in Cliftonville has slipped off and slumped into the front garden, windows and all. Chinneck made it in 2013. The bricks bend; the house behind them stands straight.

💡 House Fact: The house had stood empty for 11 years before the facade “slid,” and the work was planned to stay for about a year.

📷 Photo: Alex Chinneck / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

More: Alex Chinneck’s Architectural Illusions

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🪑 “Long Modified Bench” — By Jeppe Hein in Auckland, New Zealand 🇳🇿

A park bench that forgot to stay flat. It starts as an ordinary seat, then curls up into loops you can’t sit on and comes back down again. It stands on Waitematā Plaza in Viaduct Harbour.

💡 Light Fact: Auckland Art Gallery first commissioned it in 2011, and it moved to the plaza in 2015. It is the first of Hein’s benches to include light: at night a run of LEDs glows under the seat.

📷 Photo: Prosperosity / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

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