Buildings and Architecture in Europe
The Sami Parliament in Norway is located in the village of Karasjok. The present building was inaugurated in 2005 and parts resemble a traditional Sami tipi. The village Karasjok also has a Sami museum and even a Sami culture park.
Of Norway's 28 remaining medieval stave churches, only Urnes is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was built around 1130, making it the oldest stave church, but it's also the most richly decorated. You can only visit the interior on a guided tour.
Uvdal Stave Church is one the smaller ones of Norway's 28 remaining medieval stave churches. It was probably built around 1168. It's located on a steep grassy hill among other historical wooden buildings. When you arrive along road 40 from the west, you will first come across the impressive Uvdal Church, and although it's wooden and looks like a medieval stave church with dragon heads on the crest, it was built in 1893. Follow the signs for the proper medieval one, which is about 5 km up road 122.
A wicked, but admirable, contribution to Sopot's collection of kitsch tourist sights. The wobbly looking building is part of a shopping center, where the front is an ordinary coffee shop.
Falowiec is a wavy apartment block from the early 1970s during the communist era. Falowiec literally means wavy in Polish. There are eight of those in the otherwise drab district of Przymorze in Gdansk. The block at Obrońców Wybrzeża street is apparently the longest with 860m, which also makes it the longest apartment block in Europe. With more than 6000 people living in that one block, what a street party they could have.
Tiny Living is getting more and more popular, but Polish architect Jakub Szczęsny has taken it to the extreme. In 2012 he designed and constructed a house in the space between two apartment blocks. The house is no wider than 152 cm and stands completely independently without actually touching the neighbouring buildings. Since the house doesn't meet local building codes, the house is classified as an "art installation", but people have been living there anyway. The crampy two floors have impressively a bedroom, a bathroom, a living area, and a kitchen - where refrigerator only holds two beers. The house is named Keret House after the first tenant Etgar Keret, an Israeli writer and filmmaker.
On a mountain peak outside Sintra stands the colourful Pena National Palace. It served as summer palace for the Portuguese royal family through the last centuries. The buildings you see today are mostly from the 19th-century, but the first construction on the site dates back to the Middle Ages. Pena Palace is part of the UNESCO listed Cultural Landscape of Sintra and stands out with its fairy tale style of oriental ornamentation, bright colours, wide gates and tall towers and spires. The surrounding wooded ground is grand with winding trails leading to magnificent view points. However, since the palace is perched on top of a mountain ridge facing the Atlantic Ocean, the panoramic views either stretch all the way to Lisbon - or equal likely, are obscured by dense fog from the clouds that are rolling over the ridge.
The new wooden church at Peri monastery in the outskirts of Săpânța village (yes, the one with the Merry Cemetery) is simply towering. Official signs modestly claim that the 75 m tall wooden church is the tallest wooden building in Europe, but we can't think of any other wooden building worldwide that beats it. Some might argue that the church's stone base disqualifies it, making another Romanian wooden church in Surdești the tallest (72 m). As you probably have figured out, wooden churches are not something new to this region. Wherever you go in northern Romania, you will see beautiful, old wooden churches - though not all are this tall.
The Cathedral of Christ the Savious, the tallest Orthodox church in the world, towers majestically above the Moscow River embankment and is one of the city's most memorable sights. Inside it is even more impressive, the decor reaching almost outlandish levels of grandeur and opulence. This is in strong contrast to the piousness of those who come here to worship, humble crossing themselves before pictures of saints, kissing icons and even prostrating themselves. The cathedral was built over almost fifty years in the Ninteenth Century but after Lenin's Death Stalin had it blown up and planned to build the 350 metre tall Palace of the Soviets in its place, complete with a 100 metre tall Lenin statue. They never got beyond digging the foundation hole, however, which kept flooding. After Stalin's death Krushchev decided to simply convert it into the world's largest open air swimming pool. It served this purpose until in 1990 the Church was allowed to build a very accurate reconstruction of the original Cathedral on the site.
The UFO Bridge, or more correctly New Bridge (Nova Most), is a strange sight - and even more in Bratislava where such daring architectures are unusual. The construction was finished in 1972 and is actually just a bridge with a "flying saucer"-like structure on top of the tower that holds the cables. The UFO holds a restaurant not surprisingly called U-F-O.