Oh. Oh wow. Today is World Architecture Day.

It is probably the only day I can tell you all about an _incredible_ piece of architectural art I stumbled into once.

The architect had set out on a journey to design the perfect house but ended up somewhere mindblowing

THREAD! https://twitter.com/planningshit/status/1313012826571710464

I suppose when you want a house to be perfect, you must define what (or who) it is perfect for. I’m not sure the architect ever did

But I was in Vienna early for a symposium, had a weekend to wander the city, see art, eat schnitzel.

And people kept mentioning this one exhibit..

Everyone who spoke about the Perfect House exhibit seemed profoundly moved by it. Told me I absolutely had to go see it.

It was at Prater Park, a fairground a way away from where I was staying, BUT which also contained the ferris wheel from The Third Man.

So obviously I was IN.

The Praterstern railway station was close by but it was a sunny day and I decided to walk.

When I got to the fairground proper, I could see that one section of the park alongside it was drawing a MASSIVE crowd.

Well. Not so much a crowd as a queue.

It was a very orderly queue, nice defined edges and (pleasingly) snaked itself into curves without the need for barriers or crowd control (I liked being in Vienna, a lot of it was just plain nice).

People were chatting.

Some had brought picnics.

There was a group sat on the grass at the end of the queue and I asked if this was where I should be if I wanted to see the Perfect House exhibit.

They told me that this was the queue to go in, but that if I just wanted to see it, I could walk round & get a view past the trees.

This is where it got weird.

I was keen to find out what made this one house the Perfect House and was absolutely expecting the start of the queue to reveal a building.

That you could walk around and go into.

You know.

The standard ways that people experience architecture

Instead I walked round the trees & saw four absolutely MASSIVE cranes arranged in the corners of a large square approximate the footprint of a two bedroom city house.

And, suspended by them, a two bedroom city house hanging (I later discovered) 150 metres above the city.

The cables honestly looked thinner than I was comfortable with and the entire house seemed to shift a little in the air.

But there was a scaffold tower built alongside to access the front door and they were *letting people in*.

There was NO WAY I wasn’t going to be one of them.

I *really* wanted to take a photo, but there were stern signs and even guards telling people that they couldn’t and I wasn’t about to let anything spoil my changes of being allowed into this thing.

So I bought a ticket and plodded back to the end of the queue.

Oh! I need to get up and eat something and start work!

I’ll finish this thread in a bit and I promise it doesn’t end in anyone plummeting to their doom or anything like that. But I DID get to find out why it was the Perfect House and it wasn’t at all what I’d expected.