'Impossible' house built to rotate 360 degrees has left people astounded
If you get motion sickness, you probably wouldn't want to live in this absolutely wild spinning house.
But there are a whole lot of benefits to a house that rotates - as Tom Scott discovered in a YouTube video from 2023.
He looked at a completely unique house near San Diego, California, that was built explicitly so that it could rotate through a total of 360 degrees.
The house looks like a crazy spaceship, or an old-school flying saucer. While it's really striking, you wouldn't necessarily guess from the outside that it can rotate.
Through a really smart system that cleverly ensures that wires don't get tangled in the process, the house basically rotates around a central pillar. This pillar houses the main electric and water pipes, an engineering challenge that it overcame during construction.
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The actual pace of that rotation is pretty slow, but fast enough to be really obvious when it's in motion, as the video demonstrates.
It's not that retro a house, either, with construction apparently starting in around 2000, according to the owner and designer.
The motor that moves the house only uses 1.5 horsepower, something that would be dwarfed by pretty much any car on the market, since it only needs to move slowly.
This means the house takes around 45 minutes to complete a full turn, and if you're hosting guests you can choose what rooms to have facing the sunset at any time you like (and good sunsets are pretty common in California).
If this all makes it sound easy to build and maintain a spinning house, that's not really the case - while the designer is modest, the system built to rotate the house without getting its plumbing and gas messed up is pretty genius.
This means, however, that maintenance is something only a few people can really do, and that training has to be passed on pretty directly if the house is going to keep moving for years to come.
In fact, the amount of upkeep that was required turns out to be the reason that the homeowner and his wife put it on the market - it was just a little bit too much work for them as they got older.
Needless to say, people are astounded in the comments under the video, with thousands agreeing with this comment: "This guy is incredible. Not even an architect, designed the house just to live in it, and it works great? If there was a feature-length documentary about this guy and his house, I'd watch it."