Balancing Barn, Suffolk by William M. Connolley licensed under the terms of the CC BY-SA 3.0
Located by a picturesque lake on the English country side, the Balancing Barn gets its name the peculiar way in which it’s situated. Legendary architecture firm MVRDV designed the building with a massive cantilever: half of its length juts out off the hillside and hangs over the lawn below. That’s 49 feet of its 98-foot length!
The precarious positioning isn’t the only unusual thing about this structure. The holiday home is covered in an ultra-shiny metal cladding that stands out boldly from the surrounding greenery.
It also has a whimsical-looking swing attached to the bottom of the protruding end. It gives onlookers the uneasy feeling that anyone swinging could be the literal tipping point that brings the whole building tumbling down.
I’m sure the architects know what they’re doing. But if I lived here for any length of time, I’d be tempted to weigh down the grounded side of the home with all of my heavier belongings!
