When a California woman’s neighbors reported her for illegally turning her home into an AirBnb, she got back at them in a thoroughly modern way: with emojis.

In an incident that’s referred to in local paper Easy Reader News as “The Emoji House War,” homeowner Kathryn Kidd shocked her neighbors in Manhattan Beach with a dramatic new paint job. The two-level duplex is now a vivid pink and prominently adorned with two enormous emojis, one with googly eyes and its tongue sticking out and the other with a zipper across its mouth.

Her neighbors say it’s a less-than-subtle message following a disagreement over how the property is being used. Kidd lives a few blocks away and purchased the duplex as a rental a year ago, using it for short-term rentals, which is illegal in Manhattan Beach. Her neighbors reported her, and she was fined $4,000.

Kidd maintains that the intention wasn’t to spite her neighbors, but rather to add some cheer to the neighborhood.

“The artist is kind of a friend of mine,” she told Easy Reader. “Instead of everybody being so gloomy, always so depressed, always in other people’s business, I just wanted to send a message to be happy, be colorful, be positive and enjoy.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bobby Z. Rodriguez | Designer Artist (@ztheart)

But the artist, a local known as Z the Art, says Kidd didn’t tell her anything about the drama before hiring him, and is shocked to find himself at the center of the dispute.

The city of Manhattan Beach has no ability to regulate murals on private property, so the paint job is here to stay, at least for now.

Spite houses are a long, petty tradition, often used to get back at neighbors, family members and former spouses for perceived affronts. They almost always succeed in ruining other people’s views. Some are set up on incredibly narrow plots of land, built mere inches from neighbors or adorned in irritating paint jobs, like this one. Some even have windows shaped like fists with raised middle fingers.

Check out 22 more examples:

Spite Houses: 12 Structures Built Just to Annoy People
No Respite: 10 More Houses Built Out of Spite

Top image via Easy Reader News

Architects are sometimes criticized for taking creative liberties with their artwork, setting unlikely green scenes or populating their rendered scenes with an improbable array of happy figures. While these “literal renderings” (per Mike Rosenberg) may in some sense be figurative, using signage one would not likely see on an actual structure, they also are refreshingly blunt about the contents of the structures represented.

Surely, no one will actually call their store “Retail” or building “Signage” or mixed-use community “Mixed-Use Apartments,” but at least the viewer gets an actual sense of what they should expect to find inside.

In some cases, these are generic elements are simply temporary markers for mid-stage designs without a name — in others, they can be used to pitch developers, communities and local approval boards.

A kind of architectural equivalent to plain-packaging, minimalist companies (like Brandless), these exist at the other end of realism spectrum, countered by more playful and surrealist approaches like the one below.

The art of architectural representation has changed a lot over time, including the scale figures used to set stages, but at least these kinds of experiments show there is further room to adapt and grow.

The site and setting of Modernist masterpieces is a key ingredient of their aesthetic, so what, wondered one architect, would happen if these famous buildings were repositioned, set instead in oddly idyllic landscapes ala painter Thomas Kinkade?

Suddenly, the Eames House, Farnsworth House, Eames and Glass Houses are all transformed into surreal standouts against incongruous backdrops of cobblestone walks, colorful gardens and old-fashioned wells. Some, though, like Gehry’s Deconstructivist home (actually located on a residential street in Santa Barbara) look surprisingly cozy in an impossibly idyllic rural setting:

Robyniko explains that it started as a one-off suggestion: “A fellow architect I’m friends with on Twitter asked if anyone did modernist paintings in the style of Thomas Kinkade. It was one of those things you chuckle to yourself thinking about ‘what if’ and then move on with your life.

“But my family was gone for the weekend,” he explains, “so I decided to indulge my curiosity about how these famous modernist homes would fit into Kinkade’s universe.”

The architect started with well-known photographs of these iconic structures, then set to work in Photoshop hacking them into new environments. The result is weirdly jarring in some cases, and oddly satisfying in others.

Overall, the mixed effects show just how much buildings (and our images of them) rely on what surrounds them, for better or worse.

A new PVRR (Pet Virtual Reality Research) technical brief targets the hundreds of millions of global kitties who might enjoy a romp through a virtual playscape. For starters, be sure to watch the compelling promotional pitch below:

Isobar, the brainchild of this operation, boasts their brain-monitoring and emotion-measuring capabilities. Thee brief reports that they have partnered with Zoos Victoria to detail the stakeholders and potential benefits of their emerging tech. After all, they ask: why should only “big cats” get to have all of the fun?

Per the paper, “PVRR utilizes EEG and EKG technology to monitor cats’ emotions to certain stimuli. The methodology accounts for the fact that cats see less color, but see better in the dark than humans.” Their tests involved showing cats swimming fish, low-flying birds and other objects and scenes designed to evoke a response.

Actually reading the brief, though, you might be both amused and skeptical — it did also, after all, come out on April second, which may be more than coincidence (really, though, you should read it yourself to learn more).

More from the design team: “We pioneered a patent-pending process that is referred to as ‘W.A.H.T’- whisker attenuation and haptic telemetry. this groundbreaking addition to the computer vision and sensor platform has allowed us to leverage software algorithms to understand the ‘tells’ each feline has related to their whiskers and be able to accurately understand when a cat experiences one of the following states: (1) TD: totally disinterested, (2) D: disinterested, (3) MD: mildly disinterested and (4) CNP: cat-nipped – a term we’ve been using to express the same brain activity seen in highly stimulated cats when under the effects of catnip”

Of course, this may all sound silly to us right now, but wait a few years and household pets may well while away lonely days at home being fed by robots and goofing off inside simulated playscapes. According to the PVRR brief: dogs are the next target audience, so: stay tuned, canine fans!

Do you have $850 burning a hole in your pocket that you’d like to spend on some bedazzled platform Crocs that look like a three-year-old’s art project? Perhaps you’d prefer to shell out thousands for the honor of sticking your arms through a plastic dry cleaning bag and calling it a dress. Yes, high fashion really is its own little world, and the desire to make a statement nearly always eclipses the need for practicality. But there are strange and unusual runway moments, and then there are ready-to-wear abominations that somehow sell out online within seconds.

Sold-Out Balenciaga Platform Crocs

Crocs are ugly, but for some people, they serve a utilitarian purpose – for walking the dog, gardening or staying comfortable while working long hours at a retail position. That’s all fine. What’s not fine is taking this intrinsically offensive rubber design, extending the platform, bejeweling the tops so they look like a kindergartener’s craft project, and then selling them for $850. But of course, fashion house Balenciaga is getting the last laugh in this situation, because this abomination sold out within minutes when they were made available for pre-order.

The Helmut Lang Freezer Bag

https://www.instagram.com/p/BbUbjG2F0eG/?taken-by=helmutlang

Sure, the insulated silver bags often used to keep frozen goods cold are shiny. So are a lot of other things. But Helmut Lang saw something special in the woven metallic material, and used it as inspiration for a $320 handbag that looks like it cost less than a dollar. They even call it ‘Freezer Bag,’ and posted an Instagram photo of the bag placed… inside a freezer.

Balenciaga’s Car Mat Skirt

Balenciaga is at it again with a skirt that looks exactly like a rubber car mat. It’s actually made of leather, but can you even tell? By all appearances, it’s a piece of cheap, possibly toxic material molded in the same way car mats often are, for $2916. You could literally staple an actual car mat around your waist and achieve the same look. It’s called Car Design Skirt, and it’s sold out.

Moschino Dry Cleaning Cape Dress

Très chic, eh? This $730 dress by Moschino could have gone for a more subtle and slightly futuristic look just by leaving off the text and tightening up the silhouette a bit, but clearly they want it to look like a dry cleaning bag. Even Cosmopolitan made fun of it. The dress, unsurprisingly, is the brainchild of fashion designer Jeremy Scott, who certainly doesn’t shy away from the gauche in his work.

Thibaut ‘Thong Jeans’

The most basic job of a pair of pants is to cover and protect the lower halves of our bodies, but utilitarianism usually goes out the window when it comes to high fashion, so perhaps it’s no surprise that somebody cut the most important parts out of a pair of jeans, left a thong-like strip in the back, and called them pants. “Thong jeans now exist so let’s officially get the apocalypse rolling,’ reads Harpers Bazaar’s piece on the Thibaut creation, which debuted at Amazon Fashion Week Tokyo in 2017 and will reportedly become available on the market this year. If you’re just too excited to wait, you can get a copycat pair from fast fashion retailer Yandy – as a Halloween costume.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Bloat Couture 11 High Fashion Designs That Look Like Actual Garbage