In a stark play of contrasts, a rich wooden passageway tunnels through this otherwise modern residence made up of small colorless masonry blocks, slicing like a house-shaped cookie cutter through the contemporary structure.

The open space inside this Korean domicile looks like a cast of a traditional home, or a child’s drawing set vertical and extruded through a solid rectilinear block.

Architect Kim Seongyoul of Rieuldorang Atelier (images by Joonhwan Yoon) was inspired by the most elemental and simple idea of a house, and “started designing with the question of how architecture can enter the world of emotion” through geometry and association.

As one passes inside, the void space opens up to reveal light, views, greenery, windows and access points to the home, becoming a kind of central hallway and bridge between interior and exterior spaces.

In the end, the shape also serves as a kind of iconic welcoming beacon, a symbol of home within a home, that shows people where to go, then goes on to provide an overview of everything else the house has to offer.

Bringing together cutting-edge technologies and an ancient approach to resisting earthquake damage, the so-called Quake Column marries tradition and high-tech to create a bold new structural solution needing no mortar nor rebar to reinforce it.

Incan masons historically interlocked complex three-dimensional stone shapes in order to allow movement during earthquakes while preventing buildings from becoming structurally compromised in the process. The puzzle-like interlinking of the constituent parts helps structures resist seismic shocks, keeping them from becoming detached either horizontally or vertically.

A modern-day company in California, Emerging Objects, has taken this page out of history and reapplied it with 3D printing, allowing their new variants of these old blocks to be fabricated quickly, easily and cost-effectively. Unlike their heavy stone predecessors, these new versions are can be lightweight, modular and made on demand, including built-in handles for carrying printed-on instructions showing builders how to assemble them into columns.

These contemporary equivalents are designed to be load-bearing, code-compliant materials that could be used in actual architectural applications of all kinds, all without steel reinforcement or mortar cementing the connections. More on the structural physics at work via Inhabitat: “the absence of resonant frequencies and stress concentration points made the structures more earthquake resistant. During earthquakes, the dry-stone walls built by the Incas would move slightly and resettle without any damage. Rounded corners and an incline of three to five degrees contributed to their stability.”

Did you know that brick or stone-clad buildings you see today almost invariably hide a steel support structure that does the actual work? Before steel was used to create rigid frames, buildings relied on the load-bearing capacity of incredibly thick solid materials. This amazing structure has walls at its base up to 22 feet thick to hold the weight. Due to the cost of doing so, no designer has even tried to exceed the height of this towering structure in stone or brick in over a century.

At 548 feet high, the Philadelphia City Hall was the tallest skyscraper in the world when it was constructed and today it still holds the title of tallest load-bearing structure on the planet. The building took 30 years and 24 million dollars to complete. It was also the first (known) non-religious structure to hold the record for the world’s tallest building.

Before elevators and truly tall (10 story or more) buildings, the pricing and desirability of living on upper versus lower floors was actually reversed. People were loathe to travel up many flights of stairs multiple times a day so it was often the top rooms with the best views overlooking a city that were left to starving artists and others of lesser means. With frame-and-cladding building techniques the paradigm reversed itself and forever gone were the days of tall masonry building and cheap living with a view out over the top of the built environment.