The mysterious eight-story stacked cabin house spotted among the trees in a remote area of Alaska is even cooler than previously thought, now that filmmakers have caught up to creator and self-described “frustrated architect” Phillip Weidner. In a two-minute documentary by Great Big Story called ‘We’re Not in Whoville Anymore,’ Weidner calls his Frankenstein creation ‘Goose Creek Tower,’ and reveals his motivation for building it, along with a few of its most notable features.

“I like building. I just designed it out of my head, we didn’t have blueprints. We drew it out on cardboard, plywood, just as we were going. I started to build a 40 by 40 scribed log cabin, and I realized I could put pillars on top and put another house on top of the house. And I just kept going. We got to 185 feet and we stopped because two hundred feet is federal airspace.”

Previously, we got a look at the outside of the structure overlooking Mount McKinley and the Denali National Park via Alaska Aerial Footage, which captured a dizzying video of its full height against the snowy landscape.

The tower remains pretty bare-bones, with all of the framing complete but no windows or finished surfaces. There are even more levels than you can see from the outside, as the interior winds from one split-level platform to the next. Weiner, a former attorney, reveals that a hidden escape tunnel at the basement level leads to a safe room.

“I wanted to be able to see,” says Weidner. “And that’s the reason I went up. You could see for at least three hundred miles. And of course when the northern lights are out, you can really see ‘em. I hope that Goose Creek Tower will inspire other people to do worthwhile things, not just in building but whatever they do with their life. And every time I go up there, it’s a different experience. It kind of gives you a sense of the enormity of the universe.”

Multi-level structures with a bit of extra flair, these three designs for an apartment building, a hotel and a gallery space consist of stacked volumes that look like little houses piled on top of each other. While the VitraHaus by Herzog de Meuron, the Inntel Hotel by WAM Architects and an apartment complex by Sou Fujimoto have little else in common, all three utilize this eye-catching visual effect.

The stacked structures of the Inntel Hotel are shaped like the traditional dwellings of the Netherlands, in a tribute to the nation’s architectural history. Eleven stories tall, the structure seems to be an entire neighborhood all in one volume.

On the grounds of the Vitra Campus, which is a veritable architectural museum with works by the likes of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Tadao Ando, is the VitraHaus, designed by Herzog de Meuron. Serving as a gallery space for Vitra’s Home Collection, which is a showcase of contemporary interior design, VitraHaus is made up of five stacked volumes of a ‘domestic scale’ with individual houses cantilevered over each other.

Then, in Japan, we have this curious structure: an apartment building that seems to be made of several pre-fabricated housing units haphazardly joined together into one vertical structure. While the effect is certainly far from that of the Inntel or the VitraHaus, this quirky structure by Sou Fujimoto with its many strange alcoves and transparent transitional spaces does make interesting use of a small plot of land.