Who said spherical architecture isn’t as pretty as the other ones? A sphere, a three-dimensional cousin of a circle holds a very important space in architecture. Spheres can be futuristic as well as timeless, a perfectly round building is a masterpiece of engineering kind of seductive don’t you think? It resembles to the shape of our own planet. There’s a lot of spherical structures around the world, some of them have faceted exteriors, others slick façades but each one is an icon of its sublime geometry. Here we will show you our top five most enigmatic buildings made with spherical architecture around the world.
Walt Disney World’s Epcot, Spaceship Earth (Orlando, Florida)
The most iconic structure of Walt Disney World’s Epcot, takes you to a ride where you can travel in time and explore the history of communication through centuries, from Stone age to nowadays. The Spaceship Earth was designed by Wallace Floyd Design Group.
Tianjin Binhai Library (Tianjin, China)
This library, with its particular shape was designed by the firm MVRDV, along with the Tianjin Urban Planning and Design Institute. The project took three years to be completed, since the first drawings until its open day. This library features an illuminated sphere at its center.
Biosphère (Montreal, Canada)
The Biosphere is a museum in Montreal exclusively dedicated to the environment. It’s located at Par Jean-Drapeau on Saint Helen’s Island in the former pavilion of the United States for the Expo ’67. This majestic space was designed by Buckminster Fuller and featured clear acrylic cells that filled in its steel frame, but those were destroyed in a 1976 fire.
La Géode (Paris, France)
The Géode is a giant steel globe with 36m in diameter that reflects the Cité, the sky and the Parc de la Villette. This building is a cinema that has the capacity for 400 people and is equipped with a 1000m² hemispherical screen and an Omnimax projector which is able to produce an image nine times larger than that of an ordinary 35mm projector and greatly exceeds the maximum field of vision. It was created in May 1985 by the architect Adrien Fainsilber.
Ericsson Globe (Stockholm, Sweden)
Ericsson Globe is the largest spherical building of the entire world. It opened in 1989 and it’s the national arena for the Swedish national hockey team.