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The Telegraph

Midlothian Castle To Peter Camani, a retired Canadian teacher, there is no greater material than concrete.
"It's the cheapest material you can use that'll basically last for ever," he says. "And I can do it all myself - if I tried to use metal I'd have to get involved with a lot of other people."

For 25 years, concrete, cheap and versatile, has allowed him to work single-handedly on his home - a turreted "castle" with walls two feet deep - and a series of 100 sculptures he calls the "screaming heads" (pictured). At US$10 a bag, Camani was able to afford it on his teacher's salary, and later on his pension.
He never drew up a plan for Midlothian Castle: "Everything just seemed intuitively right," he says. "I think that's the way things were done in ancient times. They didn't go around with blueprints."
Camani's land is 300km north of Toronto, Canada. He mentions other builders nearby who have created similarly idiosyncratic homes.
"Around here there've been people making things like underground houses, people making houses out of hay bales [and] things out of bottles," he says. "There are a lot of people with a lot of ideas."
 
The minister's tree house In 1993, Horace Burgess received a divine assignation.
"I was lying on the bed after I was praying," he says, in his Tennessee drawl, "and I felt the spirit, you know, ask me, 'Build me a tree house and I'll never let you run out of material.' That's more or less how the spirit was speaking in my soul."
A fortnight later, the Lord made his mysterious proposition more concrete. Again, Burgess was lying on his bed when his room seemed to transform into a vision of the tree house.
"I got to see it for about four seconds, inside and out, plumbing, 'lectric heating system, water system, elevators."
The lifts have not been installed, although Burgess left a shaft for them inside his 97 foot-tall monument.
"It's the only tree house that God has, that I know of, that you can climb," says Burgess.

The tree house, in Crossville, Tennessee, in the United States, was initially built around a huge white oak, but now the structure is supported by six additional trees. At the top is a bell tower filled with repurposed plastic bottles that chime in the wind, and from the summit you can look down to see the word "Jesus" spelt out on the lawn. Some 258,000 nails hold the tree house together; Burgess has done the work almost single-handedly, at a cost of perhaps US$14,000, because there was no blueprint for anyone else to follow.
"It was all in ma head," he says.
Burgess is now a minister in the First United Methodist Church, but he did not always lead a godly life. He went off the rails after a divorce in 1981.
"There was no other way to describe Horace Burgess through the 80s, than just crazy," he says. "A womaniser and a drug addict. And a drunk, from time to time."
In the year of his divorce he built a smaller tree house at his family's farm, but ended up burning it down three years later.
"The same voice in my spirit that told me to build this one told me to burn that one," he says, "so I had to set my own house on fire."
Two years ago, the state fire marshal closed down the tree house, which had become something of a local attraction. It was too tall, state officials said; it lacked proper structural support, the decking was uneven, there were no marked exits and, worst of all, there was no fire extinguisher or alarm. Although it's never been officially named as such, Burgess' tree house is thought to be the biggest ever constructed.
"The world just looks a little different, the higher up you go. I guess that's why God put heaven there."
"For years everybody thought I was crazy," said Onan. "I think I'm crazy, so we're all at the same ball game."
 
The golden pyramid Seventeen years ago, the Onan family of Wadsworth, Illinois, in the US, removed 8,000 gold-electroplated panels from the 55-foot-tall pyramid they call home. On sunny days, the pyramid was almost too bright to look at, and the glare was causing problems on the highways, as incredulous drivers slowed to confirm that, yes, they had just seen a golden pyramid glimmering in the distance. Today, the six-storey structure, magicked up from concrete, wood and plywood, is painted gold, as is its four-car garage, which is topped with three other pyramids.
The 50-foot-high statue of Rameses II, on the other hand, is a sober white.
"We made it outta concrete," said Jim Onan, who began work on the pyramid in 1977, "but it looks as real as anybody else's."

Seven years earlier, Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder had published their pseudoscientific handbook Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, in which they advocated the potential of "pyramid power". The authors claimed that keeping food under replicas of pyramids could make it last longer; one of their Czechoslovakian contacts had taken a patent for the Cheops Pyramid RazorBlade Sharpener, which promised to use pyramid power to sharpen dull blades.
Onan, who has developed dementia in recent years, could never quite be pinned down on his own belief in pyramid power.
"If you were here and saw some of the things that happened, you would say it's impossible," he said in 2010. "I got people that cut their thumb right to the bone, and healed overnight. Because he believed that the pyramid was gonna do that."
Linda, Onan's wife, and Rocko, one of their five children, have recently reopened the pyramid for tours; inside, visitors can see a pyramid-shaped fireplace and Egyptian-themed murals, as well as gold furniture that, according to Onan, used to belong to filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille.
 
Bishop Castle Jim Bishop was a teenager when he bought just over one hectare of land in the San Isabel National Forest, Colorado, in the US, with US$450 he had saved from mowing lawns. Ten years later, in 1969, he started to build a small cottage for himself with stones from the forest; he was too poor to afford conventional materials. Forty-five years later, he's still building.
"I just put rock in it every day," he says. "The American dream to me is this one-man castle. It's much more an art form than a building. It's not flat, square, plumb, level, but I have a sense of balance. Me and the castle are one and the same."

With 1,500 tonnes of rock and cement, Bishop has constructed a vast warren linked with walkways and crowned with turrets. Foundations plunge 12 feet into the ground while the highest tower is 160 feet tall. Bishop is an ironmonger and he has created complex wrought metalwork and elaborate stained-glass windows. There are flights of fantasy, too: a fire-breathing dragon, whose scales are made from stainless-steel warming plates from a hospital, saved from the dump by a friend of Bishop's. The fire issues forth from a burner that once powered a hot-air balloon. Everything has been done with hand tools in arduous conditions - the land is 9,000 feet above sea level and the snow only thaws for a few months in the summer. Bishop has worked almost entirely by himself.
"I taught myself masonry," he says. "Trial and error, lot of trial and very little error."
Bishop's political ideas are stoutly libertarian - he has ignored complaints from local officials trying to enforce their "Nazi-style zoning" laws - with a firm underpinning in conspiracy theories. He talks animatedly about the Freemasons, the Bilderbergers and the Illuminati, and has a spitting disdain for the rich and powerful.
"You know there never was no king of Europe or England who ever built any castles," he says. "The same with the pharaohs and the pyramids.
"They didn't build s***. They didn't work with their hands. These two hands built Bishop Castle."
 
The underground railway Two years before the Soviet Union crumbled, Leonid Mulyarchik (below) had an unusual and, some say, insane idea: to build an underground rail system to serve his local community of 20,000 people. More than two decades later, the metro system, in a rural backwater called Lebedyan, 400km south of Moscow, has stalled following Mulyarchik's death in 2011.
Mulyarchik believed he was the only man in the world to be single-handedly building a metro system, and he was probably right. Before his death, Mulyarchik explained that he spent most of his 7,000-rouble-a-month (HK$1,550) pension on the project. When discussing what had become an obsession, he became animated.

"People do not believe that one man can achieve all this," he said. "In the Soviet era people were used to the fact that everything was done for them. They are not used to having to do everything yourself."
When the former factory worker started construction, in 1989, 166 local people, seduced by his infectious optimism, joined him. But when he announced that they would not be paid a kopeck until the day the metro began operating they left just as quickly. Mulyarchik was forced to work on his own with little more than a shovel and a pickaxe.

It took him 5½ hours to extend his metro tunnel by about three feet and a further three days to shore that up with concrete and an arch. But he managed to build an 820 foot-long main tunnel, plus a small network of adjacent service tunnels roughly 500 feet long. Mulyarchik was a short man and his metro reflects that. The main tunnel is about 5½ feet high and less than five feet wide. His plan was to eventually build 11 metro stations, though he didn't get to complete a single one. No track was laid, but that was never part of the plan. Mulyarchik envisaged that the carriages, carrying a maximum of four people, would be mounted on car tyres.
Most local people never understood his obsession. After all, it only takes half an hour to walk from one end of Lebedyan to the other. But Mulyarchik refused to be offended by people who questioned his sanity.
"Many people have been called mad over the years," he said. "When they started building the Suez Canal the first company working on it went bankrupt, as did the second. They only got it right on the third attempt. It is the same here. I have made a start and if I die, which I'm not planning to do, someone will take up where I left off."
Sadly, a volunteer has yet to come forward.
The Sunday Telegraph, UK
 


Home strange home

Midlothian Castle

The minister's tree house, in Crossville, Tennessee.

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PostMag

From a gold pyramid to a concrete castle, Horatia Harrod looks at some weird and wonderful structures built single-handedly by their owners


From a gold pyramid to a concrete castle, Horatia Harrod looks at some weird and wonderful structures built single-handedly by their owners.
