Tales of Future Past v2

Why settle for a spherical room when you can have a spherical house? That is what Dr. Johann Ludowici thought in 1961 when he designed the Kugelhaus -- a twelve-foot diameter sphere that crammed an entire house inside like Japanese commuters on the Tokyo Metro.

This German idea for handling the postwar housing shortage is admirable in its simplicity -- prefabricate spherical homes and then to install them simply scoop out a little cup in the ground, drop the ball into the depression, hook up the utilities and you're away.

Of course, there is one small difficulty with this. True, the sphere is the most efficient way of enclosing a volume of space, but unfortunately, as you may have noticed, as a sphere tapers towards its base the amount of floor space reduces rather alarmingly, resulting in a globe home with the volume of caravan, but the foot room of a phone box.

Also, it is not advised to use the Kugelhaus on steep hillsides in earthquake zones. Otherwise, you could be woken up one morning at the start of a rather alarming, albeit brief, career.

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