A Century Ago, Germany had a Spherical Steel Building

In the 1920s, Germany held their own sort of internal World’s Fair called the “Jahresschau Deutscher Arbeit” (“Annual Exhibition of German Work”). The 1928 edition was held in Dresden and themed “The Technological City.” The centerpiece of the exhibition was this spherical structure by German architect Peter Birkenholz: Called the Kugelhaus (“Globe House”), the six-story steel structure held exhibition halls, an elevator and a restaurant up top. It wasn’t terribly practical; while the sphere had a diameter of roughly 80 feet and a volume of 268,400 cubic feet, each floor only yielded about 1,000 square feet and change. But it was, for the time, jaw-dropping. The plan was to eventually build a row of these, but it never came to fruition. In the 1930s, as the Nazis took power, they didn’t know what to make of the structure; they ultimately deemed it “degenerate art” and “un-German,” and they demolished the structure in 1938.