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Henan’s Toilet-Shaped Tower Adds to List of World’s Odd-Shaped Buildings

| Jul 14, 2016 09:23 AM EDT

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The North China of Water Conservancy and Electric Power Company has a new building in Henan Province that is the talk of town and the world. And it’s not because of the edifice’s power efficient features.

Rather, it’s the physical design of the building which when viewed from the air or higher grounds looks like a giant toilet bowl, observed Telegraph. The tower’s designers appear not to have made the structure the subject of toilet humor, but the building ended that way because the 12-storey structure at the back looks like the toilet’s water tank.

In front of the building is a five-storey round-shaped structure which has a square blue roof. This portion looks like a toilet seat complete with water in the bowl.

Ironically, China just passed in early 2016 new guidelines that heavily discouraged the construction of weird-looking edifices in the country. But the building is said to have stringently followed those new planning permission guidelines which sought to curb the tendency of designers to make buildings that copy western designs.

In a planning conference in December, Chinese authorities said what is needed are designs that are applicable, economic, green and elegant in line with China’s cultural heritage.

Other weird-looking buildings in China include the office of a gaming company in Fujian Province which looks like the USS Enterprise in “Star Trek” and the Sheraton Huzhou Hot Spring Resort shaped like a horseshoe. Even China’s state-owned media are guilty of making odd-shaped buildings such as the People’s Daily headquarters in Beijing that looks like an erect penis and the office of China Central Television which appears like large boxer shorts.

China does not have a monopoly of such buildings. In Paris, there was a giant sculpture that looks like a sex toy, more phallus-shaped building in Paris, Barcelona and Michigan and Qatar’s 2022 World Cup stadium which appears like a vagina.

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