The Futuro House's Spaceship Chic: A Sci-Fi Pad Of One's Own

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A Futuro II photographed on the grounds of the Philadelphia International Airport in 1970. Source: Bettmann/Getty Images)

This bulbous round structure is not an artifact from the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind -- it's a Futuro House, a spaceship-like prefab dwelling dreamed up by a Finnish architect in the late 1960s. Today, they are scattered around the globe, so eye-catching and unusual that they do look more like UFOs than habitable buildings. But the Futuro was indeed fully functional, presaging the tiny house trend by decades while embracing the (then) contemporary mania for all things futuristic and sci-fi. In an era when easy listening artists had explored music for space-age bachelor pads and architects had dropped an intergalactic waystation (better known as the TWA terminal) in the middle of JFK Airport, designers in Finland had created a space-age pad that came pre-assembled and 100% far-out.