October 2025 | Eyesore

You probably can’t tell whether this is the alien itself or the ship it landed in. Possibly both at the same time. Hard to distinguish the tentacles from the portholes or the eye-sockets, while the salmon-pink folds and creases have a certain gynecologiocal feeling. In any case, this beast landed in Xalapa, capital of Veracruz state, Mexico. It is called Casa de los Milagros or House of Miracles by architect Danilo Veras Godoy and is a private residence, not an intergalactic freight transport vehicle / organism.

As a technical matter, this is an extreme case of what you get when a building is designed from the inside-out, without a whole lot of concern for the pattern language of the building culture in your civilization — and Mexico has quite a good one, starting with the Colonial Baroque of the post-Cortez era. That interesting mashup of the Aztec residue with Spain of the Inquisition is what you see in the dancing skeletons of our time, five hundred years later. It must have been a daunting task to manage the place back then. (An early Mexican viceroy described his philosophy of government as: Do little and do it slowly.)

In any case, this “house” stands in what appears to be subtropical cloud-forest, not a street with its demand for civic decorum. It can be whatever it wants, and it apparently wants to be something like the leftovers on a vivisection table.

Below, a glance at the main entrance / exit staircase with its side-by-side slide. Yes a slide! (For playfulness!) Looks like it would be a pretty hard landing at that angle. Ouch! Call my abogado! The joke ends up being on the home-owner. As usual.

Shout-out to Rick Darby for the nomination.

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