In 1903, an architect by the name of Vladislav Gorodetsky put the finishing touches on a luxurious apartment building in the center of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. To say that the building is unusual would be a vast understatement.
Gorodetsky — alternately known in English as Wladyslaw Horodecki — was a Polish-born architect dubbed "the Gaudi of Ukraine." His namesake building fuses Beaux-Arts and Art Nouveau styles with a roofline and facade bearing a truly bizarre menagerie of grotesqueries: Rows of frogs patrol the roofline, an elephant bulges from the building's skin, heads of deer and rhinoceros emerge from atop Corinthian columns. And, on the roof, mermaids ride writhing fish.
As arts writer and editor John Pancake once described Gorodetsky House in a 2010 Wall Street Journal dispatch: This was a structure created by "a man who hated the dull, the safe, the easy."
