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Why am I getting dizzy?
Everything in this house defies gravity and seems to develop a life of its own - and our perception system plays along!
If you look at THE CRAZY HOUSE from the outside, you can see the inclination of the entire house in the longitudinal and transverse direction. It is about 6° in the longitudinal direction and about 7° in the transverse direction.
Why does that make me dizzy? This is due to our sense of balance and gravity.
Since our body also receives information about its position in space through gravity, this is taken into account when processing the visual information. Although the body tries to align itself strongly with the vertical lines in space, it also feels the incline, for example through the position of the feet and the organ of balance in the ear.
How is our body oriented in space?
As already mentioned above, the perception of orientation depends on several factors.
An important factor is the ability to perceive the direction of gravity. This is possible through the pressure of your own weight on the feet and other parts of the body and through muscle movements to try to keep your balance.
However, the most important organ for the sense of position and rotation is the vestibular apparatus of the inner ear: the gravitational stimulus affects hair cells in the two atrial sacs of the membranous labyrinth (utriculus and sacculus). The hair tufts are embedded in a gelatinous layer and function here as extensions of the sensory cells: depending on the position of the head, this gelatinous layer shifts, causing the little hairs to be sheared and the sensory cells to be stimulated. In the nerve cell that follows, the degree of inclination is encoded by the magnitude of the discharge rate.
Other factors are the experience of the orientation of other objects and lines in space and the information that our visual system provides.
As a rule, all this information corresponds to one another and conveys a uniform orientation in space; in the CRAZY HOUSE, however, sometimes differ drastically. A person primarily tries to align themselves parallel to an upright environment (usually it is the reference system) - in this case parallel to the vertical in space. The risk of tipping is definitely accepted; at least a strange feeling arises.
Our perception system resolves the conflict between the sense of gravity and the visual system with a certain dominance of visual information over the sense of gravity and position; spatial perception is therefore largely based on visual information. This (one-sided) compromise also results in the adaptation after staying in the CRAZY HOUSE for a certain amount of time.
But it is precisely this dominance that creates the fascination of the CRAZY HOUSE.
Source: Prof. Dr. Bernd Lingelbach, IfAA - STZ Institute for Ophthalmic Optics Aalen
Literature references:
Perception - I. Rock - 1985
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FACTS AND FIGURES
• The construction time for the shell of the CRAZY HOUSE was including the prefabrication
three and a half months.
• The interior work then took another 6 weeks. Details are constantly being added and changes are taking place.
• Completion and inauguration was on March 26, 2011.
• The top (now bottom) part of the MAD HOUSE was made in the traditional way
built and then rotated with two large cranes.
• Weight: approx. 34 tons! This spectacle - the so-called fall festival - happened on January 25th, 2011.
• The ground floor (now the upper part) was then prefabricated onto the already turned upper floor.
• Total weight including equipment: approx. 45 tons!
• Everything in the house is rotated 180 degrees except: the stairs, the windows and the doors.
The reason: Requirements imposed by the building authority (safety aspects and escape routes in the event of a fire breaking out, for example)
• In addition to SAT 1, RTL, NDR 2 and WDR, the first Russian television reported in one
3 minute post about this crazy object.
• In addition to numerous German media, there were also reports in newspapers/magazines and radio, including in Australia, Austria, South America and France.
• Two couples have already exchanged vows in this CRAZY HAUS (the CRAZY HAUS team wishes you a wonderful future together!)
• THE CRAZY HOUSE has a pitch and bank of up to 7 degrees. This is one of the reasons why 99% of visitors experience dizziness.