When Futuristic Vacation Villas Go Bad

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  06.03.08 | 10:29 AM ET

Taiwanese officials started building San-Zhr Pod Village in the 1960s, with every hope that it would turn out to be a hip place to visit or even live. It was supposed to be an ahead-of-its-time kind of development, with spaceship-like dwellings, an amusement park and a dam that protected it against sea surges. But the project turned out to be doomed from the start.

Workers died during the construction and as the bad news spread, the development was abandoned. Yet the empty, rusted pod-houses are still there today. Photographer Craig Ferguson recently visited them and offers a terrific visual essay in File Magazine.

While there, he met four university students who had stopped by for a look. The building, they told him, contained “heavy evil.”

Tags: Hotels, Tres Loco, Asia, Taiwan, News and Briefs

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


1 Comment for When Futuristic Vacation Villas Go Bad

Julia 06.03.08 | 4:43 PM ET

Joanna, this is bizarre. I lived there for a year and never heard of these…

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