Folly

Folly
- usually costly, often fantastic, and mostly useless structures, which can be as diverse as sham castles, grottos, bridges, pagodas, temples etc many of which were built to appear as ruins.

folly a garden building built primarily for visual effect: to "fool" the eye. frieze the central level of the entablature, often decorated with classical motifs in carving or molding.

follyA Folly is a garden structure which can be seen as a folly (by its owner or by visitors) because of its appearance, cost or lack of utility (eg a sham castle, an artificial ruin or a hermit's cell).

They called it Burnham's Folly. But the Flatiron Building was actually a feat of engineering that used newly developed construction methods.

Men of the baser sort rose up against their betters: the rabble against the respectable, folly against wisdom, youth against its elders. And now all righteousness and peace among you is at an end.

During the 18th century an exedra became a popular garden feature or folly, often used as an ornamental curved screening wall to hide another part the garden, examples can be found at Belton House and West Wycombe Park ...

See also: House, Greek, Architecture, Broken, Villa