The billboard-style house.

"The SINGLE HAUS is designed to fill the niche for building in extreme/hard-to-settle landscapes such as marshes, cliff sides, lakes, and even in place of old highway billboards."

This is just a design, and there's no interior floor plan, but I'm fascinated by it. Maybe I'd just like to see a movie about people living in places like this... after the ocean levels rise, perhaps.

ADDED: The Single Hauz — spelled differently — was featured on BLDGBLOG 4 years ago:

Could you use the mast-and-cantilever model for other types of architectural structures, whether those are single-family houses – whole cul-de-sacs lined with modernist billboard homes! – or even restaurants and public libraries?

The Single Hauz shows how beautiful the effect could be.

What about the commercial potential? These pictures don't show the building actually being used as a billboard, but why not? You could pay for your housing by collecting advertising revenue.

Or perhaps the house could be a blog, covered in plasma-screen, with a column of advertising on the right, and new text appearing, typed up fresh by the resident of the billboard-house... BillboardHouseBlog.

ALSO: It taps into that part of us that imagines we'd like to live in a treehouse... or that likes to think about pillar saints, like Simeon Stylites:

This first pillar was little more than four meters high, but his well-wishers subsequently replaced it with others, the last in the series being apparently over 15 meters from the ground. At the top of the pillar was a platform, with a baluster, which is believed to have been about one square metre....

Edward Gibbon in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire describes Simeon's existence as follows:

In this last and lofty station, the Syrian Anachoret resisted the heat of thirty summers, and the cold of as many winters. Habit and exercise instructed him to maintain his dangerous situation without fear or giddiness, and successively to assume the different postures of devotion. He sometimes prayed in an erect attitude, with his outstretched arms in the figure of a cross, but his most familiar practice was that of bending his meagre skeleton from the forehead to the feet; and a curious spectator, after numbering twelve hundred and forty- four repetitions, at length desisted from the endless account. The progress of an ulcer in his thigh might shorten, but it could not disturb, this celestial life; and the patient Hermit expired, without descending from his column.

Even on the highest of his columns, Simeon was not withdrawn from the world. If anything, the new pillar drew even more people, not only the pilgrims who had come earlier but now sightseers as well. Simeon made himself available to these visitors every afternoon... In contrast to the extreme austerity that he demanded of himself, his preaching conveyed temperance and compassion, and was marked with common sense and freedom from fanaticism.