Longaberger Basket Building

The former Longaberger headquarters in Newark, Ohio, is seven storeys tall, shaped like a basket and complete with handles. Company founder Dave Longaberger came up with the idea in 1994, Ohio Magazine reported in 2015, after the business outgrew its home in Dresden. He wanted the building to look like the company's medium market basket and, the magazine said, struggled to find architects who understood the idea. Townspeople and even some employees were sceptical. "If we can put a man on the moon, we can build a building that looks like a basket," he was famous for saying, according to a company communications director quoted by the magazine.

The global firm NBBJ, which has a Columbus office, took up the challenge. Its design has a 30,000-square-foot atrium whose main-floor tiling echoes the bottom of a basket. An architect who worked on the NBBJ team said the handles were the hardest part and that each weighs 75 tons; he described them as hollow steel, bent from plates. The building opened in 1997, according to the Associated Press.