Built by attorney Phillip Weidner, the Dr. Seuss House is 185 feet tall and has stunning views of the surrounding landscape — but it's still unfinished after more than 20 years.
YouTubeGoose Creek Tower as seen from above.
There’s a whimsical structure in Alaska that locals have taken to calling the “Dr. Seuss House.” Like something Seussian, it rises an impossible distance into the sky, and looks like mismatched houses stacked together. But the house, officially called Goose Creek Tower, is very real.
Located in Talkeetna, Alaska, the house is 185 feet high and was built by Phillip Weidner, an Anchorage attorney who proudly calls the structure his “poem to the sky.” Weidner has not yet completed the project, but reportedly hopes to one day use it as a home for his family.
In the meantime, it’s become one of the strangest sites in Alaska, a colorful oddity people can enjoy as they pass along nearby roads.
The Inspiration Behind Goose Creek Tower
Phillip Weidner didn’t intend to build such a strange structure – at least not in the beginning. At first, the Anchorage-based attorney envisioned constructing a two-story cabin, nothing too fancy.
YouTubePhillip Weidner stands in his unfinished tower.
“Originally I was going to build a 40×40 scribed log cabin, which we built,” Weidner told Exploring The Obscure in a rare interview in 2015.
But Weidner had always been interested in construction. As Vice reported in 2016, he’d graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 with degrees in Industrial Management and Electrical Engineering. Though Weidner had gone on to study law at Harvard, he still had an engineer’s mind. And he applied it to his house in Talkeetna.
After building the original structure, alongside a concrete foundation and basement, Weidner realized that he could use 12 by 12 uprights — which he called the “eight sisters” — to build his home even higher.
“I put a house on top of a house, and I liked that,” Weidner told Exploring The Obscure. “So I just kept going and I just kept going.”
YouTubeGoose Creek Tower as seen on a wintery day.
The house began to take on a teetering, cartoonish look, which led some to dub it the “Dr. Seuss House.” But Weidner doesn’t like the nickname.
“It’s not a Dr. Seuss house, because Dr. Seuss is fantasy and this is real,” he stated. “I’ve never had any permission from Dr. Seuss to refer to him and I don’t think people should be referring to that.”
Weidner called his dream house Goose Creek Tower. So what’s it like?
What The ‘Dr. Seuss House’ Is Like
Today, Goose Creek Tower is a fantastic mix of ladders, staircases, and decks which look across a stunning vista of Alaskan wilderness.
“There’s eight decks you can walk completely around,” Weidner told Exploring The Obscure. “So at each level of the eight, including the very top, you can walk around 360 degrees.”
From this perspective, visitors to Goose Creek Tower would find a fantastic panorama. Depending on how you count the house’s staircases, it has between 14 and 17 stories, and stands 185 feet tall.
YouTubeA close-up of Goose Creek Tower, also known as the Dr. Seuss House for its whimsical design.
Weidner purportedly would have made it even higher, but risked scraping federal airspace, which begins at 200 feet.
Why build Goose Creek Tower so high?
Based on his interview, Weidner seems to have enjoyed the creative challenge of building a supertall house. But one theory suggests that he wanted a view of Denali, and kept building until he had had a good one.
No matter the motivation for the ambitious project, Goose Creek Tower has taken a considerable amount of time to complete. In fact, it still isn’t done. Though passionate, Weidner’s career as an attorney in Anchorage left him little time to work on the project over the past several decades.
The Plans For Goose Creek Tower
While the skeleton of Goose Creek Tower is complete, it’s still missing windows and doors. There’s also a lack of furniture and decoration, and decks without safety measures like railings.
YouTubeA look inside one of the many unfinished rooms of the tower.
Over time, the tower even became the target of trespassers, some of who damaged or defaced it.
But Phillip Weidner remains optimistic about the future of Goose Creek Tower — both for himself and for those who come after him.
“I plan for it to stand 1,000 years,” he said. “So we’ll see what people do with it.”
In the more near future, Weidner wants Goose Creek Tower to be a place for his family; a place where they can enjoy the stunning landscape, the Northern Lights, and views of Denali and other mountains in the distance.
“I’m going to primarily use it for my family,” he said. “I have children and grandchildren and it’s surrounded by 500 acres of homestead… ”
FacebookGoose Creek Tower as seen from below.
The very top room, he continued, the “the octagon room,” offers an especially impressive view of the surrounding area. There, Weidner hopes to spend his days writing poetry. He also hopes to install railings above the octagon room where the house’s “mast” is, so that people can enjoy an especially stunning panorama of the landscape.
Though Goose Creek Tower has become known as the Dr. Seuss House, Weidner sees it as a much more romantic, and majestic, piece of architecture. He calls the stunning 185-foot tower his “poem to the sky.”
And while the house isn’t open for visitors, Goose Creek Tower is still visible to the public from the nearby road. From that perspective, it’s still a stunning, surprising, truly Seussian sight: a series of cabins stacked on top of each other. But the view from the road is surely nothing like the view from Goose Creek Tower’s top floor, with its 360-degree view of the landscape.
That perspective, however, is saved for Phillip Weidner, his family, and whoever else might be around in 1,000 years.
After reading about the fantastical Goose Creek Tower in Alaska, also known as the Dr. Seuss House, discover the whimsical works of architect Antoni Gaudí. Then, take a look at these 35 photos of the architectural style people love to hate, brutalism.
