Tag Archives: photography

Why McMansions are built around the world

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A Swedish photographer set out to capture American-style McMansions around the globe:

Intrigued by the rising middle class in these fast-expanding economies, Adolfsson visited 44 model homes in eight different countries. All displayed strikingly similar characteristics and seemed to be taking their lead from architectural and structural ideas popularized across the U.S over the last century.

And why do McMansions have appeal around the globe?

Adolfsson said he believes people in emerging nations are drawn towards projects such as these because they believe they evoke an image of success, wealth and affluence.

“What I think we’re seeing is an upper middle class that has been growing fairly rapidly over the last two decades accompanying the economic expansion in these countries,” he said…

“What we are seeing is essentially the American suburban dream,” Adolfsson said. “This has been brought to people through movies, through soap operas, through magazines for decades. That’s really what people see as something desirable.”

If this is the case, then McMansions have a similar appeal in other countries as they do in the United States. They are often viewed as markers of success, showing the ability to purchase land and a large, modern home (and the needed car to travel from this home to other places).

Two difference in these global McMansions. Adolfsson notes that these neighborhoods of McMansions stand out as outliers compared to the surrounding area. Additionally, many of these McMansions are in gated communities. This may happen occasionally in the United States but it is not necessarily common.

Another thought: I don’t know that many Americans think of the global export of their housing styles.

Patterns amongst borders between suburban yards

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An artist noticed that her neighbors in an older Sacramento suburb follow some patterns in the borders between their yards:

“There are definite patterns of cohesiveness,” says Neidigh of her series Property Line. She says it’s possible to observe “the layering of planting trends over 50, 60 years, or even older.”A Midwest transplant who’s settled in California’s capitol city, Neidigh set out to document the “groomed landscapes” of the city, drilling down past the Pleasantville-type conformity to reveal the unique personailties expressed in seemingly cookie-cutter borders. Her earlier series, With Great Care, focuses on the tightly groomed mulberry trees found in Sacramento neighborhoods. She’s intrigued by the tension of perennially pruning these plants that outgrow their accceptable bounds.

“It has that inherited design, where they’re maintaining this thing that’s been planted so long ago, and just keeping it in bounds,” Neidigh says.

Here is my favorite of the online pictures:

Land lines can be quite contested with different ideas about landscaping as well as determining the exact line. The picture above offers a great contrast: a driveway on the right with an extra parking space on the lot line with the yard on the left going for some minimalist landscaping amongst brick pavers. The right side offers function, the left side wants to have a little piece of nature. Why don’t the people on the left create a larger hedge if they want to have plants along the line?

It’s too bad we don’t get to see the neighbors interacting across these lot lines. Of course, that assumes they do have much interaction in their front yards or that they even interact much at all…

The beauty of highway over ramps

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A sample of photographer Alex MacLean’s aerial photography includes this picture of a highway intersection in Albuquerque.

Alex MacLean 2008

Beautiful. There are several dimensions to this:

1. The interplay of light and dark both from the sunlight as well as the darker roadway and the lighter desert.

2. The modernist twists of the highway ramps.

3. The smallness of the cars, a reminder of the limited lives we lead.

I know highways are concrete entities that lead to traffic and air pollution but I’ve always enjoyed seeing them from above.

Photographing the class divide on LA mass transit

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A photographer considers what is revealed at the bus stops of Los Angeles buses during late night hours:

J. Wesley Brown’s vivid nighttime portraits of bus riders are a refreshing look at a rarely seen side of Los Angeles. The city’s freeway interchanges are iconic, but for many Angelinos, these bus stop dwellers represent an even more authentic feeling of home.

Brown, 34, spent two and a half years roaming the city to shoot Riders, a series of fascinating portraits of ordinary people doing ordinary things. That might seem like a mundane topic, but Riders offers a commentary on the societal strata of Los Angeles.

“Riding a bus in L.A. is the most outwardly visible sign of class divide,” says Brown.

In shooting Riders, Brown found the movie posters in bus stop advertising sometimes offered a commentary on the scenes framed by the bus shelters. And his exploration of the city noted that poorer neighborhoods that don’t attract advertising dollars often don’t have bus shelters at all.

Los Angeles is known for its cars, highways, and driving. Yet, owning a vehicle is expensive and mass transit is a necessary part of life for those with fewer resources. The current LA Metro might not be as expansive as the once-extensive streetcar systems but a major city today can’t function well or serve its full population without at least some mass transit.

It sounds like the pictures also highlight one of the odd features of car ownership in the United States: outside of a few places, like Manhattan, many Americans would choose to purchase a car when they have the economic means. Whether this is because a car offers more independence or is a symbol of having reached a certain social status or mass transit is viewed as more lower class or a combination of these, attaining car ownership is an important part of American life.

The negative space, inverted skyline of New York City

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A photographer decided to look not at the buildings in New York City but rather at the negative space between the buildings:

Wegner is referring to a city made of sky. In the space between the iconic buildings we pass everyday is another type of structure, one that’s totally made of blue and clouds. In his Buildings Made of Sky series, Wegner transforms a city’s negative space into ephemeral structures that look like inverted skyscrapers…

Looking at one of Wegner’s photographs is like looking at a mirage; you’re not sure if what you’re seeing actually exists. In fact, even he wasn’t sure of what he was seeing when he first began noticing inverted buildings suspended between steel and glass. “It was a serial epiphany,” he recalls. “I kept seeing it, but I almost didn’t register what I was looking at.”

To get his shots, Wegner stands in the middle of the street, focuses on the infinity and snaps the picture. “I just look all the way to the horizon, and the streets have conveniently arranged themselves to give you this image,” he says. “People will sometimes stop me and ask what I’m taking a picture of, and I tell them, ‘nothing.’” It takes little doctoring to get the desired effect: “It’s just a matter of flipping the image upside down,” he explains.

Of course, you can’t just stroll around Manhattan or any other big city and assume you’ll bump into a photo-worthy building made of sky. There are factors to be considered, like time of day (he likes early morning and evening because of the glow) location (Midtown’s gridded streets are optimal) and weather (blue skies are better than grey). Still, Wegner says, there’s an element of exploration that is central to his process. “I wander around in fugue state and hope I don’t get hit by a truck,” he says. “I’ve had more conversations with irate cabbies than you can imagine.”

Interesting flip of the script. He manages to take spaces that are not always revered – think of the references to the concrete canyons of New York City – and notes something worthwhile. Plus, this might get people to think about spaces between buildings differently. While some of this happens when people in current buildings complain about new buildings blocking their sunlight or views, large buildings are partly what they are because of their surroundings.

Those who live in Walmart parking lots

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Walmart has thousands of U.S. locations and there are people who live in some of these parking lots:

The company’s policy of allowing overnight stays in their parking lots is intended to boost sales, but has the tangential effect of creating a subculture around its locations (though they’re still at the mercy of local laws).

The two separate Walmart parking lots in Flagstaff, Arizona are specifically known for their long-term residents, and this past summer photographer Nolan Conway spent several days making a series of portraits of both the overnighters and the people who call these asphalt grids a temporary home…

Sometimes managers will say no to campers because space is limited. Conway says he’s unsure what the exact rules were for the Flagstaff Walmart parking lots but there were stories of the police coming and telling all the long-term campers to leave.

Conway says he first tried to make the Walmart portraits in another city during the winter but was routinely turned down. In Flagstaff people seemed more amenable, partly because it was summer and they were outside and more approachable, but also because these parking lots had so many long-term residents that they developed relationships and interacted on a regular basis. Their dogs would play together and residents shared meals and holidays.

Why should we be surprised – lots of other things happen at Walmart. It would also be interesting to hear: (1) what Walmart officially says about people living in the parking lots; (2) whether this actually does help boost sales; (3) is there anything terribly wrong if people live in parking lots that are often criticized for being wasted space much of the day?

Photography of the last row houses standing

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A photographer has put together a series of row houses that now stand alone in urban neighborhoods:

For German-born photographer Ben Marcin, the plucky row houses left standing in cities on America’s Eastern Seaboard—so-called “nail houses” that are the leavings of gentrification, unrealized developments, and stubborn homeowners—are the kind of domestic oddity that his shutter snapping. Why? “Many details that might not be noticed in a homogenous row of twenty attached row houses become apparent when everything else has been torn down. And then there’s the lingering question of why a single row house was allowed to remain upright. Still retaining traces of its former glory, the last house standing is often still occupied.” The shot above is in Baltimore, but others in his Last House Standing series sit in Philadelphia and Camden, N.J.

If I had to guess at what these photos are about, they are meant to invoke communities that have been lost. This is similar to all the photos coming out of Detroit in the past few years; the buildings themselves aren’t the focus but rather the sad state in which the current buildings are in.

I’m trying to picture what form a similar picture might take for a suburban subdivision. Simply showing one house all lonely at the end of an otherwise empty cul-de-sac might work. But, the beauty of the row house photos is that all these houses together formed a single unit whereas single-family homes already stand alone. Perhaps a middle unit suburban townhouse might do?

Using camera obscura to bring the city indoors

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I’ve run into photographer Abelardo Morell’s camera obscura work before and here is Morell’s official site with plenty of stunning photos. Two quick questions:

1. Are these rooms liveable while the images are on the wall? The artwork is interesting in itself but it would even better if a homeowner could go about their everyday business with these images present.

2. What about doing this in larger buildings and larger scenes? Imagine a 200 foot wide cityscape in a larger space.

Photographing some of the densest housing on earth in Hong Kong

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Check out a few photos of the dense high rises in Hong Kong:

As one of the most densely populated regions in the world, Hong Kong boasts not only the number one spot on Forbes’ list of escalating real estate markets, but also some of the most packed housing towers on Earth (at least one of which includes an honest-to-goodness 16.4-square-foot apartment). Captivated by these tightly crammed stacked cities, of sorts, German-born photographer Michael Wolf created tapestry-like shots of the residential buildings, cropping context to make the scope of each photo seem all the more mind-bending. In Hong Kong, architecture is “driven by function, not form and one tower block can only be distinguished from the next by the bold colour schemes of its façade,” he says, which means each piece in his Architecture of Density series, published earlier this year in a book by the same name, is pattern-driven and geometric; it’s so reminiscent of computer code that the human element nearly disappears altogether.

It would be interesting to see how people react to these pictures and these building designs. The headline to the story suggests these buildings are “sterile” but I could imagine other reactions: there is an order (and perhaps even some symmetry) to these structures; these buildings are stark and devoid of character; perhaps the buildings have to be this way to squeeze in so many people. Of course, these buildings don’t have to look this way; ornamentation doesn’t necessarily limit density. But, these buildings are the product of a particular era, context, and purpose.

Here is some more from the London School of Economics on Hong Kong’s density and the architecture and planning that has gone into it:

The urban area of Hong Kong has the highest population and employment density in the world. Measured at block level, some areas may have population densities of more than 400,000 people per square kilometre. As of 2011, there are seven million people for its 1,068 square kilometres (412 square miles) of land. However, more than 75 per cent of this land comprises no-built-up areas. The high concentration of people in just a few square kilometres is due partly to the fact that new town development did not take place until well into the 1970s and therefore most of the population (which had experienced a post-war boom in the 1950s) had to be accommodated in the main urban area along the waterfront of the Victoria Harbour on Hong Kong Island. The high price of land in Hong Kong also contributes to its high-density development…

Over the past few years, Hong Kong has developed the following planning, design and management measures to continue improving its high-rise living environments:

External environment of buildings
1) Better planning and design so that buildings are positioned further apart and have more open space;
2) Improved transport management by prioritising the development of mass transit and focusing on pedestrian movement in order to keep traffic congestion in check;
3) Creation of space by fully utilising the already-existing areas within buildings, such as roof tops and podiums, and transforming them into community and recreational spaces;
4) A trend towards large-scale property developments, which allows a greater consolidation of space in order to provide community facilities and ease of movement between locales;
5) The use of new building technology and materials to break the monotony of a district, while outdoor escalators facilitate the movement of pedestrians; and
6) Public education campaigns to encourage people to contribute to maintaining a clean environment.

All of this makes for quite a sight, even compared to the density of Manhattan.

Supermax prison looks like suburban sprawl from the air?

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A photographer taking and examining aerial photos of prisons made an interesting connection: the prisons look like suburban sprawl from the air.

High above the Arizona desert in 2010, after a day of photographing housing developments, Christoph Gielen looked down from the helicopter upon Arizona State Prison Complex-Florence. The hexagonal arrangement of the prison site, to him, replicated the six-sided concentric order of suburbs he’d shot previously. That chance observation kickstarted a three-year project called American Prison Perspectives, in which Gielen examines the architecture of Supermax prisons via aerial photos…

“I want to expose the prevailing trend toward building increased-security prison systems, and illustrate how prison design and architecture do, in fact, reflect political discourse, economic priorities, cultural sentiments and social insecurities,” says Gielen. “What does our ongoing tolerance of solitary confinement say about us as a society?”

Alas, there is not much talk here about the possible connections between the design of suburbs and high-security prisons. However, I imagine the commentary consistent with common critiques of the suburbs might go like this: we shouldn’t be surprised at this because suburban patterns are meant to help isolate and imprison people. A difference is that Americans might be self-isolating (though one could argue there is certainly a social and cultural push toward the suburbs) and prisoners have little choice in these prisons. But, wouldn’t that make the suburban prison even worse?

It would be interesting to know if there is any tangible connection/influence between these two kinds of designs…