identify this photo

April 4, 2006 10:54 AM

I seem to recall a while back there was a really creepy, possibly panoramic, photograph of a sprawling suburban housing development posted to the blue, though it may have been on mathowie or merlinmann's personal sites. Does anyone know what I'm talking about and can they point me to the image?
posted by keswick to MetaFilter-related at 10:54 AM (54 comments total)

Was it this one? This is the photographer's page.
posted by zsazsa at 10:57 AM on April 4, 2006

No, it was in the US, possibly the East Bay?
posted by keswick at 10:58 AM on April 4, 2006

Regardless, that first link is stunningly creepy. I cannot help but think of hundreds of children bouncing hundreds of red balls in time, and a pink, pulsing brain off in a tower downtown.
posted by cortex at 11:06 AM on April 4, 2006

This one? When I posted it to my del.icio.us links after seeing it in mathowie's, I had exactly the same thought as cortex's: Camazotz.

Zsazsa's photo link is creepier though.
posted by brownpau at 11:14 AM on April 4, 2006

That's the one! How now, brownpau!
posted by keswick at 11:18 AM on April 4, 2006

The photo of suburbia was frightening enough -- if you look through that entire album, though, it's unbelievable. That should perhaps be an FPP in itself.
posted by blacklite at 11:25 AM on April 4, 2006

(And by album I mean the photographer's page zsazsa linked to.)
posted by blacklite at 11:26 AM on April 4, 2006

Holy shit, zsazsa. They're all made out of ticky-tacky.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:31 AM on April 4, 2006

blacklite: that has been an FPP. In fact I think it was even double-posted.
posted by vacapinta at 11:38 AM on April 4, 2006

You've all lead very sheltered lives, haven't you?
posted by timeistight at 11:39 AM on April 4, 2006

Those houses in Mexico City aren't all that bad. Haven't any of you ever played SimCity, for pete's sake?
posted by crunchland at 11:42 AM on April 4, 2006

timeistight: could you elaborate on that?
posted by keswick at 11:45 AM on April 4, 2006

I'm hoping it's a devious pun, keswick.
posted by cortex at 11:51 AM on April 4, 2006

With all the covenants and zoning restrictions in place ostensibly to prevent problematic blights on the landscape, you'd think there'd be some kind of restriction against building *every single building exactly the same*.

/says multiplcation tables
posted by weston at 12:12 PM on April 4, 2006

timeistight: could you elaborate on that?

Sure: These places don't look that bad to me; at least they've left some trees and greenery. Spend some time driving around southern Ontario and these will look like paradise.

The whole "ooo... scary" thing seems kind of elitist to me, frankly. I wouldn't want to live there, but I know thousands do.

And no, I'm afraid the pun was completely unintentional. I wish I'd thought of it, though.
posted by timeistight at 12:13 PM on April 4, 2006

It's not so much "ooo...scary" as it is "ooo...creepy aesthetics of so many identical houses laid out in so strict a grid."

I mean, yes, I have lived a sheltered life insofar as I've never been stuck without a roof over my head, but it's not like I can't imagine (or haven't seen) cheaply/efficently/uncreatively produced housing of all sorts.

But that first link? Yes. Creepy. May well be a perfectly nice place to live, and the effect is probably considerably reduced when you're standing in the driveway instead of taking in the wide-angle from above, but that doesn't make it any less striking and unsettling an image of regularity.
posted by cortex at 12:17 PM on April 4, 2006

The Big Orange Splot.
posted by interrobang at 12:20 PM on April 4, 2006

> "ooo...creepy aesthetics of so many identical houses laid out in so strict a grid."

So what's an apartment building, then? Identical dwellings laid out in strict grid, that that same grid replicated for forty stories up and down except for one rich dude in the penthouse up top. Ants! It could only be ants that live in a place like that.

posted by jfuller at 12:25 PM on April 4, 2006

As for that pic of San Ramon, don't worry, it'll all be a very creepy ghost town after the water runs out.
posted by jfuller at 12:26 PM on April 4, 2006

I submit that, were you able to take a picture of all the apartments in an apartment building with one frame, the results would be striking and creepy.
posted by cortex at 12:30 PM on April 4, 2006

I've often marveled at the "man comes home drunk and walks into the wrong house" stories, and now I know how they happen.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 12:40 PM on April 4, 2006

In Portland, there is a prohibition against building anymore "snout houses" - that is, houses with the garage sticking out on the front because such dwellings offended someone's aesthetic sense.
Of course, one immediately wonders if the offended ones are the 'concrete cabal' anxious to pour lo-o-ong driveways around to the back of the house.
Strangely, there was no public outcry, no rally, no marching with candles.
posted by Cranberry at 12:51 PM on April 4, 2006

My dad is certainly among the quietly, non-militantly offended, Cranberry—he was an architecture student back in the day, and his objection is simple: they are uniformly ugly, unattractive buildings.

He has no investment in local building-contractor concerns.

He's also a quiet advocate for city sign-code reform, viz. recent and ongoing ridiculousness over the inability to paint a damned mural without going through a $3,000 (non-refundable, non-guaranteed) signage application with the city. The Merc quoted him rattling off a little bit of building code jargon a year or two back. I was tickled.
posted by cortex at 1:00 PM on April 4, 2006

zsazsa's first link is indeed creepy. And yes, I have been without a roof and would've been happy to live in Creepytown.
posted by deborah at 1:58 PM on April 4, 2006

I submit that, were you able to take a picture of all the apartments in an apartment building with one frame, the results would be striking and creepy.

Like this?
posted by O9scar at 2:23 PM on April 4, 2006

Jesus, that's *really* creepy.

But you know what's creepier than that? Imagine all those folks owning a suburban house.
posted by keswick at 2:27 PM on April 4, 2006

I had been thinking more of an impossible-to-accomplish cutaway photo of every unit in a building, O9scar, but many of those photos do have a surreal, disorienting aspect that covers some of the same ground.

However, I think I can state what is so striking to me about the original photo. Unlike an apartment building, where the units are necessarily thematically very similar if not identical, houses are generally a sort of panoply of designs and colors and shapes (laid across, perhaps, the looser grid of a city block). It's that uniformity in a context where variety is the norm (according to my own experiences, in any case) that is so unsettling.

I really did not suspect, at first, that the photo was real—it looked like a good render by someone who couldn't be bothered to model more than one house and so used the same architecture for every single of their thousand-or-so rendered houses.

A sort of uncanny valley of landscaping and architectural design.
posted by cortex at 2:34 PM on April 4, 2006

Huh. The San Ramon photo doesn't look creepy to me at all; just looks like a SoCal housing development. And not a particularly awful one. Different strokes, I guess. (Mind you, I prefer quaint little towns with winding narrow streets, cobblestoned if possible, and at least a millennium of history, but that's a pretty high bar to set for acceptability.)
posted by languagehat at 2:45 PM on April 4, 2006

Despite the similarity and density of the housing, leading non-Californians to think of Southern California, San Ramon is in Northern California.
posted by Lynsey at 4:07 PM on April 4, 2006

It may not be in SoCal, but that sure isn't NorCal either.
posted by keswick at 4:16 PM on April 4, 2006

Neither one of the pictures looked creepy to me. There really arn't that many of the pink mexican houses.

The Hong Kong ones look awsome, IMO. I'd love to live there. And they probably have a view of the ocean, or mainland china off in the distance.
posted by delmoi at 4:31 PM on April 4, 2006

You've all lead very sheltered lives, haven't you?

In a less snarky way, I'd have to note that urban and suburban housing in Korea (housing in the countryside is the same -- huge jarring concrete human beehives raised out of the fields -- or a different and no less appealing kind of poverty-blighted horrorshow) is the nightmare logical extreme that this sort of thing is taken to. The place in the photo looks like some kind of freakin' paradise to this jaundiced, Korea-fied eye.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:49 PM on April 4, 2006

Bay Area is NorCal -- especially the inland parts. SoCal doesn't start till you pass the imaginary line that emerges from the northern outskirts of Fresno.

There ain't no MidCal, brah.
posted by fishfucker at 5:28 PM on April 4, 2006

Ooo, people's houses! Creepy!
posted by kindall at 5:45 PM on April 4, 2006

"Ooo, people's houses! Creepy!"

Not just people, Californians!

I'm totally squicked.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 6:15 PM on April 4, 2006

I find the housing grids in america kinda creepy - all planned...
posted by RufusW at 6:21 PM on April 4, 2006

Manhattan looked like that once.
posted by Oddly at 6:30 PM on April 4, 2006

San Ramon is in Northern California.

Well, there you go. I actually thought about looking it up, but I was lazy, and I figured "I'm not saying it is in SoCal, just that it looks like SoCal." Now I know. (And I lived in SoCal for years, which goes to show that So and No really are two different universes.)
posted by languagehat at 7:17 PM on April 4, 2006

Bay Area is NorCal

Hate to break it to you, but you're wrong.
posted by keswick at 9:33 PM on April 4, 2006

Bay Area is NorCal

Hate to break it to you, but you're wrong.

Hate to break it to you, keswick, but to everyone outside Chico (and its equivalents), you're wrong.
posted by dersins at 11:19 PM on April 4, 2006

Since the answer has already been found, does anyone remember an asian photographer that was posted here a few months ago. One of his pictures was a black and white image of crows sitting and flying around a fence? It was kind of dark and ominous.
posted by 517 at 8:22 AM on April 5, 2006

Crows on a fence, dark and ominous? You have led a sheltered, life, sir. When once (which is to say, forever) you have looked upon the slavering Ur-Vultures of the Grastin mineral-belt, perched as they so often are upon a levee of human and alien corpses, well, crows and fences lose something of their impact.
posted by cortex at 8:49 AM on April 5, 2006

blacklite writes "The photo of suburbia was frightening enough -- if you look through that entire album, though, it's unbelievable. That should perhaps be an FPP in itself.

Holy cow, is that ever for sure. That's an amazing album. I only wish they were available for viewing in a higher resolution.
posted by Songdog at 9:16 AM on April 5, 2006

And the same goes for the album that O9scar posted
posted by Songdog at 9:20 AM on April 5, 2006

since SOMEBODY deleted my previous comment, allow me to retort in a different manner:

dersins: just because a majority of people agree on something does not mean the thing they agree on is correct.
posted by keswick at 9:32 AM on April 5, 2006

That way lies madness, keswick. By the same token, I have nearly given up insisting to otherwise intelligent people that They Might Be Giants is not, in fact, a dismissable, novelty band.
posted by cortex at 9:38 AM on April 5, 2006

And I say the NoCal-SoCal line is drawn at the southern end of Santa Barbara county. So there!
posted by deborah at 9:50 AM on April 5, 2006

dersins: just because a majority of people agree on something does not mean the thing they agree on is correct.

Agreed in some cases (politics and culture being the most obvious examples). However, in the case of naming things, the most common usage is gernally the correct one.
posted by dersins at 9:50 AM on April 5, 2006

You're from Oregon, so I'm really not sure why you think you're an expert on California.
posted by keswick at 9:59 AM on April 5, 2006

I'm not "from" Oregon. I live in Oregon. It's a semantic distinction that may be difficult to understand, but it's an important one.
posted by dersins at 10:03 AM on April 5, 2006

Many an embittered and embattled Oregonian has wondered the same thing to himself, keswick. The natural answer, of course, is, as in all things, the goddamned Californians.
posted by cortex at 10:04 AM on April 5, 2006

Sup, State of Jefferson buddy? :)
posted by keswick at 11:43 AM on April 5, 2006

Creepy? Place looks awesome! Rolling fields, huge houses, lawns, hills. What the hell kind of paradise-on-earth does everyone here live in that a place like that looks creepy?
posted by Bugbread at 1:35 PM on April 6, 2006

The asymmetrical kind.
posted by cortex at 2:59 PM on April 6, 2006