I can see my house from here

December 15, 2011 4:13 AM

Ross Racine works with a fictional world of suburban forms. Cristoph Gielen works with actual suburban forms. Here are some of their works, in no particular order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
posted by twoleftfeet (4 comments total)

I was about to get all 'blech suburbs', but then I looked at my GIS stuff and urban residential areas have similar geography from this scale. The arterials determine the path, the track housing determines the lot depth and spacing for local roads...it's not surprising where this banality comes from. Does remind me of this, though:

"I realized that the straight line leads to the downfall of mankind. But the straight line has become an absolute tyranny. The straight line is something cowardly drawn with a ruler, without thought or feeling; it is the line which does not exist in nature. And that line is the rotten foundation of our doomed civilization. Even if there are places where it is recognized that this line is rapidly leading to perdition, its course continues to be plotted....Any design undertaken with the straight line will be stillborn. Today we are witnessing the triumph of rationalist know-how and yet, at the same time, we find ourselves confronted with emptiness. An esthetic void, a desert of uniformity, criminal sterility, loss of creative power. Even creativity is prefabricated. We have become impotent. We are no longer able to create. That is our real illiteracy.

-Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1953)
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 4:54 AM on December 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

the straight line leads to the downfall of mankind

Way to dis Colorado.
posted by twoleftfeet at 5:01 AM on December 15, 2011

I love these, thanks.
posted by Forktine at 6:19 AM on December 15, 2011

It looks so much like cancer. An undifferentiated metastatic mass that sucks up resources and eventually destroys the host from within. There is hope; there are treatments: surgery, chemo and my favourite: therapeutic radiation.

Thanks.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:36 AM on December 15, 2011