The world is full of architectural fake overs, from individual facades to entire buildings designed to look like something other than what they really are. Historically, some of these disguises have been less well-intentioned than others. During World War II, Nazis gave the Red Cross access to a concentration camp but they controlled the experience, putting up false fronts to make it seem more humane. Along similarly duplicitous lines, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez reportedly had workers paint the bottoms of potholes along the routes taken by foreign dignitaries to disguise the degree of road disrepair.

When President Vladimir Putin was scheduled to visit a largely abandoned town, entire vernacular facade-covering banners were hung over rundown building exteriors. Colorful faux painted walls, windows and even cats were draped over the sides of derelict structures. Some of these quirky examples may sound outdated or limited to extreme regimes, but similar trickery can be found around the world. In anticipation of an upcoming G8 summit in 2013, for instance, closed storefront windows in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland were populated with images depicting open businesses stocked with goods, an illusion set up to impress visitors.

Sometimes, subterfuge is about making something look better, a kind of economic camouflage, but it can also be about political or military concealment. In World War II, a the entire rooftop of a Seattle airplane manufacturing plant was covered with a fake suburb complete with plywood streets, sidewalks, trees and houses. This elaborate deception was erected to conceal a vital piece of wartime infrastructure, confusing potential enemy spy planes and bombers that might pass overhead. In hindsight, attacks on the American mainland might sound improbable, but in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack the people in power were taking no chances.

Many misleading designs are less elaborate but also far more prevalent than most people realize. Hiding in plain sight in cities like New York, London, Paris and Toronto, among others, some architectural facades have been used to cover up infrastructure including sewer and subway exhaust vents. In other cases, entire fake buildings have been built as shells around around facilities like electrical substations. Similar strategies have been employed to reduce the appearance of blight in cities including Cincinnati, Cleveland and Chicago, where fake interior scenes have been applied to boarded-up windows on homes and businesses.

Not all of these fakes are meant to distort reality or create believable illusions. Test track villages in places like Ann Arbor, Michigan, for instance, are used to help study road conditions and try out new autonomous vehicle technologies.

There are also “Hogan’s Alleys” around the world — fake towns made for training police, military and other emergency personnel by setting up simulated crimes, riots and terrorist attacks in semi-realistic built environments. Some of these can be quite detailed, like Survival Town, an entire development complete with furniture and mannequins built simply to be blown in bomb tests. Whatever their particular form and intended level of deception, all of these fake places share a common designation — and so-called “Potemkin Villages” have a strangely compelling origin story.

The Original Potempkin Village

A Potempkin Village is a false front designed to cover facts with fictions, painting a better picture (literally or otherwise) over the face of a less attractive reality. The name comes from governor Grigory Potemkin who, as the story goes, wanted to impress his former lover, Russian Empress Catherine II, as she toured the Crimean countryside in the wake of war. To win her approval, he concocted one of the craziest architectural plans in history, involving the erection of entire portable villages at various locations along the way. These fake towns would be disassembled when her delegation passed by on a barge and then moved downstream along the Dnieper River to be rapidly reconstructed at the next stop on the route — the changeovers happened while the empress slept.

Thus, the same faux buildings would be seen over and over again in new contexts by her highness and other ambassadors. Potempkin’s underlings, meanwhile, would dress up and pretend to live in these places along the way. While it can be hard to disentangle facts from fantasies in this particularly peculiar history, one thing is certain: from these stories arose the idea of the “Potemkin Village,” which came to have political and economic as well as architectural meaning.

Potempkin’s story is extreme, but his motivations are relateable — he was driven by that same desire ordinary people have to make their homes a bit tidier than usual when entertaining guests or that inspires business owners to put slightly idealized versions of their wares upfront on display. The difference is arguably one of scale and degree, and his position of power and authority enabled him to take things further. In the realm of international economics, politics, business and military operations, such deceptions can indeed become massive, surreal and in rare cases are persistently maintained, even when people know a place is fake.

The World’s Biggest Facade

Perhaps the most sizable and strange contemporary example is the village of Kijong-dong, located near the Korean Demilitarized Zone. To understand this place, though, one needs to first understand the context in which it was constructed.

The Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) have effectively been at war for over 60 years. The Korean Armistice Agreement brought an end to the active hostilities of the Korean War in 1953, but it was only meant to be a temporary measure. Absent a more permanent settlement, the conflict technically remains open-ended. The resulting KMZ spans 160 miles from coast to coast and is 2.5 miles wide with the Military Demarcation Line running down the center. To this day, the border between remains one of the most militarized in the world as both sides claim the right to govern the whole Korean peninsula. Along the border, both North and South Korea maintain “peace villages,” each of which is peculiar in its own way.

On the south side, residents of Daeseong-dong live tax-free and exempt from military service. The place may seem a bit artificial, but it has real residents living out their real lives. On the north side, the situation appears much stranger — even at a glance, Kijong-dong looks conspicuously luxurious for a rural North Korean town. Interior lights turn on and off at set times while street-sweeping caretakers and other “citizens” are positioned to make it look occupied. “Farmers” show up during the day but depart at night rather than heading into one of the “buildings” where people might be expected to live.

North Korea is well known for guiding visitors through particular routes of its capital city and controlling the experience of travelers to the country, but Kijong-dong takes this kind of coercive deception to the next level, staging an entire town for display complete with a support cast and crew. However real and fake modern accounts of Potempkin’s historical efforts may be, he would presumably at least be impressed by the effort.

In bustling cities packed with other people, it can be nice to stand out at times, but it can also be a relief to fade quietly into the background for a bit. Creative wallflowers looking for a bit of both draw on all sorts of inspiration to create urban camouflage that ranges from virtually invisible to fashionably outstanding.

Take Menja Stevenson, a German artist transfixed by public transit textiles. Often overlooked or outright disliked by others, she found that he patterns applied to train and bus seats are quite intensively and cleverly designed.

Transit fabrics have a job to do, standing up to wear and tear while mitigating the visible impact of dirt, stains, spilled drinks and other challenging conditions. So Stevenson contacted transportation agencies to secure fabric samples, then started making outfits based on these generally unloved textiles.

Ironically, though, this kind of camouflage actually makes the wearer stand out, whether they are sitting in a pattern-matching seat (a juxtaposition which can look rather surreal) or simply striding down the street (clad in what are relatively unusual patterns).

Photographer Joseph Ford combined forces with knitter Nina Dodd to take a similar idea a step further, crafting apparel to match a variety of urban backdrops related to transportation and otherwise. For their project, they borrowed colors and patterns from tiles, bricks, even a graffiti mural.

The resulting camouflage is still very context-specific, but taken to other locations the the results actually start to blend in — seen on the street, it would generally be hard to guess that these subjects were wearing designs lifted from public places.

Of course, visual and material patterns aren’t the only repeating elements in cities that one could use as a basis for concealment. Physical objects like soda machines and waste bins also proliferate, adding an opportunity for immersive camouflage that can works in three dimensions.

Designer Aya Tsukioka took her disguises to the next level when she created a set of suits and backpacks aimed at mimicking the size, form and details of everyday urban objects. Since the specifics of such designs vary from city to city, they may not match their setting anywhere else, but these outfits are right at home in Tokyo.

If machine suits represent the maximalist end of the camouflage spectrum, emulating complex patterns and larger objects, these black-and-white wearable architectures designed by Snarkitecture are definitely more on the minimalist side.

Copied from rectangular, hexagonal and marbled surfaces around New York City, one would be hard-pressed to guess that architectural surfaces inspired these shirts, hoodies and hats.

Not to be outdone, other New Yorkers have taken urban camouflage beyond textiles and into the realm of body paint, enabling levels of detail and precise blending that are as context-dependent as they are mesmerizing.

Artist Trina Merry takes personalized trompe l’oeil to the third dimension, first in the Big Apple and then beyond. For her photos, she places figures in front of architectural icons and everyday cityscapes, painting people to match bricks, concrete, steel, graffiti, trees, wavy water or whatever is needed to complete the illusion.

No story mentioning body-painted urban camouflage artists would be complete without Liu Bolin, whose work borders on uncanny at times, looking more like the product of Photoshop than photography. His pictures may be fun and entertaining, but they are not without serious and controversial dimensions. In this past, he has had run-ins with the Chinese government — at one point, police even shut down his studio for including state buildings, uniforms and other official design elements.

“Living in the red hot China,” says Bolin, “I feel that I am not in control of my own life. However, I have an indescribable burning desire inside of me. Art is a weapon that helps us untangle the chaos in our lives. I hope that my artworks can calm people down during this period of constant change, but at the same time, inspire people to re-evaluate our environment and reconsider the problems arising in our society.”

Context is of course the key to camouflage, which is part of what makes it such a powerful tool for artists seeking to speak to certain times, places and conditions — like the mass-produced repetition of stuff for sale in big retail stores, illustrated above. From body paint based on decorative wallpapers to ghillie suits designed to blend into supermarket sales bins, there can be more to an urban disguise than meets the eye.

These visually stunning German transformer stations display artistic paint jobs that beautify their surroundings while discouraging graffiti artists.

“Transformatorenstation” is German for “transformer stations”, formerly known as “substations” before the advent of large electric power plants altered their prime function to be power distribution stations. These box-like structures are nowadays mainly prefabricated with little or no decorative aspects.

While this practice is cheaper, the stations are extremely alluring to graffiti artists due to their being “blank canvases” in public view. Thus, locally sponsored initiatives that enlist artists to paint the stations save money in the long run, as less funds need to be expended on graffiti removal. This “trafostation” (to use the German short form) celebrates the long maritime tradition in the Baltic Sea port city of Rostock, as captured by Flickr members Patrick in July of 2014 and Victor Valore (PowerSubShot) in February of 2018.

Seat of Power

These transformer stations are located in Wismar, another historic Hanseatic League town located on the Baltic Sea coast west of Rostock. Wismar-based artist Christian Pursch of TEML-Designs painted these two stations, the first of which appears to portray the benefits of electrification to homeowners. Flickr member Patrick snapped these Wismar trafostations in early 2014.

Mammoth Undertaking

Flickr member abudulla.saheem photographed this rather large transformer station in Köln (Cologne), an historic city in southeastern Germany famed for its iconic twin-spired cathedral. Note the graffiti tag on the concrete support span above the station – the anonymous “artist” went out of their way to tag above the artwork. Maybe the city should pay to have ALL of its infrastructure arted up.

Where the Really Wild Things Are

Public art usually doesn’t raise the hackles… this example, however, will raise the hairs on the back of your neck! How the artist got this concept past the organizing committee we’ll never know, but here it is, freaking people out daily in a shady corner of Rostock. Flickr member Zarner01 captured this suburban horror show in February of 2016.

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Eye Powered 12 Artistic German Transformer Stations

The cities of the world have a lot to hide, and while some of those things might be top secret government operations, others are as unremarkable as an ugly ventilation shaft, an electrical substation, a failing and vacant downtown area or just a sad, blank wall that needs some fake windows to improve its looks. Our urban surroundings are full of faux details, from facades and doors to massive hyperrealistic architectural murals, all trying to convince us that these structures are nicer, newer, livelier or more innocent than they really are.

NSA Building Hiding in Plain Sight

In retrospect, maybe New Yorkers should have known that this vaguely evil-looking, almost entirely windowless monolith of a building was secretly owned by the National Security Administration. It was apparently disguised as an AT&T building for over a decade, and it’s built like that to withstand a nuclear blast. Located at 33 Thomas Street, the 1974 Brutalist structure functions (surprise!) as a surveillance hub.

False Facades in Leinster Gardens, London Hiding Train Tracks

There are no real telltale signs that the houses at 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens in London are anything other than ordinary – until you take a walk along the street behind them to see the back of the faux facade and the hollow space it hides, as captured in these images by Urban 75. The actual houses that once stood in this spot were demolished to build a tunnel connection two London Underground stations; this void is actually the top of a ventilation shaft.

Parisian Ventilation Tower with Trompe L’oeil Facade

Casual passersby might not look up to examine the windows of this structure on Rue Quincampoix in Paris. If they did, it probably wouldn’t take them too long to notice that they’re actually painted on, some permanently open to billowing curtains and dimly-lit rooms beyond. The mural helps disguise yet another urban ventilation shaft.

Toronto’s Camouflaged Substations

Many a seemingly elegant building in Toronto is not what it seems. Disguised among the city’s historic structures are a number of electrical substations, designed to blend in with their environments. While expanding the power grid in the early 20th century, Toronto Hydro, established in 1911, hired a team of architects whose sole purpose was to hide what would otherwise be unsightly metal structures. You can spot them by their ‘Keep Out!’ ‘Danger!’ signs posted to the doors. The Glengrove substation at 2833 Yonge Street is a prime example.

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Its All A Sham 21 Urban Structures Facades That Arent What They Seem

You’re driving through an underground parking garage when suddenly, the colorful geometric shapes splashed all over every surface pop out into three dimensions. Try not to crash your car! When optical illusions line up right, they can be really disorienting, and it’s always cool to see them carried out on a large scale. Argentinian artist Elian Chali got to take over an entire parking lot in the Saint-Gervais Mont Blanc region of France, transforming it into a trompe l’oeil canvas.

“This artwork, which uses basic geometry and primary colors, makes use of the architectural factors where it inhabits,” says Chile. “Each element adopts a new function and the space becomes a huge sculpture. The relationship with the environment is not easy to achieve, therefore not only the walls will be intervene, but the painting will invade everything that you find in your way in order to offer to the users of the parking, the possibility of breathing inside a work of art.”

It’s a pretty cool effect, with some triangles stretching dozens of feet and crossing ceilings, support pillars and walls to end on the floor. Presented by 2KM3 Contemporary Art Platform and curated by Hugues Chevallier and Zoer, the piece comes together as an optical illusion when you hit just the right spot while driving through.

Chali is known for applying his signature vivid style to buildings around the world in the form of massive murals, often taking up entire multi-story facades. Each one takes its respective environment into account in its composition, paying homage to the history of the building and its setting, the materials it’s made of, and the ways in which it has aged or weathered. Keep up with his work on Instagram.