This is no illusion – what you’re looking at is literally the facade of an abandoned building peeling away from the structure itself, a gigantic metal zipper running down the center. The surreal installation entitled Open To The Public makes use of a building slated for demolition, the zipper referencing its past as a leather and textile manufacturer. It’s just the latest jaw-dropping facade manipulation from sculptor Alex Chinneck, who remains mum on the technical details of how his creations are produced.

“There is a history of textile that fed into the language of the zip,” Chinneck told Dezeen. “The building presented a good opportunity because, facing demolition, it gave us sculptural freedom to open it up to the elements. When introducing a narrative, we take complex paths to get to simple moments, which are quite accessible and conceptually light – we kept it playful with the zipping element.”

The building is located near Chinneck’s own studio, and he says the installation took about two months to plan and execute. The location is Brundrett House, Tannery Lane, Ashfield, TN23 1PN in Kent, England if you’re nearby and want to take a peek in person. It’ll be up through the end of August.

Previously, Chinneck seemingly split a brick building in London apart, slid down the neat and orderly facade of a home to reveal decay underneath, turned structures upside down, tied knots in columns and peeled away a section of the street, a car somehow clinging to its underside.

Set to be demolished in June to make way for an apartment building,THE HAUS in Berlin is a formerly abandoned 5-story building filled with site-specific works by 165 street artists. Dreamed up by artists Kimo, Bolle and Jörni of Die Dixons collective, THE HAUS was once a bank on avenue Kurfürstendamm, but fell into disuse over the years. The artists activated their network of creative contacts to temporarily turn it into a street art free-for-all that’s so popular with visitors, there’s often a two-hour wait outside.

The artists, who range from Berlin locals to international activists, worked almost nonstop from mid-January through March 9th to complete the project, and installations include geometric patterns made of tape, video projections, interactive exhibits and sculpture.

The exhibit opened April 1st, and guided tours run almost all day long on Tuesdays through Sundays with a donation-based, pay-what-you-can system and a ‘no phones’ rule. “Look through your eyes and not through the screen of your phone,” the website urges. You can see each individual installation on THE HAUS website, and learn more about the artists who created them.

Even beyond the art itself, the project is definitely a community effort. Nearly all of the supplies were donated by supportive businesses, and a four-star hotel even put up all the artists free of charge. Berliner Pilsner donated beer. In an interview with Vice’s The Creators Project, Kimo stresses that THE HAUS is “not a marketing joke,” noting that nothing was for sale.

“Feel the freshest urban art gallery ever with a guided tour!” says the site. “108 dope artworks are waiting to be seen, to be experienced and to be memorized by you. Every single piece is created by one of the 165 artists from Berlin and all over the world. But be aware that THE HAUS is created to be destroyed – in the end of May the gallery is going to close and the wrecking ball will follow.”

Photographs of abandoned houses and dreary, overgrown landscapes are layered with hand-painted elements on glass panels in a technique called ‘matte painting’, one of the original VFX techniques used in filmmaking. Disparate imagery comes together in a way that doesn’t quite make sense, placing entire forests inside the darkened parlor of a deteriorating mansion or pairing wallpaper-like landscape scenes with real greenery inside a partially collapsed room.

Artist Suzanne Moxhay, based in London, utilizes this early 20th century filmmaking technique – which was also used in more recent motion pictures like Star Wars, Mary Poppins, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Birds – as the basis for each of her unsettling scenes. On live-action sets, paintings on glass would be integrated with the camera to become part of the scene.

Instead of creating hers in situ, Moxhay draws from an archive of collected images and her own photography, building up the images in her studio using cutout fragments of the source material, which she makes into tiny stage sets on glass panels. Then, she takes a photo of the result, finally manipulating them digitally to remove them even further from their original context and make them into something entirely new.

“In my recent work I have been exploring concepts of spatial containment in montages built from fragments of photographed and painted interiors,” says Moxhay. “Architectures are disrupted by analogous elements – contradictory light sources, faulty perspective, paradoxes of scale. Light casts shadows in the wrong direction, walls fail to meet in corners, an area of the image can be seen either as an enclosing wall or dark overcast sky.”

Architecture that was at its prime in the 1970s has slowly fallen into decline and often ruin thanks to decades of neglect, especially in America’s poorest and most racially segregated communities, including Gary, Detroit, Camden and Harlem. Many of these structures were historically significant, built between the late 1880s and the 1920s, but when no budget exists to care for them and entire cities are left behind by economic progress, the forces of nature and decay take over.

In a potent visual representation of poverty in America’s urban centers and the loss of historic architectural character via demolition, Chilean-born photographer Camilo José Vergara has spent the last 40+ years documenting the downfall of dozens of structures and city streets. The resulting series, ‘Tracking Time,’ is a time-lapse in slow motion, photographing the same buildings once every few years.

One old shop in Harlem gets painted several times over, has its stained glass windows knocked out, loses a facade to an ugly garage door and is split up into multiple smaller businesses before finally being boarded over and transformed into a mini-mall-style church in 2014.

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A massive brick building in South Bronx becomes modest row houses, while The Ransom Gillis House in Detroit (top) sinks into the ground, its bricks falling in clumps, the roof caving in, ivy and trees taking over. It’s almost completely obscured by greenery before a restoration brings it back to its former glory.

But other stories aren’t so positive, since people care more about mansions than they do about public housing projects, row houses, and modest residential neighborhoods. Occasionally, Vergara ventures inside to show us that even though the facades still look beautiful, like that of the former Camden Free Public Library, the interiors are utterly destroyed.

It can be a heartbreaking journey but also a fascinating one, watching some of these structures remain the same for many years while the world changes around them before transforming into something new. And some do manage to endure.

As cities grow and their power needs change, the historic and often surprisingly beautiful structures holding turbines, generators, coal and gas are decommissioned, becoming prime candidates for redevelopment. A recent wave of power stations built at the turn of the 20th century, packed full of period details, have been transformed into cultural centers, hotels, apartments and more, including London’s stunning Battersea Station.

Power Plant to Cultural Art Space by Renzo Piano, Moscow

A historic power plant on the banks of the Moskva River in Moscow will become a new cultural center, transformed as part of a larger contemporary art site by architecture firm Renzo Piano Building Workshop. The main building was built between 1904 and 1907 and will be extensively renovated to add lots of glass, while the original towers remain intact to provide natural ventilation.

Battersea Power Station to Residential Tower, London

A pair of twin coal-fired power station buildings set on the edge of the Thames River in London were decommissioned way back in 1983, but are considered such an important landmark in London, they’ve been preserved, awaiting the perfect redevelopment plan that takes advantage of their beautiful Art Deco interior fittings and decor. One of the largest brick buildings in the world, Battersea Power Station has been the subject of many proposals, including turning it into an eco-dome or an amusement park, all of which have ultimately fallen through. The latest places the original building at the center of a mixed-use complex by architects Norman Foster and Frank Gehry, which includes both luxury residences and affordable homes, a hotel, a gym, and a series of shops, cafes and restaurants.

Brick Power Station to 5 Star Hotel, South Africa

Decommissioned since 2001, this old power station on Thesen Islands in South Africa once used waste timber to power huge turbines, which supplied electricity to nearby Knysna and Plettenberg Bay. Now, it’s part of the 5-star, 24-room boutique Turbine Hotel by CMAI Architects, redesigned to keep as much of the original structures and equipment intact as possible. Mechanical equipment, operating panels, piping and the original turbines are all incorporated into the new complex, and things like gauges and dials were worked into various parts of the hotel. The entire development scheme is considered a ‘living museum,’ where guests can clearly see what it used to be while experiencing it in a new way.

Coal-Burning Power Plant to College Learning Center

A coal-burning power plant in a small Wisconsin town will become part of Liberal Arts institution Beloit College as a leaning and wellness center. With Chicago-based Studio Gang Architects at the helm, the project will preserve the industrial feel of the site while offering a coffee shop, conference hall, lounges, lecture hall and theater as well as a competition swimming pool, 3-lane track, 10,000-square-foot fitness center and 17,000 square-foot gymnasium. It’s set to be finished in 2018.

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