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 Some of these quirky examples may sound outdated or limited to extreme regimes, but similar trickery can be found around the world.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.

From tiled walls and wallpaper to shrubs and graffiti, this array of custom outfits helps conceal wearers within very specific urban contexts.

Photographer Joseph Ford worked with knitter Nina Dodd to make these fashion non-statements, primarily: sweaters that mimic surrounding colors and patterns.

And while they only work to partially conceal the person wearing them, and even then only in very specific places, the designs are quite nice for everyday use, too.

A few years back, a similar project by Germany artist Menja Stevenson explored a more specific subset of city patterns: public transportation textiles, often with somewhat less fashionable results.

More about Ford’s (often weird) creative work: “The best summary of what I do is ‘storytelling with a side order of off-beat creativity’. Dynamite fishing? Check. Live butterflies flying out of people’s mouths? Check. A railway line merging into a zipper? Check. A crocodile attacking Lacoste sneakers? Yup, that too.”

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

Overcoming the awkward aesthetic factor typically faced by home solar technology, these disguised panels look like ordinary building materials you would expect to spot along the sides, steps or roof of a house.

Dyaqua, an Italian company, has developed their Invisible Solar series to look like concrete bricks, slate shingles and wooden boards, allowing them to blend into ordinary built environments. A thin top layer mimics desired materials while allowing the sun’s rays through to the photovoltaic cells beneath.

From the company: “The Invisible Solar modules are composed of a non-toxic and recyclable polymeric compound, within which are incorporated the monocrystalline silicon cells. A special surface, opaque at the sight and transparent to the sun rays, covers the cells by hiding them without prevent their operation.”

Instead of adding semi-reflective, black-and-grey accents to a traditional wood or masonry structure, these fixtures are designed to fit any abode, historic or modern. The company has begun production with the Rooftile, which resembles a typical reddish-brown terracotta shingle.

From there, they aim to create blocks and boards that can be used on walls (cladding) or walkways (pavement) sure to please even the toughest community design standards boards. They are also built for strength and durability, able to “withstand high static load, tolerates chemical solvents and atmospheric agents.”

When is a building not a building? When it is only a facade, (aka a) dummy! You might have passed right by train tunnels, communications towers or even entirely empty buildings and never realized you were being duped – until now.

Underground Train Passage & Ventilation in Rowhouse

Consider units 23 & 24, Leinster Gardens in Paddington, London. When underground rail was routed through the neighborhood in the 1860s, the residences at those addresses were razed … and replaced with a very convincing facade. Behind it: an empty void for the old engines to vent along their route, and metal bracing to help hold up adjacent structures. Hoaxes played on this place include everything from the pizza-delivery redirect to a prankster selling tickets to a charity ball at the address. Bonus: near London, there is an entire fake town used by the police for militarized simulations of everything from bank robberies and terror threats to hostage situations.

Subway Emergency Exit & Energy Converter in Townhouse

One more urban ventilator before we move on: 58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn, New York follows a similar pattern to its British brethren – blacked-out windows are the only up-close giveaway to an otherwise-complete illusion of occupation, while the railway runs below. This faux building has had multiple subway-related purposes beyond ventilation, though, including electrical conversion and emergency egress. It is also not the only example of unique urban camouflage in and around the Big Apple.

Power Substations in Houses, Offices, Factories & Castles

Toronto has a century-long history of hiding its urban energy substations as all kinds of architecture, from small single-family homes to huge block-sized factory buildings, at addresses including 29 Nelson Street, 2833 Yonge Street & 640 Millwood Road. Some have caught fire in freak accidents – not something the neighbors like to worry about. Others have been decommissioned and converted to residential or commercial use, in a strange instance of life imitating the art of imitation.

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