In Facades 3, the latest in a series of such sets, French photographer Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy ones again visits flatland, imagining the world constructed like a stage set from virtually two-dimensional building fronts (or sides).

In architecture schools and firms, students and designer often draw or photograph (or these days: turn to Google maps) to capture the street- or ally-facing parts of buildings adjacent to their site — an exercise to understand the context around their new vision.

In previous iterations of this series, the photographer focused on day-lit scenes, often occupied by people and cluttered with other contextual cues. In this latest set, calm, quiet and lonely evenings along country roads are the focus instead, all the more eerie as subjects.

Gaudrillot-Roy adds a twist to this approach, looking at structures from an angle, but nonetheless imagining them to be two-dimensional. He accomplishes the effect by photographing real places, then nearby landscapes to infill gaps when he subtracts. The surrealistic results call into question what lies beyond shared public space, highlighting the invisible voids concealed by facades.

In a smooth and simple motion, a single section of each image in this series is utterly transformed, this piece rotated until it sits precisely upside down with respect to the original scene.

While some feature more complex shapes, in general the process is extremely straightforward and geometry recognizable: squares or circles, centered horizontally (and sometimes vertically) in the frame, turned precisely 180 degrees.

Victoria Siemer lives in New York City but graduated upstate – reflecting both country and cities, her modified pictures span both natural and urban landscapes but share common themes and methods. What began as a college thesis about fragmentation of self and emotions has morphed into a larger series of shots and prints.

While her surrealistic approach includes everything from universes in coffee cups to cliffs suspended in space, this particular group of works is compelling as much for its quiet directness as anything. Without a clear message or meaning, it is up to the viewer to interpret the results and put these fragmented images back together in their mind’s eye.

Tokyo seems inseparable from the banners, billboards, logos, slogans and other flashy neon alerts, except when seen through the lens of this French graphic designer in a startling black-and-white image series turned into a alternating GIFs.

Tokyo No Ads by Nicolas Damiens illustrates just how shocking the contrast is, particularly when switching back and forth between before and after versions. Each of the seven scenes here was meticulously edited with attention to every last pixel of graphics.

To outsiders, Japan’s capital is nearly synonymous with signage saturation, so stripping them away changes the character of the place dramatically. Promoting everything from TV shows and movies to local shops and businesses, it is almost impossible to find a place in the city not showered in advertising. Perhaps the biggest surprise: the landscape almost looks more alien without its characteristic adverts.

Le Corbusier’s “machine for living in” is one of the most-studied works of Modern architecture, but what would it look like if it ceased to be preserved and was left to be ransacked and ruined?

Artistic photographer (and photo-editor) Xavier Delory is exploring just this possibility, starting with the Villa Savoye but planning to branch out to other monumental and iconic works as well.

The visual devastation is breathtaking: “The ribbon windows that navigate its perimeter have been shattered, haphazard strokes of paint ornament its pilotis, and large pieces of graffiti cover its stark white free façade. The manipulations intend to make a statement about the ‘five points of architecture’, and in turn, highlight the death of modernity.”

In part, he is making a point about preservation and putting architecture on a pedestal: in reality, few buildings are so carefully and lovingly maintained and restored as those few select works that make it into the history books. Indeed, in a way, these are almost architectural fictions that do not reflect ordinary realities of construction and use.

Other manipulated photo sets by Delory explore different aspects of our built environment and raise questions about contemporary cities, including a series of mixed-material structures that question our obsession with facades and the difficulty of creating variety at scale.

A sequence of hybrid churches-and-supermarkets examines the idolization of commercial structures (have shopping malls become our places of worship?), while a collection of rural homes sans windows and doors makes one wonder if conventional architecture does enough to integrate houses and their landscapes. For fans of faux facades, this series of dissected buildings is also well worth a look.

Like that iconic scene in the original Planet of the Apes film, these artists have displaced great works of architecture in time and space to see what each museum might look like after the end of days, relocated in ominous environments and recast in black and white.

Ukrainian photographers Vitaliy and Elena Vasilieva use surrealistic landscapes as the backdrop for these imaginative transformations, picturing structures like the Guggenheim in a sand-strewn context that looks like anything but modern-day Manhattan as we know it.

The New Museum is seen rising up from post-armageddon floodwaters, presumably after rising sees wash away the rest of New York City.

The Niteroi Museum is perched precariously on a mound of snow, everything else perhaps buried in the frozen wastes around it.

The Pompidou Center is set in a swirling dust storm, Paris long vanished and its inside-out appearance making it look all the more like a remnant than a finished structure.

When the dust settles, the smoke clears and the world freezes over, what if only our artistic institutions were left? From the creators of the series: “It is difficult to escape the feeling that ‘Apocalypse in Art’ really shows the world, standing on the edge, barren, falling in decay like a story line of a picture that is breaking into fragments.”