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 Some of these quirky examples may sound outdated or limited to extreme regimes, but similar trickery can be found around the world.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

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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Opening this week, Mcity is a completely artificial village for self-driving cars, bringing the future of automobiles back to Michigan, the historical home of Motor City. Taking lessons from military testing facilities like Gravesend in England or Yodaville in the US, the complex is made to simulate a wide variety of conditions.

Featuring 32 acres of roads, intersections, sidewalks, streetlights, signals and building facades, Mcity is part of a statewide effort to advance connected technologies and test autonomous vehicles. More than a simulated combination of urban and suburban environments in their ideal forms, these experimental grounds also incorporate stress-testing defects like graffiti and faded lane markings as well as different street terrains, tunnels, roundabouts and multi-lane freeways on a combination of pavement, cobblestones, gravel, grass and dirt.

Given that all crashes to date involving autonomous cars have been caused by human error, it is critical not only to test the vehicles themselves but also the people they will interact with on the road. In addition to its proximity to Detroit, a key benefit of the Ann Arbor area is the varied weather in the area, with everything from hot humid midsummer days to serious rain, snow and hail in the winter. The test area can be reconfigured on demand to simulate complex intersections, blind corners and other real-world challenges.

The project represents a $10,000,000 private/public partnership between the University of Michigan, local governments and various industries, including but also beyond regional and international automotive powerhouses (Ford, GM, Honda, Nissan, Toyota but also State Farm, Verizon, and Xerox).

“We believe that this transformation to connected and automated mobility will be a game changer for safety, for efficiency, for energy, and for accessibility,” said Peter Sweatman, director of the U-M Mobility Transformation Center. “Our cities will be much better to live in, our suburbs will be much better to live in. These technologies truly open the door to 21st century mobility.”

“In addition to Mcity, MTC has three on-roadway connected and automated vehicle deployments underway. With the help of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, MTC is building on a nearly 3,000-vehicle connected technology project launched three years ago by the U-M Transportation Research Institute to create a major deployment of 9,000 connected vehicles operating across the greater Ann Arbor area. MTC is also partnering with industry and the Michigan Department of Transportation to put 20,000 connected vehicles on the road in Southeast Michigan. The third piece of the plan calls for deploying a 2,000-vehicle mobility service of connected and automated vehicles in Ann Arbor.”

How many houses that you pass each day aren’t really houses at all, but just realistic-looking facades hiding a secret function? Speakeasies and secret clubs masquerade as run-down stores in New York, faux suburban residences hide unexpected operations and weird-looking towers all over Los Angeles contain something you’d never expect.

Top Secret Bar You’d Never Find On Your Own

New York City hides all sorts of secrets, among them a number of fake storefronts hiding secret bars, clubs and meeting spaces. Scouting New York listed out eight of the best, including ‘Lower East Side Toys’ on Norfolk Street in Manhattan. It definitely doesn’t look like much from the street, and the door marked with a peeling sign that says ‘Deliveries Only’ seems innocuous enough. But those in the know step right through into The Back Room, a speakeasy-style bar. The takeaway here is that if you think a New York City business is a front for something else, you’re probably right.

Fake Brooklyn Brownstone Hides an Underground Portal

If you’re very observant, you might have noticed when passing by that the windows in this otherwise normal-looking Brooklyn brownstone are curiously blacked out. But that’s just about the only clue that anything is amiss – unless you walk right up to the door and peer through the crack, which reveals not a home but rather a concrete-lined, windowless industrial space. 58 Joralemon Street stands directly above the tracks for New York City’s subway lines 4 and 5, and functions as a ventilation shaft. The MTA disguised it as a courtesy to the residential neighbors.

Chicago Mansion Is Really a Power Substation

A faux Georgian mansion stands at a Chicago intersection with front doors that don’t open and windows that are never illuminated, no matter the time of day. It’s actually a substation for electrical company Commonwealth Edison, which goes to some trouble to camouflage many of these typically unsightly structures when they’re located in conspicuous spots. This one was designed by Stanley Tigerman, former director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Triggerman made it as authentically Georgian as he could, down to the sturdy brickwork pattern that will help it stand the test of time with minimal maintenance. The blacked-out windows are actually vents.

Superhero Supply Store Doesn’t Really Sell Superhero Supplies

You might suspect that something’s amiss with the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co, given that the products on display in the window and listed on a card outside include antimatter, a collapsible portal, galactic compasses and manuals for all sorts of fantastical weapons that don’t really exist. If you know the secret of the place once inside, you’ll head directly for a secret door hidden in a bookcase, which leads not to the headquarters of the Justice League but rather a student learning and activity center focusing on literacy. A viewing portal in the wall gives visitors a glimpse into this space. Disappointed? You can actually buy a number of products from the shop and the website, including superhero disguise kits, costumes, and even one-gallon cans of immortality. There’s even a musical inspired by it.

Swiss Fortress in Disguise

Would you ever guess that this little pink house in Switzerland is really a fortress? Villa Rose is located on the Toblerone defensive line, built to defend the country from invasion during World War II. If you opened the garage door you’d come face-to-face with a pair of gigantic cannons, a third hidden deeper inside. The fake windows painted onto the second story would only fool onlookers from afar, but when the fortress was active, nobody would have made it close enough to notice. The Villa Rose is now open to the public as a museum.

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Like the set of a movie or setting of a video game, this surreal suburban facility could easily be mistaken for a real place at first glance – in reality, the installation is an elaborate artificial environment used by police to simulate complex and dangerous situations (photos by Chris Clarke).

As Geoff Manaugh summarizes the setup, “the barren streets and hollow buildings of this militarized non-place were designed for use as an immersive staging ground for police-training exercises, fighting staged riots, burglaries, bank robberies, and other crimes” including hostage situations and terrorist attacks.

Located in Gravesend, Kent, just outside of London, this strange facsimile of an urban complex is devoid of residents but comes complete with parks, nightclubs, estates, aircraft, trains and tube stations (for hijacking and bombing simulations). Its population, instead, consists of the ebb and flow of the Metropolitan Police, of which the complex accommodate up to 300 militarized participants at one time.

Open “in 2003 to provide London’s officers with firearms and public order training,” the complex’s designers at Advanced Interactive Systems (AIS) “provided all specialist firearms-related design, fit-out of the live-fire ranges with internal ballistic and anti-ricochet finishes, simulation and targetry equipment, and range sound systems.”

The same company was later contracted to “upgrade the specialist indoor shooting ranges and simulation systems [to] feature High-Definition projection systems, additional support for standard issue firearms and less-lethal devices, laser-based 3D virtual training environments, and a course editor for creating bespoke training exercises.” Even these official descriptions lend themselves to a range of dystopian speculation and dark interpretation.

Author of Subtopia, Brian Finoki notes that this dull gray place is deeply bizarre in nature, “a city standing on the planet for one purpose: to be rioted, hijacked, trashed, held hostage, sacked, and overrun by thousands of chaotic scenarios, only so that it can be reclaimed, retaken, re-propped in circuitous loops of more dazzling proto-militant exercise, stormed by a thousand coordinated boots for eternity, targeted by hundreds of synchronized crosshairs of both lethal and non-lethal weapons.”

Photographer Chis Clarke, whose Flickr photo set is worth seeing in its entirety, suggests a bold (albeit perhaps somewhat dramatic) take on the complex and its meaning in the contemporary cultural context of the United Kingdom: “Gravesend can be interpreted as a warning – a prophecy of society’s potential to alienate itself from itself, and kill its collective identity. This surreal installation serves as a chilling account of the death of community in 21st century Britain.”