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.

His photographic manipulations are uncanny, creating bizarre effects and optical illusions, all while remaining highly realistic and (perhaps most impressively) quite true to the original real-life source material.

By working from actual photographs, Erik Johansson manages to capture but subvert everyday built environments. Take Under the Corner, for instance, a photo montage he worked on for months.”I shot all the buildings in Prague,” he explains, and “combined the photos using Photoshop. No CGI or illustrated elements.”

He also spent a long time with one of his latest works, Self Supporting, which he says was an “idea I’ve been carrying with me for a long time. I find the structural properties of an arch interesting, where each part is supporting the other. If you remove one it will all collapse but as long as the structure is untouched it will remain strong.”

The landscape for Self Supporting was shot in Bohemian Switzerland in the Czech Republic and the houses were photographed in Prague and Stockholm. One of the constituent structures is shown above. “The sketches start very simple but over time become more detailed.” He sometimes uses SketchUp to model his ideas, but says they also get reshaped by the source material he photographs.

Full Moon Service is about as surreal as the come, but there is a surprising amount of reality baked in per the behind-the-scenes video above. “I brought out 7 rice lamps, 7 light bulbs, an electric generator, a car and two models out in a field” in Sweden, recalls Johansson. It still required some magic, though. “The main part that has been retouched in this photo is to replace the rice ball with a moon texture, the light and the mood was very close to what you see in the photo.”

More from the artist’s website: “Erik Johansson (born 1985) is a photographer and image creator from Sweden based in Prague, Czech Republic. His work can be described as surreal scenes created by combining different photographs. Erik works on both personal and commissioned projects with clients all around the world. In contrast to traditional photography he doesn’t capture moments, he captures ideas with the help of his camera and imagination. The goal is to make it look as realistic as possible even if the scene itself contains impossible elements. In the end it all comes down to problem solving, finding a way to capture the impossible.”

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.

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.