For much of history, urban planning as we know it didn’t exist. Sure, there were cities with zoning ordinances and building codes, but ones thoroughly planned from scratch with heavily controlled development are largely a recent phenomenon. So a few years ago, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (known as SPUR) assembled ten key illustrations to summarize the twists and turns planners took to get where we are today.

Illustrations like this one of the Garden City from the early 1900s are powerful things, able to distill complex ideas down into compelling graphics. The idea in this case was to create greenbelts for urban dwellers and keep urban centers limited to populations of just over 30,000 people. Along similar lines, Le Corbusier’s “Towers in the Park” vision incorporated vast open spaces, but instead of spreading out, it pushed up, proposing people live in towers. This idea heavily shaped urban design in America, and public housing projects in particular.

More known for his architecture than his urban planning ideas, Frank Lloyd Wright had a lot of thoughts on how people should live and work outside of the actual houses and offices he built. His ideas for things like Broadacre City were more rural than urban, taking large plots of land and turning them into family housing in which each person would live on an acre of land. If implemented, this idea would have turned the entire country effectively into a giant mega-suburb.

The street grid was not a modern invention as such, but it was deployed much more rigorously and often starting from scratch in American cities like Philadelphia that were essentially working from a blank slate. In many cities, grids were laid out regardless of complex topography, creating problems down the road. Linked together, some of America’s gridded cities have started to become something bigger — megaregions, alluded to by science fiction authors like William Gibson decades ago and increasingly a reality today.

On a more closeup scale, transects have been used to show spectrums of possibility for urban planners ranging, for example, from highly paved urban spaces to lush green areas, rendering visible different hybrid typologies in between. As cities grew up, they also employed setback principles to guide growth and maintain light access, which fundamentally shaped the skylines and on-the-ground experiences of major metropolitan areas.

A classic in any list of historical city maps, the Nolli Map drawn in the 18th century was incredibly ambitious for its time, detailing every last little aspect of Rome and providing a basis for comparing old and new forms of this famous city. Notably, it is a straight-on view — maps of its time often tilted things at angles, which distorted the geography, but this one became a precursor for what we think of as typical plan-type maps today.

At the other end of the spectrum are the psychogeographical maps developed by Situationists in the mid-1900s, which aimed not to depict the shapes of buildings and spaces in between but to instead document the subject experience of the city. It was in many ways a reaction against a Nolli-type approach as well as the rigorously rectilinear plans of people like Le Corbusier. Maps were drawn from memory and then used to understand the “psychogeography” of cities.

Finally, the most unusual selection of all: the so-called “hockey stick” chart. This captures an aspect of the history of cities, specifically: the effects of the industrial revolution on global temperatures. It’s a diagram not so much about how to physically build a city but the big-picture impacts to think about while designing one.

Over a period of decades, the waters of Devils Lake slowly rose higher and higher until they enveloped an entire farming town in rural North Dakota, forcing its inhabitants to leave. Changes to the climate resulted in heavier rain, which spread across thousands of flat acres “like pouring water on a tabletop,” says photographer Paul Johnson, who grew up in a similar community not so far away. Johnson went back to his home state to document the town of Devils Lake in two seasons: winter and summer.

Located in a closed glacial basin unconnected to rivers, Devils Lake has been vulnerable to both flooding and almost completely disappearing over time, but it first began breeching the towns along its borders after long rainy period starting in 1993. The lake doubled in size by 1999. Farmers described the process as “a slow death,” watching their fields and eventually their homes and outbuildings succumb.

Though many of those structures have since collapsed, some are still standing, completely surrounded by water that freezes when the temperature drops.

“Abandoned places hold a wistful appeal to me and I think to many of us,” says Johnson in an interview with Passion Passport. “They are the final chapters of unknown stories where we’re left to ponder the details. Their quiet stillness can spur thoughts about the nature of time and the processes of decay and reclamation. In the case of Devil’s Lake, there’s the added element of these places being completely out of their original context. You just don’t expect to see a house or barn sitting in the middle of an enormous shallow lake and the experience is pretty surreal. The loss of so many farms and livelihoods gives the area a melancholy feel as well.”

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A post shared by Paul Johnson (@paul_johnstone)

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A post shared by Paul Johnson (@paul_johnstone)

If you’re a fan of eerie nature photography and epic travel shots, Johnson’s tumblr and Instagram are well worth a look, documenting trips all over the world.

Walking down the vintage commercial strip of Lyons, Nebraska, it looks like any other building with shop windows and a front door, sharing walls with neighboring structures, but that’s all a disguise.

In fact, the disguise predates this creative conversion — when artist Matthew Mazzotta came to town, the lot behind the front wall was empty, making it a perfect place to create something new. Now, however, hydraulic cylinders on either side lower a series of platforms with bench seating over the sidewalk and facing into the low-traffic street, turning the town core into a public venue space.

Screens can be rolled in and performances accommodated on demand. “Both the seats and the screen retract and disappear when not in use, giving the impression that there is nothing unusual in this town, leaving only word-of-mouth accounts for inquiring visitors” explains the designer. The goal is to inject some life into a small town of just under 1,000 people, creating reasons for locals to gather and others to visit.

Residents donated time and money to create the project, and sponsored an area filmmaker to document the process. The Storefront Theater now hosts video game nights, movie screenings and musical guests.  “The new energy that the venue has brought to Main Street has also inspired another Lyons native to purchase the empty building right next to the theatre, and turn into an art gallery that had its first show in December and is booked with a different show for the next six months.”

Reddish-brown corten steel compliments surrounding dark browns and lush greens in this Ukrainian forest retreat, its horizontal planes pushing the building out to meet the surrounding trees.

Known for their use of weathering steel, Sergey Makhno Architects wrapped their latest work with a combination of corten and mesh, the latter to foster the growth of ivy, further connecting nature and architecture.

In the center of the house sits a wild garden as well. As temperatures rise, this greenery will slowly grow up and out, fostering building-climbing plants from both the interior and exterior of the structure.

Notably, this is not the design teams first attempt to weave manufactured materials with a natural setting. Certain formal similarities (large stretches of uniform surface, strong geometric rhythms) can be seen in one prior work in particular.

In a lot of ways, this latest work is a more elaborate extrapolation of earlier and simpler models, like the “Rain” house constructed primarily from corten steel and glass with a much simpler layout.

It started on a cold and snowy night when a wandering Japanese photographer became fascinated by the way the white flakes were piling up on an ordinary vending machine on the side of a road.

Eiji Ohashi began to document these machines, set against the rural backdrops and natural landscapes of Japan, a country with the highest ratio of vending machines to humans in the world (1 to 23).

For Ohashi and others, these devices are symbols of warmth and light in the long dark winters of Hokkaido, Japan’s cold north island. They offer hot drinks to offset the nighttime chill.

Japan’s famously low crime rate likely contributes to this vending machine culture as well, helping them to survive free of destruction or vandalism even in remote areas.

Indeed, they stand out as bright and modern in many contexts. Ohashi frames his curious subjects expertly against ancient architecture, vernacular structures, scenic mountains and vast bodies of still water.