At a glance, it would be impossible to guess that the finished houses in Panama’s Plastic Bottle Village featured walls packed with recycled drinking containers. What started as a recycling initiative by a expat Canadian entrepreneur has become an architectural adventure that will ultimately reuse over a million plastic bottles.

Since 2012, tens of thousands of bottles have been brought to the growing town to make buildings. These are stacked in steel cages with stones to fill in gaps and provide rigidity. Cement plaster covers the structures inside and out, making them appear like solid concrete or finished stucco.

The bottles, meanwhile, provide insulation while allowing airflow, keeping interiors in the hot climate a full 17 degrees cooler than the ambient outdoors.

Multiple bottle-based houses already constructed on nearly 100 acres of lush tropical jungle land purchased for the Plastic Bottle Village, which will eventually be home to over 100 such structures. Also in the works: a small public park, retail operation and yoga pavilion.

The steel-framed structures provide a balance of strength and flexibility, helping them stand up and support roofs but also to resist earthquakes. The Plastic Bottle Village is about more than just one place, too: its founder is educating others about how to build with this cheap and ubiquitous material that many see simply as waste.

The project puts consumption in context: “Average humans can consume 15 or more drinks in plastic bottles a month. If you were born after 1978, and live until 80 years old, you will leave behind a minimum of 14,400 plastic bottles on this planet.”

“These bottles take hundreds of years to break down into tiny pieces of plastic, never to completely disappear. Most of the waste is consumed by fish and birds, which has shortened their lifespans greatly.”

It also illustrates the potential offsets: “If you live in a two story plastic bottle house of 100 square meters or 1,000 square feet per floor, then your house will be built reusing 14,000 plastic bottles. These recycled bottles could neutralize the negative effect of your passage on this planet,  and move closer to leaving only your footprints.”

Complete with a Main Street, a barber shop and hardware store, this village-in-a-box is designed to make elderly patients with memory loss feel at home in an unexpectedly interior small-town setting.

The Lantern operates a series of such “villages” in Ohio, each looking as much like a movie set as a walkable small town or historic suburb, complete with fake grass, cafe tables and street lamps.

Cute homes are accented with porches and rocking chairs while a high-tech ceiling overhead projects bird sounds and features a high-tech sky display that shifts over the course of the day (and night).

The dwellings and other buildings draw inspiration from the 1940s – in other words: they are made to look like the same places the people living here grew up in.

CEO Jean Makesh got his idea to develop this set of facilities while working as an occupational therapists in less-inviting facilities. His core vision involved using biophilic design to support normal and active lifestyles that would minimize habit disruption and transition anxiety for incoming residents.

It would be too easy to draw comparisons between this place and science-fictional film dystopias (like the Truman Show), but the reality is that for most residents this assisted-living facility is much homier than a stark white hospital-style complex.

A similar-but-outdoor complex in Holland has also been developed along the same lines, containing residents with controlled exits and disguised staff while providing the illusion of an open town through shops and streets.

Nestled in the hills on a remote island at the mouth of the Yangtze River in China and full of rich foliage, one could imagine this small fishing hamlet to be an idyllic place, at least for nature if not for people – it has been abandoned by humans now for nearly half a century.

Ivy has become the dominant and defining feature of both the natural and built environments of this place, slowly but surely creeping over sidewalks and streets, up walls and roofs, and ultimately taking over the town.

In some cases, collapsed portions of structures have made it all the more easy for the greenery to work its way over the sides of buildings and into their empty floors.

Set on Gouqi Island, one of hundreds of small islands in the area, the Houtou Wan Village was a victim of changing times and circumstances, a combination of urbanization and depleted fish populations that drove its inhabitants to seek work elsewhere.

Today, it is enjoyed only by visitors who seek it out explicitly, like photographer Jane Qing, chartering boats to travel to its shores and document the decay as well as the rebirth the place is now home to in its second life.

High-minded Modernists of the mid-1900s envisioned futuristic all-in-one cities in the sky where we would work, place, live and love, but would have been surprised to learn that their ideal has perhaps been mostly closely realized in the remote village of Whittier, Alaska, where virtually everything happens under one roof.

A fourteen-story structure known as Begich Towers, formerly an army barracks, is host to most of the town’s residents as well as its post office, grocery store, health clinic, laundromat and church. Writer Erin Sheehy and photographer Reed Young visited and photographed this remote village, traveling sixty miles from Anchorage, Alaska and through a 2.5 mile, one-lane tunnel to get to there (shown below).

This is a place of extremes, which helps explain why its occupants are happy to stay indoors as much as possible – average snowfalls of 250 inches (up to 400 inches some years) and glass-shattering winds make using underground tunnels a preferred means of getting to the few other buildings in town, including the local school. The other large structure in the area is the Buckner Building (below), abandoned but favored by youth who need to get out and go somewhere.

Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation comes to mind, a Brutalist village-in-the-sky concept with alternating floors and complex sections designed to accommodate layers of living, working, shopping and recreating throughout. Ultimately its realization devolved into a typical apartment complex, but the external factors simply weren’t there to reinforce it as an internally self-sufficient community.  The concept has also been called an arcology, a portmanteau of “architecture” and “ecology”, used in science fiction and futurology.

More from Young about the town year-round: “In the summertime Whittier is bustling. Seasonal workers come for jobs on fishing boats, charter boats, or in the cannery, and cruise ships bring hundreds of thousands of tourists to the harbor. But thriving harbor industries—freight, fishing, tourism—don’t seem to translate into growth for the city.”

Like a college town times a few thousand, with visitors far outnumbering actual residents – hundreds of thousand visit the area annually but most drop off for just part of a day then get back on their train or cruise ship and leave town again.

It is, in a way, a company town, but it can also be claustrophobic for those used to warmer climates and more private spaces. “The Alaska Railroad Corporation is the majority landowner in Whittier, but it doesn’t pay property taxes, and it employs few residents. A supply barge comes into town once a week, but most of the workers who unload the freight commute from Anchorage. Not everyone who tries to live in Begich Towers can take it—a newcomer from Florida compared it to jail—and there simply isn’t much space on which to build alternate housing” Aside from the four-image montage, additional images for this story by Travis, nate’sgirl, davidd, Frank Kovalchek, Ross Fowler and Brian Digital.

The Olympics have a long history of leaving a mixed legacy in their wake but the story of Sochi is particularly strange – it was never completely finished in the first place, and is already nearly abandoned less than a year after it hosted the Winter Games of 2014.

Already located in a remote area of Russia (albeit near the country’s largest resort area), it is perhaps no surprise that this Olympic Village would not be sustainable after serving as a venue. Russian photographer Alexander Belenkiy recently visited to document the deserted architecture of the area.

His photos show what you might expect – empty streets, sidewalks, buildings and parking structures, many showing signs of degradation and disuse. Anyone who tuned into the media attention during and in the run-up to the games knows that the facilities were also in many cases shoddily constructed or incomplete to begin with. Even when the place was occupied, its buildings were haunted by stories of electrical outages as well as journalists and participants trapped in elevators and bathrooms.

Stylistically, the architecture is a strange mix of contemporary and chistorical with elements of rural-town traditionalism, resort-village detailing and decorative columns, colors and facades spanning and mixing various movements and periods. Without upkeep, though, these eclectic remixes may not be long for this world.

This was Russia’s first time hosting the Winter Olympic Games, but it had to start largely from scratch: “The site of a training centre for aspiring Olympic athletes, in 2008, the city had no world-class level athletic facilities fit for international competition. To get the city ready for the Olympics, the Russian government committed a $12 billion investment package. According to some estimates, the investments necessary to bring the location up to Olympic standards may have exceeded that of any previous Olympic games. By January 2014 the construction costs had been reported to exceed the $50 billion mark, making it the most expensive Olympic Games in history.”