Architectural Fails: 28 Buildings Trying To Hide Their Past Purpose

So, there’s a subreddit called r/NotFoolingAnybody that serves as Reddit’s dedicated community of building spotters with a twist. The twist being recycled retail buildings that were obviously something different (and often in ways that still allow folks to determine its origins—consider all the McD buildings around as proof).

The group is home to 33,000 members, spotting oddly familiar buildings on the daily, and the subreddit is ranked in the top 3% of Reddit.

To get sidetracked for a moment, you’d think that buildings are supposed to universally provide shelter and living quarters for people. However, it’s quite interesting to see that there are several reasons why they mostly differ.

There’s a concept of site-specific architecture, which essentially means that a building or a structure is of a time and of a place.

It is essentially designed to respond and describe the physical and metaphysical contexts of where it’s at. This can include everything from the specifics of the location to what materials are available to what building codes dictate its characteristics.

The ultimate reason as to why buildings differ is exactly that—the reason it is being built in the first place.

Depending on its purpose, buildings can assume appropriately practical shapes and sizes, catering to the specific needs of that particular purpose.

Say your building needs to serve a residential purpose. These will be primarily designed around factors like safety and accessibility. They will be built in places that have good pedestrian and vehicular logistics, with various utilities and services readily available, or at the very least easily realizable. That’s also the reason why many residential buildings are often high and space-conscious.

The same can be said about industrial buildings. Depending on the industry and the functions and equipment that they will house, the buildings will be of appropriate size, shape and location. These are often found further away from populated areas, but are also boring to look at—it’s all for practicality and affordability. It’s cheaper that way, but also what if something explodes? That has to be easy to fix, all the while appropriate to contain it.

And then we have commercials which, among other things, have a huge focus on purposeful, targeted aesthetic. It has to represent the commerce that is happening there and, considering that the design can change drastically at any point, making it flexible is definitely a bonus.

And, so, sometimes you have very distinct, single-floor buildings with a “cap” for a roof, surrounded in concrete nothingness which served as a parking lot and drive-through before it became an adult entertainment club. Or something. But we all know that there was either a clown or a king dining there on the regular.

While these are broad categories, there are more niche purposes for buildings that seem like categories of their own.

Consider KWK Promes’ “Safe House”, for instance. While it looks like a bomb shelter, it kinda sorta is as its purpose is to be a zombie bunker.

Or that one fake house in the city of Raleigh in North Carolina that is only a shell of a house, but actually hides the city’s pumping station. The only weird thing about it is that it doesn’t have a driveway or walkway.

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