Urban and suburban camouflage

When you have a city, you also need infrastructure, but the buildings for that infrastructure tend to be ugly, so you now have the need to camouflage your infrastructure as something inoffensive. And not just utilities need camouflage. An oil company might need to disguise a well.

• Near Raleigh, a water pump station is disguised as a single-family home.

• A house in London is just a façade to disguise a ventilation shaft for the underground line.

• The same for a house in Paris.

• In Brooklyn, a house is a ventilation shaft and emergency exit.

• Many houses in the Toronto area are electrical substations. More pictures.

• You can disguise an oil well as a synagogue. (Search for “the bus arrives at the Genessee well site”.) Another page.

• Or you can disguise your oil wells as luxury hotels.

• Or an office building (photo 18), or a who-knows-what (photos 16 and 17).

• You don’t even need to blend in. You can disguise your electrical substation as something dramatic and imposing yet ambiguous.

• A tunnel ventilation shaft that is dramatically imposing yet ambiguous. Another.

• There is an entire industry devoted to disguising cell phone towers. Some companies rent space in church steeples or any other tall structure. Or you can construct a fake tree, a fake water tower, or any number of other fake things.

• But people are so used to seeing cell phone towers that there is a secondary industry of disguising other things as cell phone towers.

• A military radar station disguised as farm buildings. Yes, this doesn’t fit the pattern of urban camouflage, but it’s still cool.