Where are some buildings, park scenes, street scenes, etc. that are out of place geographically?
For example, this fountain, and the buildings behind it, look like something you’d see in Madrid or Cordoba. Except it’s in Kansas City.
Or, this manor house wouldn’t look out of place in France or Germany. But it’s in Asheville, North Carolina.
What are some others?
The Edgewater Beach Apartments near the northern terminus of Lake Shore Drive in Chicago seems like it would be much more in place along South Beach in Miami:
This very modern artsy building doesn’t look like it should be on the campus of the nearly-200-years-old Case Western Reserve University, or in the same neighborhood as the stately Severance Hall. But there it sits.
People are surprised when they see the Panama City skyline, especially the weird buildings like the corkscrew one. It looks like it should be someplace in Asia.
The Royal Pavilion looks like it ought to be in India. In fact it’s in Brighton on the South Coast of England - the wiki, if you’re interested.
You’ll see that it was used as a military hospital in the First World War. I’m please to see that the wiki page also has a photo of the Chattri - a war memorial commemorating Indian servicemen who died in the Pavilion hospital. At this site you can scroll through a few pictures of the Chattri. Again, looks as if it ought to be in India - in fact it’s on the South Downs overlooking Brighton.
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The area I live in is mostly rowhouses and two story houses all done in a fairly bland brick style. Right in the middle of all this is a Spanish Colonial house. The place I used to live was an old army base that had been basically torn down and replaced with a fairly typical mix of small modern style houses. Right in the middle of this was the base commander’s old mansion. A fairly upscale house with three stories and multiple rooms.
A whole lotta the Las Vegas Strip.
Postmodern architecture in general, on purpose.
Stonehenge, Maryhill, Washington, USA. It’s much too tidy.
“We stole the Statue of Liberty!”
“WOOOOO!”
“…The small one, from Las Vegas.”
When I was teaching English in Japan in the mid-1990’s I would occasionally ride my bicycle to the not-so-nearby city of Kanazawa, which was in the neighboring prefecture. On my way out of town, I’d pass an anomalous looking building that looked like a small-scale multi-storey fire station made with very western-looking red bricks. I asked a native teacher at my school what that was, because it seemed very conspicuous. I was told it wsa a grain silo that had been intentionally made to look like a brick fire station and, in fact, it was on the edge of a whole town that was scattered with reduced-scale buildings from around the world, including a dutch windmill, a small version of London’s Big Ben clock tower, and several other replicas. I think she said the Big Ben just happened to be part of a school or municipal administration buildings.
The town is Tonami, in Toyama prefecture.
The odd thing is that, while hunting for pictures of such buildings in Tonami (home of Japan’s biggest tulip distributor) I couldn’t find any. Instead, after a lot of hunting and a bunch of twisted phrases in Google, I found another town in Japan (In Nikko, and I know I could never have ridden my bicycle that far from the western coast) which is famous for its Tobu World Square which is a theme park containing dozens of 1:25 scale models of famous buildings from around the world.
Now that’s just really weird and, quite frankly, decidedly Japanese.
I have no idea if the buildings in Tonami are still standing or gone. Maybe they were moved to Tobu World Square, I dunno!
–G!
