Circumference



It may be small comfort to anyone (and really, who hasn’t?) who has ever gotten lost in an endless suburban development full of identical houses and looping streets, but some of these communities create gorgeous geometries when seen  from above. Christoph Gielen, a German photographer, has flown above dozens of these and other sprawling complexes in the American southwest taking photos that capture another perspective of their rigidly planned urbanism:

The Sun Belt suburbs depicted in these photographs are “absolutely self-contained,” Gielen suggests; many of them, he adds, are “not changing anymore.” They are static, crystalline and inorganic. Indeed, some of these streets frame retirement communities: places to move to once you’ve already been what you’ve set out to be. This isn’t sprawl, properly speaking. They are locations in their own right, spatial endpoints of certain journeys. (NYTimes)

Check out the entire article here and the companion slideshow.