The uncanny eye candy of abandoned subdivisions plays a leading role in ruin porn portfolios—and coincidentally, serves as the setting of cult TV series Arrested Development, whose revival is receiving the special Architizer treatment this week.

But the architectural carcasses of pre-recession residential aspirations are more than an ironic TV set. After the property bubble burst in 2008, developers found their half-built schemes worth a fraction of their projected worth—and quite a few jumped ship altogether. We’ve compiled eight sordid stories of arrested real estate developments that remain trapped between the American dream and maligned, McMansion-strewn suburban blight.

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Project: House That Opens To Its Inside

Architect: Florian Busch Architects

Location: Chiba, Japan

Function: This project is a case study for affordable small houses in the densely built suburbs of Tokyo. Two U-shaped volumes are stacked on top of each other and joined to create fluid living spaces around a central garden. This approach maximizes the house’s perimeter and allows air to flow through and ventilate the building. Read more about this project in the Architizer database.

Photo © Satoshi Sonoda and Florian Busch Architects

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With the bursting of the real estate bubble and the recent American foreclosure crisis, the house, particularly the suburban home, has become a potent cultural emblem ripe for artistic seizure. One dilapidated house in Austin, Texas was recently rechristened as an immersive art project by Austin-based art collective Ink Tank. The project, called Last New Year, revolves not around the foreclosure crisis, but around a crisis of a grander and more mythical scale: the end of the world as predicted on the Mayan calendar. The artists described the large-scale installation as a celebration of the end, a study of crisis management, a search for meaning, a chance for closure, and “an unwavering column of truth in a desert of confusion.”

Perhaps the most resonant piece in the installation, as noted in Colossal, is a sculpture called The Purge. While many of the pieces in the house envision glorified and artfully tamed doomsday scenarios, artist Chris Whiteburch’s site-specific sculpture imagines how the physical house would react to the impending doom of 2012. Whiteburch shows the house purging its content, violently spewing structural materials and debris with a powerfully human sense of desperation.

[All photos courtesy Chris Whiteburch, photographers Julie and Nicole Blair, via Colossal]

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The Streets is a series of photographs by Leigh Merrill that turns attention to San Francisco’s less than glamorous painted stucco suburbs. Set against an opaque white sky, these pastel shells are decidedly incongruous with the vibrant image of the city over which they sprawl. Their pasty existence is a testament to San Francisco’s complexity, its “unique blend of residential living that sits between urban and suburban in a way that never quite reconciles with the other,” says the artist on Geoff Manaugh’s BLDG BLOG.

To investigate this peculiar landscape, Merrill has constructed a series of digitally assembled architectural fictions, stitching together illogical structures and streets to “reveal their underlying and sometimes unconscious intentions.” More after the break.

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Capped at four sentences long, the Wikipedia “stub” about Hatert doesn’t tell us much. We discovered that Hatert is a relatively new suburban area to the south if Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and its main attractions are a shopping center and a weekly Wednesday market. Little did we know that the sleepy Dutch suburb is undergoing a major process of urban renewal.

The newly completely crown of the neighborhood is an iconic housing project by Dutch firm 24H-architecture. Drawing from historical and contemporary architectural predecessors alike, from Oscar Niemeyer to Jeanne Gang, Housing Hatert is a towering complex marked by its highly expressive, free-formed balconies. Read on.

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Photographer Edward Burtynsky captures the vibrant, seemingly extraterrestrial topographies of a remote region in northeastern Spain in new series of photographs entitled Dryland Farming. From a 2,000 foot aerial view, these landscapes read like abstract maps, as if Kandinsky had taken a stab at cartography. More after the break.

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All images courtesy of the artist

Ross Racine creates digital renderings of fictional suburban neighborhoods, drawing them freehand directly on the computer without the aid of photographs or scanned materials. Understanding the dual role of the computer as a tool for urban planning as well as a tool for image capture, Racine combines the abstract qualities of mapping with the descriptive powers of landscape art. More after the jump.

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Images courtesy of the artist

Amy Bennett’s paintings of a quiet suburb originate from a curious process: the artist first constructed a fictional model neighborhood. She then imagined the lives of the characters in each house, the private dramas, routines, and struggles, and the voyeuristic tendencies of a small town. With these narratives in mind, Bennett painted scenes from the neighborhood. The resulting paintings are eerily still, yet alive with psychological allusions. Click for more!

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‘Suburban Landscape‘ is a photography series by Sean Litchfield (in collaboration with architectural historian Zachary Violette) that subverts the picturesque ideal in the American suburbs. It analyzes the man-made landscape of our semi-urban areas, which effectively eradicate nature instead of creating a sustainable environment.

Litchfield delves into our “fetish for the private automobile,” “insistence on highly-organized sites of mass consumption,” and “technology-saturated, mass-produced homes” — heavy charges, all — which have left the United States with “precious little of the pastoral landscape that the whole suburban experience was about in the first place.”

Click through for more images and background on the project.

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