The Manufactured World

Barley, a dog, walks along a very concrete sidewalk, alongside a very concrete garden wall, topped by the posts of a very plastic fence. A handful of plants do their best to retake the landscape, but have a long way to go.

Roundabouts Barley’s usual haunts, new residential construction is pretty unusual. Sure, people renovate all the time, but it’s pretty rare for a property to be stripped to zero with a new structure built from the foundation up. Whenever I come across such a brand-new house, what always strikes me is how fake and cheap the results look, not just for the house itself, but also for the yard, which is always populated by meager, undersized plants and unnervingly uniform building materials. Presumably, that’s how all houses start: No one’s going to invest money in “aging” the appearance of their property artificially when a couple of seasons of the weather and the wilds will do that for free. Nevertheless, the effect of that readymade blandness has on me is pretty visceral. I don’t think I would enjoy walking Barley in a suburban housing development.