One person’s corrugated is another’s dilapidated

Jeremy at Antipixel posted an image of a corrugated tin house in his neighborhood, and waxed somewhat lyrical about this material therein (and in the comments). I mentioned in his comments that until I started to pay a bit of attention to my neighborhood last year (ironically occassioned by some of Jeremy’s writings about Japanese architecture), I hadn’t taken notice of the fact that a lot of the homes around here employ the material.

Reading his post I thought it would be interesting to take another trip around the neighborhood, and do a “photo trackback,” as it were, to his paean to corrugation. What I discovered was that I hadn’t really noticed the extent to which my neighborhood has been corrugated. I saw so much of it on my little walk that it was as if the neighborhood itself had been “shape[d] into folds or parallel and alternating ridges and grooves” (to borrow American Heritage’s definition of corrugate). Not only were many of the homes faced with it, but whole blocks seemed to be fenced in by the stuff. As I commented on Jeremy’s post, I tend to associate corrugated tin with dilapidation, poverty, the downtrodden and threadbare, and find little redeeming about the stuff.

At any rate, I took some pictures, one of which is above. It’s of an old storefront (and presumably home above) that has long been closed. The remaining pictures I have posted here (see the first 7 images in the gallery).