For this year’s @threadapalooza, I am going to share 100 more or less spontaneous opinions about suburbia.

1. Suburbia is weird because it is topological. Since its buildings exist as duplicate designs of each other, suburban spaces occupy a smaller territorial extent in your memory than they do in real life.

2. Every individual built franchise of a suburban retail chain can be thought of, in computer programming terms, as an instance of a class.

3. Suburbia likely has as many lessons to teach programmers about object-oriented programming as Christopher Alexander’s ideas did, but that’s an uncomfortable thought to consider when its physical manifestations are less aesthetically pleasing. They’re also much more successful.

4. In many respects it’s inefficient to build spaces which are duplicates of each other. The fact we make redundant duplicates of construction labor & land use over creating more redundant or competing sets of intellectual property says something about our values & priorities.

5. Highway amenity exit signs are like hyperlinks in how they point to generic territories which could exist anywhere. You could swap the blocks of one town outside an off-ramp with those of the town at the next exit & visitors seeking familiar chains would notice no difference.

6. We need better vocabularies to discuss the experiences many, many Americans have with experiencing suburban chain businesses on their own aesthetic terms, beyond not mentioning them out of shame. If you really want to be socially aware, that’s not content to reflexively avoid.

7. To the extent that fewer people would be able to stand isolated suburban living without access to TVs & computers, suburban tract homes might be considered an early form of smart (or at least connected) buildings. (Skyscrapers enabled by telephones are an earlier example.)

8. The hidden goal of many design aspects of suburbia is to create a differential between physical proximity vs. the speed & effort needed to navigate its spaces. An animal can travel beyond the dead end of a cul-de-sac much faster than a human following arbitrary rules can.

9. Another way of describing why suburbia is interesting: so many of its spaces are designed to be navigated while on mental autopilot.

10. You often hear people criticize generic parts of the built environment as being placeless. Another way of approaching one is to say that you are visiting the same place in multiple different locations. In that sense it can be mentally categorized as if it was a mobile place.

11. One result of that phenomenon is that you may apply existing familiar memories to new places you have never visited before.

12. Since brands were originally developed to differentiate specific products from generic bulk commodities, it’s interesting how they operate to commodify physical space into something undifferentiated & more generic than it would otherwise be.

13. One overlooked difference between urban and suburban living: how often you have a chance to see, and thus notice, the horizon line and whatever is happening in the sky above it.

14. Earlier 3D video & computer games often feel less urban than more current ones (regardless of what they’re trying to be thematically) because of how past graphical limitations often led to the creation of coldly empty expanses of flat space.

15. We underestimate the extent to which some categories of products, hobbies & even career paths are dependent upon implicit norms of suburban spatial circumstances. Ex. home theater systems, or the kinds of making & entrepreneurship which are easier to do if you have a garage.

16. I’ve wondered before about how/when pop culture assumes suburban norms. Stereotypes of young people playing loud music & putting up posters on their walls imply levels of privacy & agency dependent upon living in certain spatial circumstances & being at certain life stages.

17. I once tried to make a running list of every time I heard a song mention someone (a narrator etc.) being in their “room,” & then tried to categorize whether those rooms could be identified as urban or suburban. I still want to do something with that fringe research some day.

18. The stereotype of the computer hacker lurking alone in a dark room (often a basement) also often suggests a set of suburban circumstances, ie. that they’re dwelling isolated in a place where basements exist. This ofc. often contradicts accounts of real hackers you read about.

19. Basements & rec rooms are under-discussed as a liminal category of space, whose recreational potential was discovered by accident when people in homes with smaller modernizing heating systems no longer needed to devote as much of basements to their old functional usage.

20. People who grew up in suburbia & then move to cities may have subtle disadvantages in cultural capital which can be awkward to acknowledge. Ex. you’ve potentially spent more time being exposed to mass-market reference points for various foods relative to the authentic ones.

21. We need finer-grained categories to denote suburban areas which are more rural in their features but not decentralized like the term “exurb” implies, and also those which are effectively urban in ways which just happen to still be heavily oriented around automotive travel.

22. If women had more influence in car design, cars would be conceptualized to a greater extent as extensions of fashion. The potential is already there, especially considering how we already collectively decided to make the front ends of cars resemble human faces.

23. It’s weird how whenever you get in a car you are putting your living body inside an inanimate object which is also designed to evoke a resemblance to a body. When cars move around in space, we perceive them as though they are proxies for moving bodies.

24. Physical forms traveled past at high speed (ie. seen from a car on a highway) may be a distinct creative medium from those seen at low speed. Venturi & Scott Brown claimed that territory for architecture, but it involves more new design practices than have yet been codified.

25. The “great rooms” inside many suburban houses are one of their better & relatively redeeming features, at least based on my own childhood experiences of growing up in a house with one. Suspect the experience of living in them varies depending on quality of dif. home layouts.

26. It’s funny how when you visit enough different locations of a chain business you do start to notice more types of differentiation in your experience between those locations. Ex. you might start to suspect differences in how various particular locations are managed.

27. It’s also curious when you don’t observe as many memorable or noticeable differences btwn. the locations of one chain as you do among the instances of a different chain. There’s macro-level variability in their quality in addition to that which occurs at the more local scale.

28. It’s probably not an entire coincidence I associate the smell of hydraulic fluid with low-midrange suburban chain hotels, given relative likelihood of how often you encounter buildings in that specific height range / with similarly light elevator requirements in other places.

29. The whole narrative of people fleeing cities for suburbs would have slightly less ammunition if there were more (affordable) housing options in major cities which included their own washers & dryers. If there’s not a WDIMBY subset to the YIMBY movement then there should be.

30. Sometimes the generic nature of chain restaurants makes them into more efficient vessels for you to impose your own personal meanings on, which you accumulate based on your individual unique experiences within them over time. Ofc. that means they’re very postmodern entities.

31. Panera Bread has associations for me of being the place that was on the way home from the hospital where my father was battling cancer. Chili’s was where I walked to with friends after high school. You never know what someone else in your generic suburbscape is going through.

32. In different metro areas you can notice the composition of different car models changing like you would notice changes in the variety of local wildlife or vegetation. Some of that variation is even due to a common natural underlying reason of differences in weather/climates.

33. Suburban residents engage in a lot of invisible, unacknowledged labor in the form of driving around.

34. If Sherlock Holmes had inhabited a world with cars in it, it would have been interesting to read about what kinds of information he’d have claimed to deduce about the psyches of various types of drivers by analyzing the patterns of scrapes on their cars’ bumpers, wheels etc.

35. Every car you see on the road has at least some statistical likelihood of providing potential information about the physical space in which it is stored.

36. There’s a symbiotic relationship between the increasing sizes of cars/trucks and the similarly growing sizes of the garages built to store them. In that respect, car design operates in an architectural context.

37. I associate large, blank, bright expanses of white wall space with the 90s, & I don’t know to what extent that’s a just correlation with childhood memories of moving into a new house then. Ofc. the fact the house was constructed at that time also reflects a cultural context.

38. Also pools and rompler music, and rompler music playing outdoors on the patios besides empty pools in the middle of the afternoon.

39. It took me some time after living in cities to realize how they can exert influences compelling women to make more conservative fashion choices relative to in some suburbs. Likely a combo of weather/practicality for outdoor walking commutes & sadly also fears of harassment.

40. As with other types of fashion, vernacular design choices of suburban buildings/interiors form distorted mass-market echos of the directions of more prestigious design decision-makers. Was an epiphany for me to realize buildings I grew up around related to a broader context.

41. It’s odd to discover a suburban entity has broad recognition in pop culture or on Wikipedia, like as though something personal & private of yours was made public, even though it was public (local) knowledge all along. That’s how I felt learning Publix sandwiches were a meme.

42. Nobody mourns when a suburban building or a chain business is demolished instead of preserved, even though it may still contain many personal memories & moments of pleasant design. Thinking of the pink PoMo shopping center whose fountain I accidentally fell into as a child.

43. It’s easy to favor cities over suburbs by saying they have layers of history, while seeing suburbs as innately ahistorical. No one will recognize how surviving garish suburban relics of the 80s, 90s & early 2000s also count as “history” until it’s too late & they’re all gone.

44. Stereotypes of mundane suburbia have lots of truth. They also make it too easy to forget times when you might, as in any other place, encounter the strange or inspired. Ex. as a kid playing in a house with old Soviet posters inside it, & having no awareness what they were.

45. The correlation where people in the tech industry express an enthusiasm for cities may have a self-selecting factor behind it if people enter into tech careers in order to be able to afford to live in cities.

46. We still have yet to learn how architectural concepts of decay, such as “patina” and “ruins,” will fully apply in suburban environments as they age over time. I’m not sure how much we really want to know.

47. Large areas of suburban space are static because they are allowed to be. Objects accumulate within countless rooms of houses which people already own and won’t feel any future pressure to move out of.

48. If you live or have ever lived in earshot of a small branch line of a train track, it can be slightly interesting to look it up on Google Earth and see where it goes. Especially if it only leads to like 3-4 specific industrial plants as its destinations.

49. As a child it was interesting to notice how different backyards in different states seemed to have highly specific variations in their local wildlife at a very small scale. Arkansas had trilobites, and Texas had June bugs.

50. Weird pieces of suburban infrastructure you tend to forget exist: telephone pole switch boxes. Attic fans. A giant rusty now-antiquated satellite dish in someone’s backyard. Wells, especially if you find a government map showing many surprisingly deep old ones around you.

51. So much of our the environment is not considered to have anything to do with architecture at all. By only covering a tiny sliver of our world in its serious discussions, architecture as a profession takes on the positioning of an isolated and irrelevant cult.

52. You sometimes wonder about how much the whole modern industry of "fantasy"-oriented books, games etc. would exist without the simultaneous presence of suburbia as a contextual foil in the lives of many of its young readers which they yearned to escape from.

53. It's weird how different physical conditions of human habitation are associated with different age ranges (ex. growing up in suburbs & moving to cities for jobs). On an instinctive level it feels either like a natural process or like it's absurd. Maybe both at the same time.

54. One room in a suburban house will be called the "TV room," regardless of what other roles it takes on. If your living room doubles as the TV room then the search for an optimal TV viewing setup will eventually conquer over all other usage intentions set out for that space.

55. TVs have really never existed in an urbanism-friendly form. They went from being large, heavy cubic volumes to large planar expanses, but either way their optimal & intended habitat is a suburban living room.

56. The open, free-flowing plans of McMansions technically make them fit the definition of "queer space" (open plans as opposed to isolated & compartmentalized family life) to a greater extent than has been acknowledged.

57. Kitchen islands are a weird formal and spatial construct, but I can't remember why I think so.

58. Close your eyes and try to remember the specific design of a carpet or floor tile pattern which you once walked across on the floor of a hotel, a convention center, an airport or a mall.

59. For a split second I wouldn’t initially feel surprised if I overheard someone say that all suburban houses were really constructed of giant LEGO blocks.

60. At some point in time carpeted flooring needs to have a critical reevaluation which will rediscover its positive attributes.

61. There may be some really subtle low-level parasocial relationships which emerge when you see someone driving a model or brand of a car which you feel sympathetic to, and you start to assume or imagine other things about them.

62. When enough stuff from a single previous phase of your life accumulates in the same room, it begins to feel just ever so slightly like a room belonging to a different person, even though you know it's really still "you."

63. Should say that I don’t really endorse #53, but I was having some conflicted thoughts brought about by all the baggage of our culture associating ambition with wanting to journey out of suburbs into a city. I support that emotion more than the structures in which it operates.

64. I've been meaning to say something about what it means to try & move to & find success in a city when you have an undesirable baseline of another place where you never fully fit in to "go back to." Sometimes that potential reverse journey seems like a threat hanging over you.

65. It's also curious in general how some percent of the population is indirectly conditioned to have a whole idea of the suburbs being such a negative antithetical foil to many desirable things in life. It's a dialectical way of perceiving the built environment.

66. Rural-leaning portions of suburbia can allow more blurring to occur between industrial and residential or commercial spaces than might normatively be anticipated.

67. Wet sprinkler-soaked lawns operate on an uncanny border between “grass” and “carpet,” but in a pleasant way.

68. When power outages happen in non-urban areas, you’re considerably more likely to just blame them on a tree falling down or something instead of wondering about more malicious causes.

69. We need a term to describe the specific kind of urban feeling which can occur in dense, walkable small towns within otherwise rural surrounding areas. It’s a different atmosphere from that of less dense suburban regions which might have higher total populations.

70. It’s slightly intriguing to look at an aerial view of a subdivision and trace the outlines of the shapes of all the different driveways (in your head or for real) and realize how, in contrast to their attached houses, they are really not all the same shapes and sizes.

71. Aerial views also reveal that people construct a surprisingly wide variety of sheds, home additions etc. in their backyards, especially in older neighborhoods. Those must be the places where individuality is allowed to reveal itself more easily, even if in indirect ways.

72. When a new instance of a retail chain opens in a new place, it may exhibit more initial resistance to its surrounding context than it retains after a few years of use. The standardized objectives of chains mean this effect is visible most often when a store "goes downhill."

73. I wonder if one overlooked contributing factor in the decline of malls could have been increasing academic/other competitive pressures causing young people (especially within the middle class) to have less unstructured free time.

74. More physically isolated types of rooms & spaces increase the impression that different occupants of different distinctive rooms may experience a totally different “unwelt” from each other.

75. It’s kind of a trip to visit a neighbor who has the same model of mass-produced house as yours but has decorated it in a very different way. You notice at first how certain architectural features are similar, but it feels like more of a different building layout than it is.

76. We overlook how profoundly the objects/furniture in any room shape the overall perceived contours of its space until we are moving out & it suddenly feels like the room itself is smaller or larger. Effect can occur anywhere, but larger suburban rooms make it esp. dramatic.

77. There’s a possible corollary to that thought involving how large blank expanses of wall area help enhance our perception of natural light, perhaps just by giving us canvases upon which the light’s potential for dynamism can become apparent.

78. It’s tragic how the Millennial houseplant trend had to involve so many plants that were ill-suited to dark urban apartments. If your succulent is green in color, there’s a good chance it’s really meant to look red or grey or purple outdoors in nature where it gets more light.

79. There exist taxonomies of all the different variants of drywall textures a suburban house can have. I grew up surrounded by the “Santa Fe” texture.

80. A water tower which has been blown over and ripped open in a hurricane looks like a crashed airliner fuselage.

81. Suburbia reveals itself to have more cultural diversity than stereotypes would suggest in situations where you can successfully strike up conversations with other people.

82. As an adult you forget that stick-on wall decorations used to be an exciting thing.

83. There can be more fish/minnows swimming within random bodies of water than you might expect.

84. Highly specific type of texture: a piece of paper-ish material which has been exposed to moisture and has begun to crumple, like maybe a label/sticker on some kind of equipment subjected to years of the elements on the back of a patio. Especially if it’s also covered in dust.

85. Deeply faded American flags stuck on people’s windows etc. feel “patriotic” in a slightly different way from brand-new ones.

86. It’s weird to mourn the pandemic-induced loss of both small businesses and multi-location chains right now. Specific local chains almost feel like they were small businesses operating on a larger scale.

87. It always feels like a smart decision whenever I see a chain restaurant license products for sale in grocery stores. Restaurants need to start thinking more like other entertainment businesses, and sell consumers multiverses taking place across a variety of mediums & formats.

88. We overlook how cars enforce certain neurological norms out of a broader set of possibilities. Having to be at a minimum alertness level every day limits your freedom in other ways. (Thinking of that just from my personal experience with late nights studying in school.)

89. If you attach a bunch of lights (ie. from signage etc.) onto a building then the place can, from an experiential/sensory point of view, begin to feel more “urban” than it really is.

90. Red lights stopping traffic form a temporary urban public space.

91. As a child I used to think that these blinking red lights which stuck out from the shelves in a grocery store to advertise coupons were scary because they reminded me of the red lights at railroad crossings.

92. For a long time I thought there was a structural disparity going on in terms of the lack of attention which people in architecture paid to suburban spaces relative to the urban. They’re more trendy now, but it’s still often people most familiar with cities talking about them.

93. One aspect of the urban affordable housing crisis was it made it feel hard to go to arts events when I was in SF. I couldn’t sit & listen to any local artist speak without wondering how they could afford to live in the area & feeling suspicious of their agendas as a result.

94. I almost miss the uncanny aesthetic auras evoked by certain kinds of obsolete outdoor lighting I remember seeing much more of in rural/suburban areas than in cities. There used to be those really sickly deep yellow lights, & also a glaring white light with a greenish hue.

95. Had a mild epiphany reading a paper once on how people who are interested in cars recognize their designs based on overall combinations of their features, like you would a face, whereas non-car people are more likely to scrutinize specific shapes of each head/tail light etc.

96. If you pick a few different ostensibly generic suburban neighborhoods on a map and start trying to compare them with each other, more differences emerge than you might initially expect. Esp. in terms of things like income levels, or dif. ages when neighborhoods were built.

97. Suburban neighborhoods gradually become less generic over time as people increasingly modify their homes. At least from what we can tell so far with older historical suburban neighborhoods. Those with rules may exhibit more resistance, but rules tend to slip over time also.

98. We don’t talk enough about whether it’s really ethical to keep pets in different kinds of manmade environments, but suburban ones with easily-accessible backyards are probably more ethical than confined & restricted urban spaces.

99. If suburbia was an RPG video game, each chain store interior would technically share a common map & graphics palette. The predictability & consistency of those teleportation outcomes (in a game design sense) is disrupted when one chain store lags behind others in renovations.

100. Our perception of suburbia via pattern-matching with other past identical spaces we’ve visited makes it an especially good candidate for processing through machine learning, at least as far as artistic concepts are concerned. I have an unfinished project in that domain...