Cool Corner

Phoenix, Arizona is all suburb and no city. Growing up there accustomed me to a certain architectural homogeneity. On my first trip to Europe, I took pictures of light switches and door handles, because I had never seen anything but the Home Depot standards. One of the things that drew me to Seattle was the existence of non-rectangular buildings. The way that people make use of odd-shaped, left-behind spaces still intrigues me.

This corner building in Qingdao tickles all of my anti-suburban fancies. A weird, triangular shape. A residence above a commercial venture (indicated by the painted pizza and neon signage mounted on the early 20th-century stone wall). And public art, this time in the form of a wintry clump of trees. Combined with the snowflakes in the window, the mural makes me wonder about the person who lives inside.

I took this picture in May. Is the resident someone who really loves winter? Do they save all their money to hit the lifts in winter? Or are they, like me? A serial obsessive who gets fired up about seasonal decorating, then gets distracted by something else and forgets to change the decorations? What obsession distracted them from their appreciation of bare branches and falling snow? Whatever the answer, the person who surrounds themselves with winter in an apartment above a pizza shop in a historical building must have an interesting story.

Suburban houses never inspire viewers to imagine the lives within. Or if they do, the imagined lives are painfully generic.