In one shot, taken through a lighted window, the cozy domesticity of a family having supper, wine bottle on the table, enlivens the dark facade of a grim building; in another, a lineup of scrubbing women, seen from the rear, animates an outdoor washtub of ancient stone.
AKIYA, Japan — The house perched atop a cliff overlooking Sagami Bay, southwest of Tokyo, has many of the defining features of a traditional Japanese home, like the deep hisashi eaves that form a sharp, straight line across the oceanside facade and the exterior walls of dark wood in a koshi, or lattice, pattern.
In immemorial fashion, "Night House" (1975) depicts the dark facade of a traditional New England frame cottage, reassuringly pierced by three lighted windows that signal human presence inside.
When we were there in January, with the temperature at -25C, groups of young people were walking across the Neva as the sun, even in winter, caught the tops of the church towers and the dark facade of Peter and Paul Fortress, a former prison and garrison whose cathedral is the burial place of the Romanovs.
The facade, with its three arched doorways of dark wood — one for the bodies, a second for the office and a third for the public — looks so ecclesiastical that Ms. Grenier tells cab drivers to watch for a building that "looks like a church but it's not".
Its peculiar but much-admired facade of roughened bronze captures the dark side of high-style modernism, the spaceshiplike surface reminiscent of the planet-destroying Death Star in the "Star Wars" series.
The set, by Alexander Borovsky, is dominated by the dark wooden facade of the house where the schoolteacher Olga (Irina Tychinina); her married sister, Masha Elena Kalininaand and the blooming Irina (Ekaterina Tarasova) pass the time in exile from what they insistently believe is their spiritual home, the Moscow where they spent their youth.
On Market Place stands the modishly dark-painted facade of jewellery boutique Taylor Black, set up by Hatton Garden-trained Philippa Taylor just over a year ago.
The shop was the first retail space by the British architect David Adjaye, who also designed the Lindemann residence, a wondrous stack of dark boxes slyly hidden behind a 19th-century facade.
Sadly, it leaves far too many young people living their lives behind a facade of normalcy, figuratively dancing in the dark.
