Photos: fake brick lane houses in Hongkou

I am with you, Liliac, if you were referring to those cheap mosaic exterior in various neutral colors...yuck!

(We once ran into a couple of buildings like that in Tokyo and got a good laugh: but over there they were mercifully few.

Another thing that got on my nerve whenever I venture out to Shanghai's suburbs is the blue- or green-tinted windows in so many residential buildings. Make the building look, well, blind; you half expect the roof to bent forward with a sightless wink, and start to tell your fortune.

reminds me of the toilet tiles used in the 1990's for the "modern" buildings, cute and cheesy ;) well...maybe not cute

Facades are a basic fact of architecture. Painting cheesy bricks on the side of lane housing is not the same thing, especially as it looks much worse that standard lane housing. A comparison to aluminum siding would be more apt.

They must have copied the romans who built many of their buildings with fake stone outer layer but with a cement core. Oh, so sorry, when whities do it, its not called fake.