Hardcore Architecture is a project by Chicago artist Marc Fischer exploring the relationship between domestic spaces, urban and suburban neighborhoods, and underground hardcore and punk bands of the 1980s. For the project, Fischer pulls the street addresses from contact listings for bands both reasonably well-known and impossibly arcane, as listed in back issues of the punk magazine Maximumrocknroll from the 1980s. He then looks the addresses up on Google Street View, taking screengrabs of the houses as they currently appear (or as they appeared in 2011 or whenever the Google camera car was last by). The images are posted to a Tumblr along with the band’s name, ZIP code, and a snippet of the original review. Fischer has just published a limited-edition booklet with 68 of the images.

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MP: You’ve looked at a lot different types of houses in a lot of different parts of the country. Have you noticed any regional variations in the types of housing? I noticed half of the featured Twin Cities addresses are little stucco cottages, which is about right for this part of the country.

MF: I notice it a lot more with plants than buildings. Like, oh, they have palm trees. Or there are different kinds of attitudes towards landscaping. There’s the sort of mentality in much of America still where no matter how hot and dry it is, you try to preserve having a lawn, no matter how absurd that might be for the climate where you live. 

And there are definitely sorts of trends in the building styles. If you’re looking at a gigantic, long brick building in Syracuse, New York, in all likelihood it’s student housing for Syracuse University if it’s not a house. And certainly the homes in Chicago that I found all look pretty normal variations on Chicago types of homes – like brick two-flat buildings. Or in New York, of course, it’s predictably either really tight row homes, or giant high-rise buildings.

MP: Twenty-five years have passed since these groups lived in these places. How do you get the sense the landscapes have changed? Have you gotten the sense that, “Oh, this place looks upscale now, but it was a dump in 1984”? Or the opposite, where it’s like, “This used to be a middle-class neighborhood, but it got hit hard by the recession”?

MF: Certainly there are a few homes that are boarded up, and obviously, wouldn’t have been, one would think, when people were living there. One of those is in Michigan, which we can make all kinds of assumptions based on how Michigan has been for the last couple decades. And other things, where the landscape is extraordinary, and looks extremely extravagant, and it’s hard to know what it looked 25 years ago. It’s purely speculative.

Maybe a third of the addresses that I go looking for don’t work out for some reason, and definitely some of that is because a house is no longer there. And in some cases, it’s a parking lot, and in other cases there’s obviously a shopping center here that used to be housing. It’s like, “OK, I’m pretty sure that group didn’t live inside a Wendy’s.”