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Suggestions about style and architecture

click on images for full-size:

Plan of a tea house in northern Japan that breaks the rectangularity of traditional Japanese buildings and of the standard tatami straw mat -- what would be the parallel challenges to standard American house styles?

Loading docks (Virginia)

Dumpsters (Virginia)

Trash pickup (Tokyo)

Cell phone tower in the form of a cross erected on church grounds in Texas

As with the other suggestions, these pertain mostly to already built suburbs. They are independent of the larger and more controversial policy changes that would have a greater impact on suburban places.

Is there any way of breaking the monopoly the traditional palette of house styles has on the suburban imagination? Or, since we are here exploring ways to affect already built suburbia, could we find ways of adding on to or twisting those styles in the already built, to make them acknowledge the complexity of their situation? Even though we can't rebuild all those houses and office buildings, could we alter architectural details or add decoration to celebrate complexity and connection?
To increase the sense of historical density and temporal complexity, changes in the built environment could be emphasized as changes, with contrasting physical traces. Suburban houses and institutions are constantly being reworked; are there ways to point this out architecturally and give people a sense of participating in the process of change?
Could small-scale interventions (perhaps architectural follies in pocket parks, or other artworks that gathered or twisted or connected) be used to defamiliarize people and make them perceive their places as always being remade and reinterpreted?