Anna Collette says that her representation of the contemporary landscape ie., urban and suburban environments-- focused on how the natural world—and human expectations of it—is being redefined, both visually and metaphorically, by the failed idealism of increasing development. An economic development that rejects the conservative views of America as a rural, agrarian society.

There is little urban nature in this image. What is striking is the high rise apartments in the universal international rising above the regional vernacular style of the wooden houses in a specific locality. Vernacular here refers to J.B. Jackson's conception of urbanscapes or5 cultural landscapes made by ordinary people, without professional input and without much conscious motivation.

This body of work, which refers back to the “New Topographics” tradition consists of numerous large scale color photographs that represent the pluralization of housing styles in the New York/New Jersey area. They represent the intrusion of high-rise apartment buildings into areas already populated by hamlets of shingle roofed, cozy two family styled houses.

In the US his kind of apartment architecture is now an antiquated mid-century international style that failed to fulfill the promise of a successful urban utopia. The fact that the apartment buildings stand isolated and singular suggests the death as a rational modernist solution to a spatial, urban problem. They are monuments to their own failure.