At the epicenter of the world’s largest urban area, Tokyo is synonymous with density—an overflux of people, spaces, and ideas. Upending the general take of Tokyo as an urban over-stimulant, photographer Gabriel de la Chapelle has captured a novel, arresting view of the city as desolate landscape in his series, Tokyo End. His images are achingly captivating, showing empty stretches of urban infrastructure. Upon closer inspection, the empty “highways” are in fact canals with road striping superimposed. With not a soul in view, these impossibly beautiful images offer an intimate (if inaccessible) window onto the city. Click through to see them all.

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Coming soon(ish) to New York, the “East Side Access”! Set to open in 2019, the $7 billion project is one the greatest infrastructural works currently underway in urban America. Every day for nearly seven years now, giant machines and teams of workers buried deep in the ground excavate tunnels through Manhattan’s bedrock core. These tunnels will house the future trains that will traverse the length of the new Long Island Railroad (LIRR) line, connecting Sunnyside, Queens, to Grand Central Terminal. At peak times, the line will route 24 trains per hour and ferry 162,000 trips in both directions.

At present, 5.6 miles of tunnel have already been dug. The MTA recently posted images of the construction progress, which finds workers toiling away in a giant crater beneath Grand Central. This cavernous space will be home to a large platform that will terminate the line. Click through for all the photos!

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The Dutch design firm Waterstudio has created a series of floating emergency structures to lie along the edge of “wet slums” all over the world. These floating “City Apps” come in four units that can provide food, water, shelter, and even energy in the event of a flooding emergency. This incredible innovation was recently awarded the “Architecture & Sea Level Rise” award from the Jacques Rougerie Foundation, earning the designers 10,000 euros—enough money to build the first prototype in Bangladesh. Read more.

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Images by Jeroen Musch and NEXT Architects

Often, pedestrian bridges and walkways are, well, pedestrian. But the newly completed Melkweg Bridge in Purmerend, the Netherlands, is anything but. Designed by NEXT Architects, the bridge separates bicycle and foot traffic into two spans across Purmerend’s canal. While the cycling bridge winds sideways across its span allowing changing eye-level views, the pedestrian span occupies an elegant semi-circular arch, taking walkers high above the water and allowing long distance views across the town and the flat Dutch landscape. Read more!

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What architect doesn’t love a good bridge to awe over? We know we do! Whether simple and complex, a good bridge packs plenty visual interest to enliven any urban or natural landscape. One of our favorite things about all of the bridges that have been showcased on Architizer, whether inflatable, helical, or  suspended, is that they are all completely different! We’ve picked a few of our favorite projects highlighted on our “Bridges” Pinterest board for you here, but if you’re in the mood to check out more extreme engineering be sure to head over to Pinterest for a complete round-up of these amazing structures!

Click through to see some of our favorite built (and unbuilt) bridges!

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Bucky had his weather-regulating glass dome over midtown. Superstudio plopped their continuous monument clear across the Big Apple. Paul Rudolph’s LOMEX severed the lower half of the island from the urban fabric. Now, Tiago Barros has a new but equally thrilling vision for a speculative Manhattan that matches its predecessors in sheer zaniness. The architect, who garnered much press for his “Passing Cloud” project from last year, here envisions hovering donut structures that loop, overlap, and interlock in the air above the city’s gridded streets, at time brushing up and encompassing some of New York’s long-standing icons. Empire State Building, watch your back. Read More.

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Few data centers are meant to be seen, let alone artfully photographed. But that’s changing, as the many series of data space-themed photographs can attest. As these structures–usually no more than warehouses, yet animated by complex, even mystifying webs of cables–are increasingly exposed and presented for public consumption, they become cultural objects in their own right. In light of this development, both the multinational companies and architects behind these data centers are taking the initiative in opening up aspects of the architecture that were once kept in the dark.

Take Google. (Side note: we’ve just added Creative Director Aaron Koblin to the awesome A+ Awards jury!) The search engine giant has just unveiled a new site that explores eight of the company’s nine global data centers (four more are under construction). On average, 3 billion searches zip through these structures on a daily basis, while the machinery they contain process 72 hours of Youtube video every minute. Where the Internet Lives pulls back the curtain from Google’s operations and the network of infrastructure that holds it all together. Continue.

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All images: Biomorphis

It looks like Edinburgh may soon have its very own High Line. Designed by innovative architecture firm Biomorphis, the Leith Walk bridges two sides of an old elevated railway that is being rehabilitated as a pedestrian walkway and park. The project plans to make whole the railway once again to create a green belt that will give walkers and bikers a safe and fast commute across town. The project aims to reinvent the city’s landscape, lower fossil fuel dependency, and clear traffic by using infrastructure that Edinburgh already has. Read More.

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Photo: China Foto Press / Barcroft Media

If you’ve lived in or visited any Chinese city, you’ve surely encountered or are even intimately familiar with the “flyover”, that peculiar, patently Asian urban device which lifts denizens up into the air and over bustling car traffic below, only to deposit them on the street opposite. The flyover, usually concrete and cast in some dubiously symbolic, yet daring form, resembles an utopian artifact from a time when ambitious urbanism schemes were still produced by the profession. The futuristic city may be a dream of the past, yet the bespoke object-flyover is just coming into its own. But not without it’s own share of problems. Continue.

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David Sopronyi: ‘West Way’

Many people, especially those who prefer suburbs, tidiness, and comfort, tend to view concrete buildings and structures as marks of violence inflicted on cities, scars of old ideas that didn’t work out so well. However, many architects and city-dwellers have an opposite view: that these seemingly brutal structures have a poetry and elegance of their own. Concrete buildings and bridges revel in heaviness and mass, anchoring urbanites to the built environment.

Photographer David Sopronyi new photo series, entitled West Way after a major highway in London, takes these concrete wonders as their subject. Sopronyi uses the subtleties of natural lighting and the seasons to give a new softness to London’s West Way and its surrounding residential monoliths. In these images, a normally grim onramp bridge becomes a graceful arc. There is still plenty of grit, to be sure, but somehow, Sopronyi’s work removes the threat from these typically passed-over zones, and imbues them with interest. Click for more photos.

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