In his beguiling photo series “Sitting on the Wall: Haikou V,” Chinese artist Weng Fen captures young women and new cities on the precipice of change. In the images, faceless adolescent girls sit on cement partitions in cities like Hai-kou, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, gazing out toward sleek hi-rises in developing commercial districts. Their backs face us, giving no hint of a personal identity, save for their slightly varied school uniforms. Meanwhile, the booming new buildings dominate the background, their postmodern façades signifying an increase of investment and oncoming changes throughout the city.

This intriguing scene, which is replicated in each of Weng’s pictures, highlights the growing divide between disenfranchised urban populations and residents in more central areas, as cities increasingly look toward development to attract capital and the upper classes. The anonymity of these girls feels unnerving; like the city, they are at transitional stages of growth in their lives. An anxiety arises in the possibility of the girls being cast in the shadow of the burgeoning development that captures their attention. The vibrant hues of the new cityscape captivate the viewer and the subject, who at the moment remains static on a steep precipice. See all the gorgeous photos below.

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In case you haven’t heard, Public Voting for the Architizer A+ Awards Public Choice Winners is live! Today we’re spotlighting the amazing finalists in the residential categories — which encompass everything from super-sleek skyscrapers to rectangular ski lodges, from urban housing to remote hideaways. We’ve also included some pretty rad interiors, including a cozy mountain villa (with spectacular views) and a NYC penthouse that residents can fly through via harnesses attached to the ceiling. Click through to see them all!

Spot a favorite? Make sure to vote for it over at the A+ Public Voting site!

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“Sketching with a band saw” is how artist James McNabb describes his process for making his micro-lumber-cityscapes. McNabb’s sculptures are all painstakingly carved out of wood and typically consists of two components: a large frame—either circular, rectangular, pyramidal—that delineates the boundaries of the miniature cities inscribed within. Each of the tiny skyscrapers are individually formed and intricately detailed; they assume their own character, with some zig-zagging this way and that, while others twist and curl. The towers are aggregated in a “skyline” that’s organized along a grid or single axis, producing a dizzying, zoetrope-like effect. Click through for more photos!

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Occupying places like Wall Street and Starbucks is a pretty straightforward enterprise, but what about occupying a city skyline? In a playful takeover of Madrid’s skyscrapers, the architecture office and collaborative PKMN [pacman] appropriated images of the city’s famous towers and constructed a populist rec room of Ping-Pong tables, slides, and minigolf for a recent installation at Centro Centro. The work, part of an exhibition called “User Guide,” turned an intangible mark of the city’s identity into a playground “occupied by Madrilenians having fun,” PKMN writes. Read more!

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Architects are inveterate dreamers. They think up buildings all the time and, given the chance, are quite capable of producing master plans of entire cities, complete with fanciful designs for the towers and tenement houses, whirling roadways and flyovers that would populate them. But rarely do they do this in pen and ink, let alone with the virtuosity that artist  Mark Lascelles Thornton possesses. Thornton is currently underway on a massive drafting endeavor: a fully-realized skyscraper city that spans an 8 foot by 5 foot spread. “The Happiness Machine,” as he is calling the project, collects the world’s most iconic superstructures and lines them up along a monumental axis that forms the spine of the imaginary metropolis. Read more!

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images © Gizmag

Emporis, the biggest name in building data and construction databases has chosen this year’s recipient of the Skyscraper Award, and it’s a beaut! Opened just last year, 8 Spruce Street, also known as “The Beekman”, is already iconic, its metallic folds and general wind-swept, walk-of-shame appearance easily standing out among Manhattan’s skyline. Emporis chose the tower over 220 other hopefuls as the latest and greatest in innovative vertical design. Maybe because it’s Frank Gehry’s first attempt at scraping the sky, or that the expressive facade is a welcome change from the city’s crowded boxy towers. Either way, at 867 feet tall, this gleaming masterpiece (?) is a cut above the rest. Read more.

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The burgeoning city of Mississauga, Canada, just unveiled a pair of curvaceous towers. Chinese firm MAD saw a unique opportunity in Mississauga’s up-and-coming status to create a new kind of skyscraper, setting the creative tone for further urban development in the area. The Absolute Towers, nicknamed the “Marilyn Monroe Towers” by locals because of their shapely silhouettes, are slinky, circular structures rather than the typical boxy, imposing skyscraper. They may look like two stacks of wobbly saucers, but these beautiful towers house hundreds of apartments and condos and give the city of Mississauga a chic new identity. Read more.

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As cities continue to pack in people and homes, designers have realized the only way to build is up. In coastal harbors like Monaco, buildings are usually rather low and flat, nestled into the enclaves of hills, creating that picturesque-postcard view. Well,  Jean-Pierre Lott Architecte is shaking up the luxurious Monaco landscape with his staggering, speckled high-rise the Simona. The gorgeous white tower will not only add modern flair to the historic coast, but also help move Monaco into a more sustainable, spacious future. Read more.

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A 1902 diagram illustrating Ebenezer Howard’s concept for the Garden City, which sought to do away with the crowding and pollution of early-20th-century industrial life. Photo courtesy of SPUR

As we sit here in the perpetual LCD-screen glow of the 21st century, fantasizing about the floating cities and moon-bounce bridges that will populate the urban amusement park we all are apparently yearning to live in, we have much in common with our urban predecessors, all of whom wanted to remake their inherited spaces and carve out a new logic for living. The ancient Greeks used their colonies to roll out the rationalist grid system. The Renaissance Italians, frustrated by their narrow, crowded medieval streets, sketched ideal Vitruvian cities full of proportion and symmetry and devoid of people. In the U.S., 18th-century agrarian idealists organized Westward Expansion in an ever-unfolding grid of six-mile-square townships. Le Corbusier, grossed out by the dirt and disarray of the modern industrial city, compartmentalized every bit of urban space into its own safe little OCD box.

In the new exhibition “Grand Reductions: 10 Diagrams That Changed Planning,” the nonprofit urban think tank SPUR tracks the history of urban desire in its most distilled form: the diagram. On view at SPUR’s San Francisco storefront through February 15, “Grand Reductions” unravels the ideals and anxieties lurking behind seemingly unassuming maps. The orthogonal is political! Click through for some of our favorite diagrams from the show.

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Image courtesy of Vincent Callebaut

Today, while the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) was busy coordinating Food Day events across the nation, we got to thinking about all the delicious plants that will have to grow on buildings if our rapidly urbanizing world is to produce enough sustenance for the projected 9.1 billion people who will need access to fresh food by 2050. Could it really be a coincidence that so many of the causes CSPI addresses—healthy eating, hunger, food security, agriculture policy—find some resolution in the promise of agritecture, farmscrapers, and other utopian portmanteaus? We think not!

As the vertical farming trend has taken off in recent years, many architects and designers have begun tackling the question of how to marry agriculture with architecture. Here’s a look at some of our favorite concepts (most of them unbuilt) for fanciful food-producing pyramids, geodesic domes, flower pods, and insects. Check out the pictures!

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