Some of Dirk Koy’s videos should come with warnings before viewing, but not for the usual reasons. If you’re at all prone to motion sickness, just watching a few seconds of these disorienting animations could turn your stomach a little.

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The Basel, Switzerland-based artist specializes in short experimental films that take ordinary scenes – like cars navigating a roundabout or a diver doing a flip into a pool – into dizzying and disorienting loops you can’t seem to look away from. Frequently employing drones to rise above a landscape, Koy subverts the footage just enough to make you feel like somebody dosed you with psychedelics.

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Most of these clips are posted on Instagram, YouTube and Vimeo with no comments other than some identifying hashtags, further distancing the viewer from the real place. If you can make it all the way through a series of them without feeling ill, hats off to you.

Stretched and exaggerated almost to the point of absurdity, otherwise ordinary architecture takes on a bit of an uncanny feeling. Digital artist Alex Lysakowski describes it as “imaginary magnitude,” a change in proportion that’s a bit too extreme to be real, but straddling the line, sometimes making the viewer unsure whether they’re looking at a real building.

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For his series “Antistructure,” Lysakowski manipulates photos of buildings and the cargo boxes of trucks to create fictional structures that look a bit like monuments, standing tall in mundane settings.

“Antistructure is a body of work that focuses on exaggerated architectural forms within banal spaces. The farcical nature of the manipulated structures creates a surreal world of absurdity in an otherwise mundane landscape eluding to an environment beyond the realm of any real architectural forms but still preserving the potential for their existence.”

Lysakowski says his father is a chemical engineer, and as a child, he’d flip through engineering manuals and catalogs in his home office, filling his head with ideas about what could be made with the components. Maybe the results shouldn’t be real, from an engineering perspective, but there’s something fascinating about the possibility.

Check out more of Alex Lysakowski’s work on Instagram @mdviii_mcmxc.

Humans have been carving architecture into rock for nearly our entire history on this planet, so it’s a little surprising we don’t see more modern marvels mimicking spectacular ancient wonders like the city of Petra in Jordan. Relatively easy to carve, sandstone offers an ideal medium for sculptural architecture that adapts existing rock formations into habitable spaces.

A new series of concept images by Shanghai-based architect Amey Kandalgaonkar makes that leap. “House Inside a Rock” combines colossal sandstone formations with minimalist concrete and glass, carving out spaces within the rock formations and adding new horizontal planes for outdoor living spaces. Taking inspiration from the rock-cut tombs of saudis Arabia’s Madain Saleh, the 3D renderings envision a new way to fuse human-created structures with nature.

“Considering the visual complexity the rocks at Madain Saleh, it was imperative to use simple planes and cubes in order to achieve a visual balance,” Kandalgaonkar tells Designboom. “I started out creating the rock in 3D software which in itself was a sculpting process. Later when inserting the house into this rock, I tried to keep its visual impact from eye level as minimum as possible and only when observed from a bird eye, the real extent of the intervention is revealed.”

There’s something a little villainous about the result, and if such an idea were ever to take off in real life, it may stir concerns about the degree to which we’re altering and developing our natural surroundings. But as a concept, it’s pretty cool. You can see more of Kandalgaonkar’s fantastical work on Instagram @ameyzing_architect.

Like urban treehouses, each of these “street tree pods” rises from a parking space to nestle within the branches of a tree, providing compact, low-cost living space for people in need of housing. University of Westminster graduate Matthew Chamberlain envisions these organically shaped portable dwellings as a potential way to address the housing crisis in cities like London, where there simply aren’t enough places for the population to live.

The design mimics the natural process known as “inosculation,” in which two trees merge together as they grow. Covered in cedar shingles and shaded by the trees, with bird houses built into their roofs to avoid displacing urban wildlife, the pods collect their own rainwater and use a bio-digester to handle waste. These urban treehouses would be built around the tree trunks, using rubber gaskets to accommodate their growth.

Inside, the four-floor dwellings include a utility room on the lowest level, a kitchen and living space with a bathroom and balcony on the second level, workspace and storage on the third level and a lofted bedroom at the very top. Doors at the third level of each tree house pod could connect to an elevated boardwalk for pedestrians and cyclists.

“Street Tree Pods seeks to offer a fresh insight into urbanization and community living within London, tackling and challenging both the current housing crisis and the growing pollution issues within the city. These self-sufficient, low impact urban tree pods merge the house and street tree together, facilitating humans innate attraction towards nature and natural processes, along with focusing on the importance of wellness and sustainable architecture.”

Chamberlain says he imagines the Street Tree Pods being most useful for people who have trouble accessing traditional housing, like those transitioning from homelessness, students, young professionals or first-time home buyers. A theoretical near-future transition to more car- and ride-sharing and fewer personal vehicles in cities could free up lots of parking spots, making space for experimental housing of all kinds. But realistically, this program would have to include a serious built-in dedication to affordability to make a real impact, lest it get taken over as the latest Airbnb craze.

You can read Chamberlain’s proposal in full, including details on how the pods would function and be built, at Issuu.com.

Architecturally inspired animated 3D scenes pay tribute to David Bowie, Darth Vader and Daft Punk in a striking new series by Vincent Viriot. The direction and motion designer created the ‘ICONIC’ trio of animated graphics for a Parisian design studio of the same name in what has got to be some of the coolest branding ever.

Each of the three images is rendered in black, white and metallics, incorporating geometric forms, spheres, and elements that rotate and unfold. Ever wish you could see inside Darth Vader’s head? In Viriot’s vision, as half of the villain’s face swings to the side, we find yet more rotating shapes and an impenetrable core.

The close-up shots of each animation give those of us who aren’t digital animators a fascinating glimpse into the hyperrealistic details.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bsh4-eylvgO/

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Commissioned as part of the launch of Iconic Paris’ new website, the series expands upon the style of Viriot’s previous animations. If you want to see more, check out his tumblr, which is full of them.

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Vincent Viriot, who produces work as FMK7, is represented by H+ Creative. “His contemporary graphics manipulate type and imagery, creating a unique aesthetic that has been featured by internationally recognized clients,” they say, including SuperDeluxe, Globe Skateboards, Game Awards, MIXER and BBDO NY.

via Designboom