In Moscow, the iconic “Great Wave off Kanagawa” woodblock print by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai has reached greater heights than ever before as it breaks across the facades of six apartment towers. The print stretches from one building to the next as it crests and falls, taking up a total of 645,834 square feet.

These towers join three additional buildings to form Etalon City, a new mixed-use complex in the lush residential South Butovo area of southwest Moscow. The other, more irregularly shaped structures feature graphic abstracted silhouettes of Chicago, New York, Barcelona and Monaco, while the six “Great Wave” towers are located along the highway for maximum visibility.

Oversized murals can go a long way toward brightening up an otherwise unremarkable or even drab urban area, especially at this scale. How different would our cities look and feel if more architects and developers made bolder use of color and adornment? Vivid and cheerful architecture is definitely memorable, like these 11 unusually bright towns and neighborhoods around the world.

Most graffiti artists never get the chance to paint a human figure measuring a staggering 100,000 square feet, but most of them aren’t working directly on massive mountainsides, either. Swiss artist Guillame Legros, better known as Saype, creates temporary scenes in the grass using a special biodegradable paint he developed himself after a year of experimentation. A paint gun helps him spay large quantities of pigment at a time onto grass cut extra short to make each work last as long as it can.

The rate of grass growth and the weather determine whether each ‘fresco,’ as Sayre calls them, lasts just a couple weeks or perhaps just over a month. The 2016 piece ‘Un Grand Homme,’ depicting a man in lederhosen lounging on an Alpine cliff in Leysin, Switzerland, broke world records for its size, while the 2018 piece ‘Present by Future’ created for the Eurockéennes Festival in Belfort, France is his most complex work yet.

“Fascinated by the philosophy and the questions which we could call ‘existential,’ his painting explores, most of the time, problems around the human being,” reads his bio. “His work is for him a way to share his vision of the world and invites us to wonder about our deep nature, our spirit, our place on earth and in the society.”

A wall could look as flat as flat gets until street artist Peeta gets his hands on it with a can of spray paint, distorting its surface, confusing its perspective with three-dimensional illusions. Sometimes, the effect is so convincing, you can’t tell which windows are real and which ones are painted, or whether some elements of the composition really are popping out beyond the wall. Hint: if you think they are, like in the case of the windows on the green-roofed building below, you’re probably wrong.

Peeta – real name Manuel Di Rita, a resident of Venice, Italy who’s been painting graffiti since 1993 – has really upped his game over the last few years. A member of Padova-based EAD crew and New York City-based FX and RWK crews, Peeta also works on canvas and with actual 3D sculpture in PVC, bronze, acrylic resin and fiberglass. His experience with sculptural media really shows in his newest murals, which take the familiar forms of letter-based street art and manipulate them into abstract creations.

“Today, through my anamorphic works I redesign the volumes of any kind of surface involved, thus causing with my paintings a temporary interruption of normality by altering the perception of familiar contexts and so raising a different understanding of spaces, and consequently, of reality as a whole,” says Peeta.

“Metaphorically, I want to neutralize preconceptions and urging the emergence of new perspectives. Anamorphism totally embodies the intent, always pivotal in my production, to reveal the deceptiveness of human perception, the fallacy of narrow and fixed points of view through visual tricks which, proceeding from the attempt to confer a three-dimensional semblance on a pictorial representation, ultimately reveal their will to deceive.”

Peeta’s works have popped up – literally – all over the world, from China to Oregon to Barcelona. Give him a follow on Instagram @peeta_ead to keep up with his anamorphic works and occasionally get some interesting backstory on particular pieces.

Delicate patterns of lace adorn the facades of buildings, magnified many times larger than life, echoing the particular motifs of the region’s traditions. The Polish street artist known as NeSpoon travels from one nation to the next, alternately spray-painting or weaving these patterns on public surfaces for events like Sweden’s NO LIMIT festival and Berlin’s Urban Nation. She defines the works as “somewhere in between street art, pottery, painting, sculpture and jewelry.”

Though she’s been working in this style since 2009, NeSpoon began tailoring her lacework designs more specifically to regional traditions over the last few years. In 2017, for example, she met with and observed lacemakers in Póvoa da Atalia, Portugal to commemorate the vanishing craft practiced by female circles of craftspeople. She enlarged their patterns, and incorporated the women themselves into the resulting mural.

While many of these works are officially approved, particularly the larger pieces, NeSpoon also makes use of guerrilla-style methods, quickly spray-painting her lacework onto urban objects like utility boxes.

“Why laces? Because in laces there is an aesthetic code, which is deeply embedded in every culture,” she says. “In every lace we find symmetry, some kind of order and harmony, isn’t that what we all seek for instinctively?”

“Why street art? Because it gives freedom.”

Prior to 2013, a warehouse in Queens known as 5Pointz was a graffiti mecca packed with murals and other work by hundreds of artists, many of whom rented space inside the building. That is, until owner Gerald Wolkoff suddenly and without warning whitewashed the entire facade under a messy coat of paint. Wolkoff had been planning to tear the building down for a while, and the artists were in the process of trying to stop him under the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), which protects “works of recognized stature.”

The court had no time to make a decision before Wolkoff’s drastic action, and a showcase of graffiti art was instantly destroyed. Perhaps Wolkoff wasn’t expecting the judge to deem the graffiti of ‘sufficient stature’ to protect, much less grant a significant monetary value, but clearly he was wrong. In November 2017, a jury ruled in favor of the artists, and this week, a federal judge in Brooklyn delivered the final blow: Wolkoff, a real estate developer, owes 21 artists a combined $6.7 million.

“Rather than wait for the court’s opinion, Wolkoff destroyed almost all of the plaintiff’s paintings by whitewashing them during that eight-day interim,” said Judge Frederic Block in his 100-page decision. “The sloppy, half-hearted nature of the whitewashing left the works easily visible under thin layers of cheap, white paint, reminding the plaintiffs on a daily basis what had happened.”

“Since 5Pointz was a prominent tourist attraction the public would undoubtedly have thronged to say its goodbyes during those ten months and gaze at the formidable works of aerosol art for the last time. It would have been a wonderful tribute for the artists that they richly deserved.”

Top image: iamNigelMorris/Flickr Creative Commons