One person’s ego-centric vision of how cities should adapt to their own particular individual needs encroaches upon the dreams of another, as revealed by MVRDV’s Tetris-like open-walled ‘(W)Ego House.’ The design is part art installation, part futuristic vision, part warning against architecture that’s one-size-fits-all. Originally created in 2015 and displayed at Dutch Design Week 2017, it’s now reassembled for UABB, the seventh Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in Shenzhen.

MVRDV worked with The Why Factory, a think tank and research institute associated with the Delft University of Technology, to create the installation, which “represents a window into the future of adaptable housing to the user’s needs. The vision allows the coexistence of multiple lifestyles in an optimized dense reality.”

Dwelling on the concept of coexistence, the architects posit that we all have to learn to negotiate with each other to optimize use of limited urban space. The layout of (W)ego is meant to be adaptable and reconfigurable, though the installation displays it as stacked static rooms.

As far as the architects are concerned, this process of negotiation is a good thing, and W(Ego City) displays a novel way in which various kinds of housing can be Tetrised into a single building taking up a relatively small footprint in a city where undeveloped land is hard to come by. They argue that every dwelling could be unique, each one ergonomic and tailor-made to particular spatial needs. Some people might need an accessible space all on one level toward the bottom floor, others may prefer a more unusual space that requires active climbing, others are happy to pay less for a smaller and simpler unit.

That may be true, but is the firm accidentally making a statement on the impact of class, and how the dreams of the rich impede upon the everyday comfort and survival of those with fewer resources at their disposal? While some might look at (W)Ego City and see a playground where they can choose the customized residence of their heart’s desire, others see a maze of ridiculous spaces that aren’t just unavailable to them, but produce irregular, impractical, virtually unusable ‘leftover’ spaces that would likely rent for lower prices.

MVRDV co-founder Winy Maas says “Through gaming and other tools, (W)ego explores participatory design processes to model the competing desires and egos of each resident in the fairest possible way.”

But when multiple people are ‘negotiating’ with each other to build their own spaces however they want within a limited envelope, and not everyone has the same financial resources, physical strength, entitlement and pushy personalities, who wins?

Useless, defunct and more than a little surreal, ‘thomassons’ are the remnants of architecture and infrastructure left behind during demolition to leave behind a ghostly imprint of the past. These architectural relics are like scars: evidence of damage that never fully healed. Some passersby never even notice the stairs that end in a brick wall, the outlines of buildings that no longer exist, the doors that open to the air many stories above ground level. But for others, they have a sort of melancholy romance as a physical, tangible connection to bygone eras in a rapidly changing world, even if that ‘bygone era’ was just a few years ago.

Spotting these anomalies can feel like the discovery of hidden portals, as if you could stand in front of them and magically transport yourself right out of the space-time continuum if you just had the password or the secret handshake. For others, they’re like glitches in the matrix, just out of place enough to give you a momentary sensation of your surroundings being not quite real. An intrusion of the digital world into the physical.

So maybe it’s not surprising that communities have developed around finding, documenting and appreciating these urban oddities. The word ‘thomasson,’ if you’re not aware, was coined by Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei in the ’80s, referencing a basketball player with a useless position on his team. He was a bit of a pioneer in the world of thomasson-spotting, archiving the vestigial objects he found around Japan in a magazine column, and then a 1985 book titled Chogeijutsu Tomason.

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The book was published in the United States in 2009, bringing the phenomenon stateside. But search for ‘thomasson’ on Instagram, Flickr, tumblr, Facebook and other social media platforms and you’ll see that, for whatever reason, this hobby remains most popular in Japan.

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Akasegawa referred to thomassons as ‘hyper-art,’ explaining that they may not have been created with artistic expression in mind, but nevertheless, they’re more artistic than intentional art itself. Indeed, they have more than a little in common with Dadaism, the early 20th century avant-garde art movement that “rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest.”

Would the construction workers who are ordered to tear down or alter part of a structure without erasing all evidence that it ever existed think of themselves as artists? Probably not, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t. When they become self-aware, does the whole movement threaten to become a mockery of itself? Hard to say, though it’s kind of fun to imagine. The idea of cities becoming more maze-like than ever, full of intentional dead ends, is either frustrating or delightful, depending on your particular perspective. You’d have new and creative excuses for being late to work.

For Akesegawa, a true thomasson meets two criteria: it must be totally and completely useless, and also regularly maintained, which adds another layer of absurdity to the object’s continued existence. That means ruins and abandonments don’t really count. The objects must be folded into a newer incarnation of their surroundings as if nobody could be bothered to remove them altogether, and possibly cleaned or repaired on a regular basis. Demolish that section of spiraling stairs that lead to the sky? Nonsense! Put a fence around it instead!

In our era of rapid urbanization and development, it’s easy to see why thomassons are so intriguing. Cities change so quickly, it can seem like the realities we’ve lived in during our own lifetimes have already been lost, despite how little time has actually passed. And who doesn’t dream of reconnecting with those old familiar environments, whose memories may already be fading in our minds?

The deeper you look into the incredibly detailed drawings of artist Benjamin Sack, the more the cities depicted seem to multiply, as if you could travel through his fractal cities forever and ever without stopping. Drawn in a classical style in black and white, his works play with the topography of architecture that has run amok, growing and expanding upon itself without limits. A little bit Leonardo da Vinci, a little bit MC Escher, the surreal pen-and-ink drawings draw you into fantastical worlds where ‘urban density’ has taken on a whole new meaning.

The American artist, who received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011, also produces time lapse videos of his work, so you can watch it come alive on the page.

“Sacks’ work explores architecture as a flexible medium capable of expressing the unique space between realism and abstraction; where interpretation and our ability to create meaning is in flux,” says Robert Fontaine Gallery, where the artist has displayed work many times over the years. “Within this space, Sack, furnished with pen and ink, encapsulates both the infinite and the infinitesimal. His work invites the eye to explore drawings of the ‘big picture,’ to gaze into a kaleidoscope of histories and to look further into the elemental world of lines and dots.”

“Sack draws a majority of his inspiration from art history and classical music. By combining these interests, Sack’s works become symphonies of ink. As well as art history and classical music, Sack derives a great amount of inspiration from the sciences, history, literature and the contemplation of paradoxes.”

A ghostly ship sails through the Bay of Sapri in Southern Italy, just translucent enough for onlookers to doubt whether they’re imagining it, its silhouette obscured by a jumble of rectilinear columns. The latest wire mesh masterwork by artist Edoardo Tresoldi, ‘Locus’ is a collaboration with Italian musician IOSONOUNCANE, bringing sculpture and music together in a public performance enjoyed by a crowd gathered on the nearby shore.

The musician debuted his unreleased composition during the installation, presented as part of Sapri’s Derive Festival, an experimental art, music and poetry project curated by Antonio Oriente. The combination of the ship’s visuals, the lighting, the music and the setting truly made it a one-of-a-kind experience, with the sounds amplified by the water.

“Sapri Bay become sone of the characterizing elements of the event, acquiring a temporal and performative dimension,” states the Derive website (translated from Italian. “Collaboration blends different contemporary languages, redefining the relationship between audience and artist in a kind of hic et nunc [here and now] unrepeatable.”

Edoardo Tresoldi is known for his eerily beautiful wire compositions, which are typically architectural in nature, recreating entire classical and historic structures like echoes of churches that fell into ruins centuries ago and palatial interior installations augmented by flying birds.