Now open on the edge of Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city, the Harbor Bath project features a main 150-foot-long pool as well as diving and children’s pools, plus a pair of saunas. Naturally, the water is drawn directly in from the surroundings.

Designed by architects from Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) — images by Rasmus Hjortshøj — the complex can support up to 650 bathers at one time. Various pool sizes are elegantly integrating into the tapering form, creating poolside areas as well as swimming and lounging spaces.

Essentially a fake floating island, the structure is further supported by an array of beach volleyball courts, cafes and bars along the adjacent edge of the city.

Future plans call for theaters, hotels, restaurants, shops and more to be developed in the area, making this project a seed or generator of sorts for nearby activity, open all day every day through the summer.

Within two years, the city of Chengdu aims to swap out its ground-based street lighting with the soft glow of an artificial moon, casting light across 50 square miles of the urban landscape.

Wu Chunfeng, chairman of Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute, announced the news at a national mass innovation and entrepreneurship event earlier this month.

Reflective panels on board the machine will pick up and redirect the sun’s rays. The satellite will actually glow multiple times brighter than the moon itself, creating a dusk-like atmosphere on demand. The precise illumination can be varied in different sections of the city as well.

The project may sound like a moonshot but it’s not without precedent: Soviets tested similar light-reflecting satellites decades ago, aimed to illuminate darker northern regions, and on the ground: cities in valleys have also been known to use giant reflectors perched on adjacent mountainsides.

FaceApp and similar reality-warping applications are especially fun to use in ways their designers never intended. Along similar lines, Google’s DeepDream (designed for photo manipulation) creates fascinating results using photographs but is even more stunning when applied to representations of cityscapes.

While training DeepDream (a neural network that adapts like a brain to new inputs) to identify, differentiate and understand images, Google researchers discovered it could “over-interpret” results as well. In short: it could start to “read into” images from previous experience, resulting in an array of beautiful (if disturbing) hybrids.

Once it went public, mapmakers were among those intrigued by the possibilities of geo-visualization, turning flat maps into seemingly living landscapes. Tim Waters, a geospatial developer, began taking OpenStreetMap data and running it through the system, generating these strangely psychedelic urban environments.

He discovered that a short run could create fractal and quilting effects, while longer and reiterated processing started to introduce faces and creatures to the mix.

Above: monkeys and frogs seem to emerge from the grid, while a coastal region forms the head of a bear, making the landscape look like a giant bearskin rug. Overall, the effects are quite beautiful, creating a sense of depth and adding character to what would otherwise be fairly generic representations.

The developers behind a new tower rising in downtown Warsaw, Poland, have added a sunny surprise to the side of the building, aiming to brighten the moods of citizens during dark and cold months of winter construction.

A temporary installation, set to stay in place until the floors are occupied, was made to “brighten up the lives of people during this depressing winter time, when the days are short and you miss the sun.” It was intentionally lit on Blue Monday, thought to be the most depressing day of the year.

The 42-story Q22 tower is a neomodern office building developed by Polish firm Echo Investment and designed by APA Kury?owicz & Associates with collaboration from Buro Happold Polska.

Intentionally or otherwise, the entire project evokes images of retro gaming graphics and vintage cyberpunk films like Bladerunner, in a way (perhaps depressingly) reminding residents of just how much winter they still have lying in wait.

Since the early 2000s, decommissioned New York City subway cars have been seeded into the waters around New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia and other eastern states, creating infrastructure for fish habitats along the coastal shelf running from New York to North Carolina. Artificial reefs like these can increase sea life concentrations dramatically in otherwise-flat subsurface regions, boasting up to hundreds of times as much biomass per area of seafloor.

In late 2000, the Metro Transit Authority began dumping 1200 old cars into the water; in 2007, another 1600 were added to the list. These frameworks of these sunken cars serve as replacement rock outcrops on which corals and plants grow, leading to oysters, mussels and further sea life. Photographer Stephen Mallon has spent years capturing this deliberate subway-dumping activity in action on the surface.

Meanwhile, sequential underwater images show the subsurface results over time. The progress photos above and below were shot after 5 years and 10 years, respectively, demonstrating just how rapidly and effectively these places can become populated, first sparsely and then densely.

The critical amount of biomass that develops makes these cars hotspots for diverse populations of underwater creatures all along the food chain, together forming self-sustaining regional ecosystems.

In turn, these locations can attract fishermen and divers as well, keen both to see the thriving populations of aquatic life but also to explore the underwater ruins of modern machines. Far as they may be from their original subterranean homes, these train cars still manage to serve citizens of cities along the Atlantic coast in their own unusual ways.