In Berlin, spanning the 450-foot length of the Brandenburg Gate where the former Wall divided the city, a kinetic installation ripples in the wind, bearing hand-written messages from city residents. Created by artist Patrick Shearn, “Visions in Motion” recognized the 30-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

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120,000 fabric streamers, 30,000 of them bearing notes, mimic the banners carried during demonstrations of the Peaceful Revolution, when hundreds of people came together to demand the reunification of Germany. Shearn, a resident of Berlin’s sister city Los Angeles, encouraged supporters in LA to participate by contributing their own messages, wishes and hopes for the future to the project.

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A post shared by Poetic Kinetics (@poetickinetics)

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A post shared by Poetic Kinetics (@poetickinetics)

“In total, the installation is comprised of approximately 9500 linear ft. of rope, over 1250 hand-tied technical knots and approximately 120,000 ripstop nylon and reflective fabric streamers arranged in an elegant, colorful pattern. Harnessing available wind, the artwork will undulate in a gorgeous, immersive display… Patrick Shearn is particularly inspired to lend his work to this auspicious historical event and intends ‘Visions in Motion’ to be a symbol for peace and the united power of the people overcoming injustice.”

“‘As an artist, I am deeply moved by the invitation to translate such a watershed moment in human history into physical form,” says Shearn. “In light of the state of affairs in the world today, I feel it is a time to be bold, gather together with a unified voice, and throw our shared colors and our dreams skyward for the world to see.’”

The installation was in place from November 4-10 for Berlin Festival Week, when the city transformed “into a large open-air exhibition and event location” for official celebrations.

Affordable apartments are getting harder to find in just about every major city, but if we want to multiply our options, we just have to look up. That’s the idea behind Cabin Spacey, a modular cabin project aiming to take advantage of flat urban rooftops and other disused spaces, with the ability to move on to a new location when the time comes. It’s designed to appeal to today’s urban nomad with the knowledge that small, flexible spaces will likely be in demand for a greater percentage of the population in the near future.

In Berlin, where cheap, spacious apartments were abundant just a few years ago, a constant influx of new residents combined with a lull in new construction has tightened up the rental market. Cabin Spacey founders Simon Becker and Andreas Rauch note that the city has space for 55,000 new apartments on unused roofs that are unsuitable for regular development, an opportunity that calls for portable, minimal homes that can be dropped into place and easily hooked up to existing utilities.

Measuring just 25 square meters (about 269 square feet), the cabin has just enough space for two people with a double-height design incorporating a lofted king-size bed, a wardrobe, built-in storage, a daylight bathroom with skylights and a walk-in rain shower, a fully featured kitchenette with a regular-sized cooktop, a multifunctional lounge area that transforms into a guest bed and a dining area for four.

Other features include surround sound, USB docking stations, a laundry machine, an integrated coffee machine, kettle-hot water straight from the tap and a smart home system that manages the heat, sound, Phillips Hue lighting system, smart locks, integration with Amazon Echo and even a smart mirror with face and gesture recognition. The cabin helps produce some of its own energy with rooftop solar panels, too.

The founders hope to break the conventions that dictate that apartments need multiple large rooms in order to be comfortable, while also encouraging us all to rethink the spaces where housing could fit into existing urban landscapes (and they don’t mean moving to the suburbs.)

“CABIN SPACEY was not a pop-up idea,” they say. “It’s a combined answer to several paradigm shifts, newly arisen needs and behavior changes in living and traveling. An increasing demand for mobility is shaping new forms and habits of accommodation. Right in that field of tension we started working.”

“We always dreamed about CABIN SPACEY as the location independent housing solution for the modern metropolitan. As a first move towards the direction of that vision we designed and built a minimal home which is smart and sustainable at the same time. Our overall goal from the beginning was to lower to access barriers to appropriate living space in exceptional locations.”

The prototype is currently on the ground so visitors can check it out, and more are expected to pop up on Berlin rooftops shortly. Cabin Spacey is expected to retail for around €100,000. Follow Cabin Spacey on Facebook and Twitter for updates.

In the words of venerable modern philosopher Ice Cube, ‘it’s on like Donkey Kong’ – literally – at Berlin’s Mount Center climbing park, which features elevated platforms that look an awful lot like those seen in the classic video game. Located in Mitte, the city’s hip central borough, the park offers a massive parkour course that takes visitors higher and higher up into the sky, amidst suspended vehicles and other recycled objects.

The park opened back in 2010, and features six different courses of varying levels of difficulty that may also remind some people of the courses on the reality television competition American Ninja Warrior. If you’re not exactly a parkour master, you can take a short training class before they use throw you out onto this open-air system of ropes, barrels, tires, platforms and bridges.

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At 50 feet high, its pinnacle also gives you pretty great views of a lovely green area of Berlin:

h/t Inhabitat; photos via BerlinSidewalk.com and MountMitte.de

Taking to the skies in Berlin, a set of color-coded drones aims to make the biggest spray-painted mural ever made (at least by robots) using unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with programmed paintings. And this is just the beginning: painting drones could enable civic artwork in hard-to-reach places, and eventually serve practical applications, re-coating infrastructure and architecture.

Designed by architect (and director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab) Carlo Ratti’s, the Paint By Drone system employs sets of four drones, each loaded with its own paint tank. Like a CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key [Black]) system much like modern printers, each contributes a layer to the piece. Together, these layers can add up to a full spectrum of color possibilities.

Ratti’s team has used drones before — as tour guides at MIT, for instance — and is now experimenting with ways to engage them with other activities in the built environment, testing their limits in a more public and large-scale setting. In this case, the sheeting that wraps scaffolding, ordinarily left blank and dull (or used for advertising) can be dynamically turned into something beautiful.

The drones can be adapted to work with different inputs, allowing passers by to submit designs, for instance, or to select sections of canvas to paint. For now, they are being deployed on a surface stretched across scaffolding, but the idea is to ultimately enable public art in more places — precision-guided small drones can reach high up on (or under) structures like bridges that would be difficult (and dangerous) for people to access directly.

More on the mechanics of the system: “A central management system regulates the drones’ operations in real-time, from image painting to flight, using an advanced monitoring system that precisely tracks the UAV’s position, detecting multiple devices simultaneously. Furthermore, a protective net placed on the scaffolding’s’ cover allows the drones to move into a safe space. Drones can draw content submitted digitally, via an app. The artistic input can come from either crowdsourced platforms or from a curator orchestrating the contributions of several people.”

“Paint by Drone represents a next step,” in their research, reports Carlo Ratti Associati, “on both vertical drawing and open-source design, which includes projects such as OSARC (Open Source Architecture) at the 2012 Istanbul Design Biennial and the Vertical Plotter system featured at Milan Expo 2015’s Future Food District, which entered the Guinness World Record as the world’s largest plotted image. The new concept pushes the previous boundaries of time and space, having the potential to be installed in just a few hours in a city and paint on any surface.”

A long unused strip of space weaving through Berlin is set to become a bicycling boulevard, sheltered by the tracks above and lined with bike service stations, recreation areas and food trucks. This latest rails-to-trails project has six miles of space to work with, connecting major roads and multiple neighborhoods. Completely disused aside except as illegal parking and intermittent strips of sidewalks and seating, the area below the U1 line is ripe for rehabilitation.

As in other cities with similar programs, the Radbahn aims to serve not only as a traffic corridor and green trail but also to activate adjacent spaces. Pocket parks and commercial vendors are expected to spring up along the route, and side extensions can bring bikers down to adjacent waterways and other natural features.

Meanwhile, riders can enjoy a rain-free experience (it rains over 100 days per year in Berlin). Cyclists looking to take the train can also park their ride in sheltered spaces below the rails near stations. The minimum width and consistent coverage of the tracks above provide for a sufficiently wide trail from start to finish, while studies have shown that train noise below tracks is reduced as compared to adjacent space.

Per the proposal, the goal is “revitalize the former space along the iconic U1 line to a pulsating urban artery. It thereby acts as a playground for modern mobility, innovation and leisure activities.” In typical German fashion, the project designers and engineers have already extensively documented and mapped opportunities throughout the route, which you can explore in greater depth by visiting their website.