While nothing is set in stone as yet, the city of Tokyo has plans to build a road through this residential plot, forcing architects working on the site to craft an ingenious future-proof solution for potential partial destruction.

Faced with a long history of earthquakes, Japanese architecture has a long history of ephemerality, but this challenge is of a more controlled nature: an expanded street is slated to eventually slice at an angle through the property, hence a home designed to break into pieces.

Japanese architects Starpilots call their creation Housecut, a direct reference to this core dilemma. The house-and-office they crafted for the site is composed of three structurally independent volumes, anticipating the possibility that one or two may be demolished.

The family runs a funeral home, lives in the structure and wants to maintain a business and domestic presence in the remaining space should part of their live/work building be removed. While the warehouse, break room and other elements may go, their goal is to at least maintain a reception area for clients if the city does eventually proceed with its plans.

For now, two residential areas border a central entry and are lofted above the business below. Everything is designed with dual endgames in mind, at once spacious and open but able to be reconfigured to make maximum use in a scenario where much of the building vanishes.

Treating abandoned buildings and urban surfaces more like pages in a book than bricks to tag, this street artist brings an illustrator’s touch and storyteller’s approach to his unique graffiti.

Though based in the Netherlands, Daan Botlek frequently ranges far from Rotterdam to cities including Berlin and Bangkok, where he draws surreal scenes with imaginary characters.

Some of these creations seem to be contemplating dangerous acts, while others fight through their artificial environments or even with one another.

These much-humanized, frame-breaking figures are only one facet of his portfolio, but they uniquely bridge the gap between the artist’s experience with illustration on the one hand and street art on the other.

Aside from on-paper drawings and character creation, his other public art series include a set of white cubes, again reprising this three-dimensional approach to bring objects, in this case, off the page (or wall, as it were).

Oh yes, you read it right: breaking ground was meant in the literal sense – think Sandworms from Beetlejuice, chewing through asphalt on their way to attack and nature’s own bright orange warning color.

Epos 257 is an urban artist with many tools, techniques and approaches, but few are quite so attention-getting as a presumably-rogue pipe (or mythical snake) that bursts up from the cobblestones or concrete right at your feet.

The creatures comes straight out legend, leaping into view in modern form: the Mongolian Death Worm is the creature of nightmares, spewing flesh-eating acid as it terrorizes a population. To this day, scientists cannot say of the stories are based on fact or fantasy.