Three hundred feet above the valley floor, a suspension bridge gently sways and bobs as pedestrians cross its 1,621-foot length through the Swiss Alps. These impressive stats have helped the Charles Kuonen Suspension Bridge in Switzerland break previous records, making it the longest pedestrian suspension bridge in the world.

Sure, the glass-floored bridge in China is higher and forces you to look down from your precarious position, but this bridge is almost as scary, considering that it’s not stationary and measures just two feet wide. That means you have to march down its length single-file, making it harder to clutch onto others for dear life.

The bridge was completed in 10 weeks by Swissrope and offers magnificent views of the surrounding mountains, including the Bernese Alps and Matterhorn (if you manage to look up and enjoy them instead of staring at your feet and trying not to hyperventilate.) It features a grated metal floor, runs between 5,000-7,000 feet above sea level, and takes ten minutes to walk cross. The pass through the mountains previously took four hours to navigate.

Photos taken from the air (provided by the Switzerland Tourism Board) give us the best idea of the bridge’s scale. The Charles Kuonen Suspension Bridge links two sections of the Europaweg hiking trail, a two-day link between the towns of Zermatt and Grächen, and replaces an older bridge that was damaged by falling rocks. It’s named for its primary sponsor.

Climbing walls, skate parks, art installations, theaters and even miniature marinas take advantage of the cathedral-like spaces beneath highways and bridges, revitalizing formerly disused and depressed square footage in urban areas. In cities around the world, underpasses are often fenced off, strewn with trash and generally unappreciated, but these intervention projects reclaim the space in fun and creative ways that benefit the community.

Folly for a Flyover by Assemble, England

“Starting with the idea that how spaces are imagined is often as important as their physical characteristics in determining their use, the Folly reclaimed the future of the site by re-imagining its past,” says ASSEMBLE of its ‘Folly for a Flyover’ installation beneath a disused motorway underpass in Hackney Wick. “The new ‘fairy tale’ for the site described the Folly as the home of a stubborn landlord who refused to move to make way for the motorway, which was subsequently built around him, leaving him and his pitched roof stuck between the East and Westbound lanes. The Folly hosted an extensive program of cinema, performance and play… by day the Folly hosted a cafe, events and boat trips exploring the surrounding waterways; at night, audiences congregated on the building’s steps to watch screenings, from blockbusting animation classics to early cinema accompanied by a live score.

A8ernA, Zaanstad Underpass Installation by NL Architects

Another underpass project offering access to the adjacent waterway is A8ernA by NL Architects, located on the river Zaan in the Zoog aan de Zaan village near Amsterdam. The architects describe the new highway, built on columns, as a “brutal cut in the urban tissue.” Their installation attempts to heal this cut while taking advantage of the cathedral-like space, creating an “optimistic intervention” encouraging a new type of urban life, and includes a supermarket, flower and fish shop, parking, a park and a ‘graffiti gallery.’ There’s also a skate bowl, a mini-marina, a soccer field and a small hilly park.

Underpass Park, Toronto

Toronto’s Underpass Park is not only the most extensive park to ever be built beneath an overpass in Canada, but one of the most unusual parks of its kind throughout the world. Transforming a derelict and underused space into a new urban neighborhood feature and pedestrian passageway, the park turns what was formerly a barrier between the north and south parts of the community into a connection. Murals by world-renowned graffiti artists, playgrounds, sculptural installations, sports fields and other amenities draw locals in to engage with the space on an unprecedented level.

Ballroom Luminoso Installation by JB Public Art, San Antonio

The I-35 freeway underpass in San Antonio briefly became ‘Ballroom Luminoso’ thanks to a public art installation by JB Public Art, featuring six color-changing chandeliers made of recycled bicycle parts and sprockets. After dark, the lanterns would light up, casting intricate gear-shaped shadows all over the concrete structure.

Seattle’s Fremont Troll

Frequently popping up in movies and television shows set in Seattle, the Fremont Troll is a public sculpture by four local artists set beneath a bridge in the Fremont neighborhood. The piece won a neighborhood competition in 1990 as an idea to revitalize what was, at the time, a dumping ground. The troll sculpture is clutching an actual Volkswagen Beetle.

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Underpass Art Parks 15 Fun Projects Reclaiming Disused Urban Space

Twice a day, when the tides go down, this causeway appears to connect the French mainland to the island of Noirmoutier, but cross quickly or the road will disappear, stranding you in the middle of the Bay of Bourgneuf. The Passage du Gois was built upon a strip of silt that just barely elevates it above the surface during low tide for a little over an hour at a time. Crossers often wait too long to get started, bet that they’ll be able to make it across, and lose.

Once it starts flooding, it happens quickly. That’s why there are elevated rescue towers located along the stretch – you might just have to swim over to one, climb up and wait it out. When the tide is low, abandoned, ruined cars can be seen littering the sand.

Each year, runners gather for the Foulées du Gois, a race across the causeway. The road also tends to be covered with seashells, making it a popular destination for both souvenir-seeking tourists and locals who look for edible shellfish.

Photos via Flickr Creative Commons: garder le cap, ludovic, pics by brian, oliver gobin, alain bachellier, marc bourbon, oliver hankeln, wikimedia commons

Steps that go nowhere, pedestrian walkways that dead-end into elevated bridges, doors that open out into mid-air: these so-called ‘Thomassons’ are what happens when workers demolishing an outdated structure leave part of it behind, whether out of necessity or laziness. Ultimately, they become almost sculptural in their absurdity, visual ties to the past of a particular place. Walking up one of those staircases to nowhere almost seems like it could be the key to time travel.

Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei named these nonfunctional structures ‘thomassons’ or ‘hyperart thomassons’ in the ’80s in reference to a baseball player with a ‘useless position’ on his team. He noted one such structure in Tokyo in 1972, a staircase that had no entranceway once you reach the top. Discovering more around the city, Akasegawa began giving them names like “the useless window of Ekoda,” building a collection that was published as a book called Chogeijutsu Tomason.

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These days, images of such relics are collected via Instagram tags, on the Hyperart: Thomasson tumblr and on Reddit. There’s even a Thomasson Observation Center on Facebook, accepting public submissions and curating them into new visual references.

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Like the human appendix, these vestigial structures have long since ceased to be useful, yet somehow they’re still around, even as the world constantly shifts and changes. That in itself is pretty strange and incredible.

(images: Mathieu C, Matthew Fargo, Seng Chen and mindbomb via hyperart thomasson tumblr; reddit; wikimedia commons)

Vital yet dangerous, shifting its shape and obscuring what lies beneath, water is an ideal conduit for illusion, and artists take advantage of these qualities to produce works that confuse our senses and seem to give us superpowers. These aquatic art installations allow people to walk on water and breathe beneath its surface, and ask us to confront its mysteries, navigating flooded spaces in pitch blackness or edging dangerous whirlpools.

Floating Piers on Italy’s Lake Iseo by Christo and Jeanne Claude

A modular floating dock system comprised of 220,000 polyethylene cubes will allow visitors to walk all the way to an island from the shore of Italy’s Lake Iseo. The first work by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in Italy in over 40 years, ‘The Floating Piers’ are still under construction and will ultimately be covered in a shimmering yellow fabric that will continue for a mile on land through the pedestrian streets. In the works for decades, it’s Christo’s first piece to be completed since the death of his partner Jeanne-Claude in 2005. The exhibition will be in place for 16 days and then all components will be industrially recycled. “Like all of our projects, ‘The Floating Piers’ is absolutely free and accessible 24 hours a day, weather permitting,” says Christo. “There are no tickets, no openings, no reservations and no owners. The Floating Piers are an extension of the street and belong to everyone.”

Intentionally Unstable Floating Pavilion

Just barely peeking above the surface of the sea in a few strategic places, this sunken pavilion lets you walk right out onto the water, with dry paths appearing and disappearing according to the movement of the waves. ‘Thematic Pavilion’ gently rocks back and forth as visitors move from the top level to the nautical exhibition space below the surface. Hydraulics of the same sort used for submarines keep the structure from sinking to the bottom, and raise it all the way up after the exhibition so it can be used like an ordinary boat.

Glass Topped Swimming Pool by Leandro Erlich

Glimpsed through the surface of a swimming pool, groups of people standing on the bottom seem irrationally calm – not to mention dry. That’s because a thin sheet of glass actually separates them from the extremely shallow water, creating the illusion that they’re submerged. Artist Leandro Erlich uses perspective, mirrors and glass to create optical illusions that shake our sense of what’s up and what’s down.

Boat Tour Through a Flooded Art Museum

Visitors to the Palais de Tokyo have to navigate dark waters inside the museum itself, as if in a post-apocalyptic scenario, for this installation by Celeste Boursier-Mougenot. ACQUAALTA takes its name from the annual flooding event in Venice, imagining what would happen if this same flooding were to affect Paris. Standing or sitting in their boats, visitors row through the nearly pitch-black space before disembarking onto jagged foam landscapes.

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