The science of engineering and rationalism of city planning meet visionary experimentation in art installations by Tomás Saraceno. The Argentina-born artist is known for works that imagine an alternate future for humanity in unexpected, often utopian ways. His latest work, ‘On Space Time Foam‘, is an exploration of self-sufficient aerial structures that could be made on a larger scale and inhabited by humans.

‘On Space Time Foam’ is a layered installation of translucent PVC membranes suspended nearly 80 feet above the ground. Installed at the Hangar Bicocca in Milan, Italy, the work alludes to the primordial state of matter from which the universe formed.

Visitors can access the installation either from above, to navigate it themselves, or from below, to watch as people seemingly float in mid-air. The plastic has a surface area of nearly 13,000 square feet. Walking on the surface is a tricky task, sending visitors sliding and tumbling across the plastic. “As soon as you decide to climb onto the installation, you are necessarily caught up in a play of mutual dependence,” Saraceno told Klat Magazine. “This experience helps to initiate a dialogue between people, through a body language that has no need of words.”

While it’s a fun attraction in its current form, Saraceno has big plans for the concept. He aims to translate it into a Buckminster Fuller-inspired floating biosphere above the climate change-threatened Maldives Islands, which would be fully inhabitable with solar panels and desalinated water. Saraceno will embark on a residency at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work out the logistics of such an ambitious undertaking.

“The aim of what I do is to try to expand the range of the dialogue, to make as many people as possible aware of the extent of the impact that each of us has on others and on the environment. This is the objective of my artistic practice: awakening people to the interdependence of the different elements that make up the system in which we live—the interrelations between objects, natural phenomena and living creatures.”

See a video of the installation in action, and an interview with the artist, at Design Boom.

What would New York have looked like, if the futuristic visions of innovative thinkers in the late-19th to mid-20th century had become reality? Midtown Manhattan could have been enclosed within a dome, as imagined by Buckminster Fuller. The Hudson River could have an enormous bridge with towers that reach hundreds of feet into the air. And of course there’s personal aircraft involved. Here are some of the most outrageous and intriguing of these predictions.

Nuke-Proof Underground New York

During the height of Cold War fears over nuclear attacks, Oscar Newman dreamed up this wacky design for a nuke-proof second New York City, to be located in a hollowed-out space hundreds of feet below the existing city. Published in 1969, this highly impractical vision ironically called for nuclear weapons to be buried deep underground and detonated to create the space.

Colossal Hudson Bridge

Gustav Lindenthal’s design for a colossal bridge across the Hudson River would have included towers that are taller than the Woolworth building (which remains New York’s tallest skyscraper.) The bridge, for which a cornerstone was built and still exists, would have been 6,000 feet long, 200 feet wide and 200 feet above the river with 12 railroads, 24 traffic lanes and 2 pedestrian promenades.

Just Imagine

In the 1930 film ‘Just Imagine‘, Depression-era aesthetics crash into wild fantasies of New York in 1980, with massive 16-lane highways, vertical architecture full of terraces and lots of inexplicable ‘high-tech’ equipment.

Elevated Railway System Leading to Lady Liberty

Cartoonist W.A. Rogers’s depiction of an elevated railway system running amok in Manhattan seems to have been a satirical commentary on expansion and development in the New York City of 1887. The cartoon shows a railway winding up the Statue of Liberty and entering the frightened-looking lady’s mouth.

Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome

And, of course, there’s Bucky Fuller’s geodesic dome. The architect, engineer and inventor (among other things) popularized this type of structure in the 1950s. This particular vision would have enclosed Midtown Manhattan “to regulate weather and air pollution.”

How many exciting design ideas have been put off indefinitely or discarded altogether due to the fear of failure? It’s not only the mental and emotional tolls of failure that hold designers back – it’s the physical tolls that come from wasting materials and being unable to salvage parts to use them again. What if the physical framework for these ideas was simple, reusable and highly compatible? The Grid Beam system, directly brought about by Buckminster Fuller’s Challenge, enables designers to build, disassemble and rebuild to their hearts’ content without worrying about waste or compatibility.

The Grid Beam system uses a series of wood and steel beams with evenly spaced hole patterns on all sides. No special connectors or equipment are necessary to start building all sorts of structures, vehicles and other objects. And because no welding or other irreversible modifications are required, the materials can be reused ad infinitum – sort of like real-life Legos for engineers, architects and designers.

Items made with the Grid Beam system are easily duplicated by even the most novice builders. There are no complex joinery techniques or advanced skills required; builders need only to count the hole pattern and assemble their frame with regular nuts and bolts from any hardware store. The Grid Beam pieces themselves are just pieces of wood or metal with holes drilled at specific intervals, meaning that almost anyone can create the raw materials for building amazing things right at home.

Because everything made with Grid Beam can be disassembled without damage to the components, it is simple to “reprogram” the parts into new shapes. A bunk bed can become a chair, a trailer can become part of a car – the squared frames can take on just about any form. With the addition of some simple motors, gearboxes and axles, more complex structures come to life easily. As times change and gadgets grow obsolete, they can simply be taken apart and rebuilt into whatever is needed in the future.

Grid Beam enthusiasts, many of whom have been using the system since its creation in the 1970s, see the system as a low-tech revolution. Taking manufacturing out of the hands of big companies and putting it in the hands of the individual (and making it easy for the individual to create whatever they need) makes Grid Beam the perfect system for enacting a quiet movement toward DIY technology.

But even more importantly than putting the power in the hands of the individual, the Grid Beam system allows users to learn creative problem solving. Rather than building all of the structures that one will ever possibly need, Grid Beam lets users build the needed objects one at a time with a limited number of materials. One can build a tractor to use in the spring, disassemble it and then reuse the same parts to build a harvester in the autumn.

The reusable nature of the Grid Beam system makes it the ideal solution for many problems: saving money, saving space, satisfying a creative need to build, reducing waste and eliminating the need for large manufacturing operations. The enthusiasts who sing the praises of the Grid Beam system wholeheartedly believe that the future of design rests with the individual and with this unique system. With it, they say, we can build a new world.