Historic architecture meets modern art on the canals of Venice, where a pair of gigantic hands emerge from the depths to lend support above the waterline.

Designed by Lorenzo Quinn, “Support” was put into place a month in advance of the 57th International Art Biennale but is already drawing massive crowds ahead of its official debut.

It was prefabricated and shipped into positioned down the Grand Canal, then assembled and positioned so that it appears to support the Sagredo Hotel, a structure dating back to the 14th century.

Like many historic buildings in the city, this one rises straight up from the water — also like others, it is threatened by the prospect of higher sea levels as well as sinking and settling of the ground below.

“I wanted to sculpt what is considered the hardest and most technically challenging part of the human body. the hand holds so much power – the power to love, to hate, to create, to destroy” says the artist.

“Venice is a floating art city that has inspired cultures for centuries, but to continue to do so it needs the support of our generation and future ones, because it is threatened by climate change and time decay.”

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“Reflecting on the two sides of human nature, the creative and the destructive, as well as the capacity for humans to act and make an impact on history and the environment, Quinn addresses the ability for humans to make a change and re-balance the world around them—environmentally, economically, socially,” writes the Halycon Gallery, which represents Quinn.

As driverless vehicles hit the streets and shared car usage grows, forward-thinking architects, developers and urban planners are working on adaptable designs to future-proof parking garage structures and give them second lives.

Big firms like Gensler see the writing on the wall, predicting car usage will peak by the end of the decade and ride-sharing may dominate by 2025. The effect of this on cities and real estate will be massive, freeing up home garages, street parking and dedicated parking structures — nation-wide there are over 500,000 parking spots and spaces inside buildings and outdoors covering an estimated 3,500+ square miles.

Gensler’s The Mod concept plays to new possibilities in light of their predictions, featuring garage floor heights that will work for new uses. Its modular sections can be easily moved or removed to let in light and facilitate circulation. Built-in utility hookups also help make conversion easier. The firm has also designed a building in Ohio with three parking levels made to be changed into offices over time with easily-added facades and details similar to ones found on other floors (below).

Another such project — a 1,000-car garage for building residents in the Arts District of Los Angeles by Avalon Bay — is to be completed in four years, a long time in this age of fast-evolving technology. Accordingly, their plans include tricks to make converting this area back to other residential uses easy and efficient. This includes flat floors (rather than inclined ones found in many garages) so they can be turned effectively into usable spaces, like shops or community areas.

Converting garages will be a huge project of the coming decades, but so will rethinking the way new architecture is designed in the age of autonomous vehicles. Without people at the wheel, cars can park themselves in smaller spaces. Loading/unloading zones will be reduced and the way people enter buildings (from the street rather than a garage) could change dramatically as well.

Then, of course, there are streets — with less street-side parking, space is opened up for things like parklets, walking and biking paths (not to mention all of the changes to how roads will work). Accordingly, many designers, developers and planners are wisely anticipating these changes — still, their ultimate effect on the built environment remains to be seen as the future continues to take shape.

In a massive coordinating guerrilla marketing campaign, 82 artists from 19 countries produced and installed 600 convincing false advertisements around Paris, all targeting major polluters and corporate backers of the COP21 Climate Conference.

Orchestrated by Brandalism, these installations were professionally executed, placing real-looking adverts behind panes of glass at bus stops and street corners around the city. The aim: to raise awareness of corporate interests in the talks, particularly those with high fossil fuel consumption, and attempts by such companies to greenwash their behavior and appear to be on the side of sustainability.

The works came in all forms, from political cartoons to stark photographs showing the realities of climate change and impacts around the world. Some highlighted the roles of specific brands while others spoke more generally to the consequences of global pollution left unchecked.

From the organizers: “Amidst the French state of emergency banning all public gatherings following the terrorist attacks on 13 November in Paris, the ‘Brandalism’ project has worked with Parisians to insert unauthorised artworks across the city that aim to highlight the links between advertising, consumerism, fossil fuel dependency and climate change.”

The world of future-focused artwork tends to examine extreme outcomes, but this artist’s visions represent a compelling range of possibilities from catastrophic to optimistic, Dystopian to Utopian with other shades of gray in between.

First consider the range of negative outcomes and what they would do to villages, towns and cities around the world (as illustrated in this first round of images above and below) – built environments afflicted by surprising climatic changes like heat waves, ice storms and droughts.

On the one hand, Evgeny Kazantsev considers these disaster scenarios, from dust storms in Barcelona and villages in the Alps without snow to Venice gone dry and oceans overrunning desert cities. But this is only half of the story.

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Adding to its existing collection of over 800,000 seeds, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has just received a series of 4 deliveries representing species from 100 countries around the world. Started in 2008, this ambitious project is designed to safeguard our agricultural heritage for present and future generations and in the face of climate changes, but also to provide a catalog that inventories available types for future accessibility.

The growing store, managed by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, represents a critical repository of agricultural history and a meat-space (or more apt: seed-space) backup for both global crops and other smaller gene banks scattered around the world.

Though the contents were collected in a few cities prior to packaging and reshipment, their types and strains are myriad. “The shipments include types of wheat, barley, corn, sorghum, peal millet, chickpea, groundnut, Asian and African aubergine. Seeds of a number of indigenous African vegetables, including okra, amaranth, spider plant and jute mallow are also being deposited.”

Svalbard, is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Situated north of mainland Europe, it is about midway between continental Norway and the North Pole. The seed vault is cut into rock in this remote location, and the seeds within it continuously refrigerated for long-term storage. The vault structure itself, as currently constructed, can theoretically store up to 2.5 billion seeds representing 4.5 million varieties.

There are many dimensions to the vault trust’s mission. According to the trust, “preserving different food plant varieties will help breed and develop crops that can withstand a changing climate, for example, by being more drought resistant or able to cope with higher temperatures” As a form of genetic wealth, crop diversity provides security for the future of food for farmers and world citizens alike. The GCDT is seeking additional donations from individuals, institutions, businesses and governments to maintain and grow its endowment (approaching $1 billion USD) for the sake of humanity and in the face of climate change.

Fortunately for those who worry about the future, there are other repositories around the world providing a cloud-like backup network bolstering the mission of this seed bank. “Worldwide, more than 1,700 genebanks hold collections of food crops for safekeeping, yet many of these are vulnerable, exposed not only to natural catastrophes and war, but also to avoidable disasters, such as lack of funding or poor management. Something as mundane as a poorly functioning freezer can ruin an entire collection. And the loss of a crop variety is as irreversible as the extinction of a dinosaur, animal or any form of life.”