After the Austrian government spent €19,000,000,000 to bail out a bank in 2014, a student group in Vienna created a giant urban model of a place Hypotopia in protest. This visionary city for 100,000 people represents a place that could have been built with the money used to rescue the Hypo Group Alpe Adria banking group.

The city of Hypotopia is and will remain a Utopian fantasy, but represents a novel form of protest – a way for it to take physical form and convey a visceral sense of lost possibilities. This (quite literally) walkable city was opened to the public, allowing people to inspect it in full detail.

According to Lukas Zeilbauer, “while Utopia stands for an ideal fictitious world, ‘hypo’ is a Greek word meaning under, beneath or bellow – so a change coming from the bottom, from the folk.” While fictional architecture has been used by niche practitioners for polemical purposes throughout history, it is rare for such a large-scale, full-city effort to be driven by political motivations.

Students from the Technical University of Vienna designed and created the model city in Karlsplatz, a central city square, building it over the course of four months. Were it to be built, it would be the sixth largest city in Austria.

Construction of the model was aided by businesses who donated building materials, including wood and concrete blocks, carted in wheelbarrows to the site and assembled according to a predetermined computer model.

The public received the project with great enthusiasm, as the majority of citizens did not agree with using taxpayer money to bail out the bank in question.

Meanwhile, the makers of the model did more than just create a miniature mock-up: they actually ran the math and calculated the cost of construction, from architecture to infrastructure, making room and accounting for everything … except big banks, that is (images by Armin Walcher).

A team of designers has taken iconic images of major global cities and added a “rich graphic language and vibrant visual effects” to blend each one with elements of Japanese infrastructure and visual culture.

Presenting their work at the Venice Architecture Biennale, this strange art series from Daigo Ishii + Future-Scape Architects aims to question our ideas of locality and our sense of civic imagery and identity.

What happens, they ask, when a familiar underlying environment gets an overlay, sending mixed signals to observers? Is it the underlying shape and form of a place that make it what it is, or those other visual cues that lend familiarity?

The firm set their cities on cities including New York, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen and La Paz, each time pulling in distinctively Japanese elements, from neon signage to cherry trees.

In each case, the result is a surreal hybrid, playing off cues in source photographs shot in the United States, Argentina, Denmark, France, Bolivia and Italy, becoming something that is neither here nor there, original or artificial.

“The project seeks to present an amalgamation between traditional architectural studies and surprising artistic elements.” The display in Venice consists of “a video work shown on a large-scale monitor, with six surrounding boards displaying the final scenery of each city after ‘Tokyo-lization’ has taken place.”

A temporary installation to commemorate the rebuilding of the city after the second world war, this massive staircase made from scaffolding will lead visitors up onto a postwar structure in the heart of Rotterdam.

Standing 60 feet high, the staircase of the 180 steps end on top of the Groot Handelsgebouw, an early building from the postwar construction effort that began 75 years ago. Dubbed simply The Stairs, this project by Dutch architecture firm MVRDV will also involve film screenings and events on the rooftop.

If the resulting temporary roof-topping venue is sufficiently popular, a more permanent means of access may replace the temporary stairs.

Other temporary and permanent architectural and urban design projects are also being developed and opened as part of the 75th-year commemoration (above: Market Hall with digital mural by MVRDV)

Facing down the difficult challenge of creating an ever-changing urban gaming environment, this digital designer went with a cheap alternative that is aesthetically compelling and could have impacts beyond cyberspace.

The game, Project Sprawl, is something of a cross between the Grand Theft Auto series and classic roll-playing games, but most critically: its metropolitan context needs to be dynamic and full of surprises, evolving over time like a real city.

Low on funds and looking for cheaper and easier world-building solution than stock skylines or fully-custom options could provide, Cedric Kerr “decided to develop software that could auto-generate complex cities, from street maps to skyscraper architecture, for his characters to inhabit.”

As these animated illustrations show, there are rules to the way the generative algorithm constructs buildings – starting with a simple baseline, windows and doors, cantilevers and split facades morph and evolve in mesmerizing ways.

From Wired, “The solution to Kerr’s urban planning problem came in the form of Unity, a game engine often used to design game worlds from the size of a room to entire solar systems. The result was a set of building blocks that could be pulled and stretched in any direction with facades that would update in real time. Kerr could quickly sketch an outline of a foundation and in seconds have a unique building automatically populated with windows, doors, and other architectural details.”

The result of this project is a kind of architectural vocabulary that could be useful for deconstructing architecture, creating simulations or generating backdrops for conceptual projects. From Kerr: “the idea is that each building is decomposed into a set of rules forming a grammar that describes each stage of the process. These rules are hierarchical so a building is made up of facades, facades are made up of floors, floors are made up of tiles, tiles contain windows and so on.”

After a huge and lengthy legal battle fought on various fronts by developers, municipalities and the Council of State, the Turkish government has ordered the partial destruction or total demolition of multiple large buildings said to threaten the historic architectural heritage of Istanbul (above image via Gokorg).

When speaking of skylines, one generally thinks of of the towers that define them – but the courts have ruled that modern-day Istanbul (not Constantinople) is not allowed to reach for new heights, or even maintain its currently-constructed ones. Adding pressure to the mix, Unesco has threatened to revoke the city’s status as a World Heritage Site, in part due to rampant urban development (additional images by Moyan Brenn).

At the heart of this particular legal issue are views of a series of structures long central to the civic identity of Istanbul, including the Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace and Blue Mosque, all of which are now being overshadowed by three new structures standing dozens of stories tall. These new threats to the existing sihuoette are part of Onalti Dokuz complex, a residential development already largely finished.

Detractors are celebrating the victory, which started with legal attacks beginning last year. From Dezeen and the Turkish newspaper Todays Zaman, “two legal cases were launched against the development – one seeking cancellation of the permits for the construction of the building and another to shut down the construction and destroy parts of the buildings that had already been completed.”

The government has rejected appeals by the developers and city, and it remains unclear who will pay for the cost of the necessary size reductions the buildings in question must now undergo. It is easy to see why critics would feel threatened by these and other new developments, but at some point one has to wonder: who has the right to suppress urban growth, and where do we draw the line between preservation and urbanization?