Central yet unused, the central median of New York City’s Park Avenue is the subject of a series of spectacular and speculative redesigns — from rock-climbing walls and waterfalls to kayak commuter lanes — thanks to a creative ideas competition.

Participating architects, designers and planners were given free reign to re-imagine this major thoroughfare spanning across Manhattan, and took that liberty to heart. Their pitches for Beyond the Centerline, organized by an NYC real estate company, are largely quite extreme.

Among other ideas, short-listed contestants offered up images of ice-skating rinks, elevated basketball courts, yoga studies and Modernist art exhibition spaces. Some are fun and others functional, offering alternative ways to commute by boat, for instance.

Some are focused on greening the dense city, creating space for landscapes and natural environments to break up the loud and busy car-filled route. A few even suggest incorporating forest habitats for urban wildlife. Many of the proposals are vertical in nature, seeking to maximize the small footprint offered by introducing shops, cafes, markets, theaters and other above-ground and underground amenities.

“While Park Avenue, with its median plantings and periodic art installations, remains one of the world’s most iconic commercial boulevards, I have long believed that we can and must be far more imaginative in how we encounter and utilize such a precious urban commodity,” said the contest creators. “Our hope is that this contest and these proposals will spark a real conversation about what can be done to activate Park Avenue’s center line for a new generation of New Yorkers.” Winners will receive up to $25,000 for their creative work, and while it may never be built, hopefully it can at least get people thinking about how to develop underutilized space in cities.

Cities often feel like dense and crowded places, and it is hard to imagine everyone on Earth living in urban environments let alone a single city or even (yes, it’s possible) one gigantic megastructure. In a series of videos, filmmaker Joseph Pisenti asks: what if everyone lived in one city? Then he takes it further with: what if everyone lived in just one building?

It sounds like an absurd proposition, but our planet’s population of billions could, in fact, but contained in a relatively small amount of space if needed (perhaps in case of a worldwide evacuation to space?). Images of single cities in the videos show places that already have populations in a single frame larger than countries like, say, Australia have spread across an entire continent.

A few billion cubic meters in a structure set on, say, Manhattan, could uncomfortably house the human race. It would be twice the height on the world’s largest building, but we would fit if we had to.

As the video series unfolds, its creator gets increasingly realistic with respect to actual needs for people beyond simply space to exist, imagining a world where we all could actually live on a small part of South America. Hopefully, of course, it will never come to this, but as sea levels rise it’s good to know we have options (and fun to engage in these thought experiments, regardless). By the time you finish watching this series, however, you may find you would rather simply escape it all:

Given how far away we still are from personal spacecraft, perhaps it’s not surprising that most design concepts for extra-terrestrial ships haven’t evolved much in the last couple decades. Concerned more with practicalities (and budget constraints) than aesthetics, even NASA has stuck to the same-old same-old when it comes to spacecraft design, but a fun vision of the future from Ferrari’s design director gives us some hope.

Known for incorporating Ferrari design sensibilities into all sorts of sketches, Flavio Manzoni doesn’t disappoint with his spaceship concept. Fluid and reflective, the ship is just as sleek as any of the real-life luxury cars that Manzoni has designed, including the LaFerrari supercar.

The ship is divided into two shells by a signature red line, and two wings wrap around the lower section of the body.

Unveiling the sketches and renderings at Form Trends, Manzoni says it started as just a bit of fun, inspired by his childhood living at the top of a six-story building and imagining a UFO landing on the rooftop terrace.

“I tried to imagine something that can fly in the future, since there will be less and less space available on the ground,” says Manzoni. “And I focused on creating a little craft that’s different than my childhood dreamm, when I thought that a car of the future would slip on a cushion.”

Actors gain access to thousands of different faces instantaneously as their facial topography is scanned and altered in real-time using 3D projection mapping. Japanese artist Nobumichi Asai collaborates with makeup artist Hiroto Kuwahara and French digital image engineer Paul Lacroix to create transfixing transformations that track the actor’s movements to keep their ‘new faces’ in place.

The Facehacking and Omote projects consist of real-time face tracking and projection mapping to ‘re-write’ the actors’ faces in a virtually endless variety of ways. As the actors turn their heads, animations are projected onto the surface of their skin.

The effect can be quite creepy, especially when these new characters open their eyes as if they have suddenly inhabited the bodies of their hosts. The result looks like especially detailed stage makeup, but changes on demand. While it could certainly be used in film, it’s especially intriguing as a possible element of live performances.

From 3D-printed towers of sand to garbage-powered architecture of the seas, these eVolo Skyscraper Competition entries push the envelope in every possible direction, and a few impossible ones too. A common theme this year: harvesting energy and building materials from local environments, and turning pollution into part of a futuristic solution. The award winners are certainly impressive, but a number of other entrants are well worth their honorable mentions as well. Set everywhere from the urban jungles of Los Angeles and suburbs of Detroit to the world’s rain forests, deserts, oceans, here are ten designs, selected from hundreds, all deserving of a closer look (leading up to and including the three award winners).

Sand Babel is one such runner up, an incredible skyscraper crafted from the very sands on which it sits, its 3D-printed construction powered by solar energy (abundantly available). Inspired by desert tornadoes, its above-ground portion is anchored by an underground system of root-like spaces. Temperature differentials help the structure generate water via condensation along its expansive top viewing platform.

Project Blue, another honorable mention recipient, is fueled by its environment as well, but takes things up a notch by turning particulate pollution in the sky and converting it into “green energy by creating an enormous upside down cooling tower with a multi-tubular cyclic desulfurization system that produces nitrogen and sulfur. When both elements are combined with the atmospheres surplus of carbon monoxide the result is water coal that would later be transformed methane and used as green energy through a low-pressure reaction called low pressure efficient mathanation – a physical-chemical process to generate methane from a mixture of various gases out of biomass fermentation or thermo-chemical gasification.”

The Hyper-Speed Vertical Train Hub provides a fantastic vertical spin on a conventionally horizontal phenomena, turning transportation on its side and making it more visible in the city, all while saving precious ground space. “The proposal will ‘flip’ the traditional form and function of the current train station design vertically, and re-form it into a cylindrical mass to increase the towers train capacity. This tall cylindrical form aims to eliminate the current impact that traditional stations have currently on land use, therefore returning the remaining site mass back to the densely packed urban Mega City.”

The Skyvillage draws its inspiration from the challenging condition created by freeway interstates, which are at the heart of the car-centric city of Los Angeles where the conceptual project is set. The “Los Angeles freeway system segregates the city’s fabric restricting urban activities to single locations. Similarly, skyscrapers exacerbate this condition of segregation instead of encouraging urban integration. The envisioned vertical city would bridge over freeway interruptions and connect the four quadrants around 101 and 110 freeways as a single architectural organism while boosting cultural exchange, urban activities, and social interaction.”

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Futurbanist 10 Award Worthy 2014 Evolo Skyscraper Designs