Combining photographs or everyday vernacular designs, artist Anastasia Savinova aims to illustrate patterns in built environments across major European cities as well as rural countrysides. Her Genius Loci (a play on Genus Loci, or: spirit of place) series illuminates the distinctive details and materials of each place she visits and, set against a regional backdrop of landscapes and waterways.

In some cases, it is colors that serve as unifying factors — in others: building materials and typologies. Each one manages to be at once a singular work of architecture and a montage of quintessential parts.

In a way, her pieces serve act like scrapbooks or memories, combining fragmented portions of travels to countries including Sweden, Germany and Italy. They capture those ineffable qualities usually too hard to fit into a single picture frame.

“In this project I am a flâneur, wandering around, inhaling the spirit of places and trying to visualize it,” she says of her work. “I travel, I observe and document. I take pictures, stare into the windows, watch everyday life – all this helps to build the feeling of the Place.

“Architecture and landscape are visual components of the integral image of the Place, at the same time, this image is inseparably linked with a mentality and a way of life.”

“A House on each collage is composed of many buildings, which are typical for a particular country or city, in their connection with the land and the spirit of the Place.”

An ambitious infrastructure conversion project in Singapore will turn 15 miles of a abandoned rail corridor into a continuous mixed-use trail-and-park system stretching from one end of the island city-state to the other.

Led by the Urban Redevelopment Authority and designed by Japanese firm Nikken Sekkei, the coast-to-coast master plan features over 100 access points and 20 modular platforms for various uses, strung together with contiguous bicycling and pedestrian paths.

Some spaces will be dedicated to nature-oriented activities, including secluded boardwalks and rainforest viewing stations. Other nodes will be community-oriented, with outdoor movie projectors, climbing walls, information stations, food vendors and additional activity centers.

The southern terminus will be the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station, and the long route north will bring the trail system past a series of both remote and urban areas, under viaducts and over bridges, offering access to city dwellers but also escapes into nature and compelling views. In some cases, redundant infrastructure (like former train stations) will be incorporated into this rails-to-trails redevelopment plan.

The goal is to create “seamless public space” that prioritizes the “preservation and reintegration of existing green areas and a relaxed extension of modern life,” according to the designers. The rail corridor should be “inspiring, accessible, comfortable, memorable, eco-friendly and growing/evolving … acting as a catalyst to development and community bonding.”

It can be hard to explain to someone from Europe or elsewhere just how vast and variegated the United States really is, but this short epic photo series is a great start. It depicts a series of surreal landscapes, carefully chosen to show the amazing range of environments found across the American West.

Photographer Reuben Wu came originally from the United Kingdom and was awed by what he found traveling cross-country in America. On his latest trip from his home in Chicago, he looped through the northern and southern Midwest on his way to the West Coast and back, taking incredible images along the way, dubbing the series Cross Country.

He traveled this route with a plan: capture scenes at night when natural marvels were devoid of human activity and using technology to calculate when peak moonlight would allow for stunning visibility. The result is this set of vivid images that make familiar places seem alien, and speak both to beautiful variety and carefully found settings.

Subjects of the series span from Illinois and Indiana through North Dakota and Nevada, California, New Mexico and Kansas, and featured sites (or sights) include: Yellowstone, Badlands, Death Valley, the Grand Canyon and the Grand Prismatic Spring, the Devil’s Tower and the Smith Mansion.