Green space, installation art and public amenity are all distorted into something fresh and provocative with this strange creation, crashing together at the intersection of amusement and apocalypse.

Developed as part of the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show in London by The Edible Bus Stop, a landscape firm that clearly has a sense of humor, the resulting scene is bit hard to parse at a glance.

A totaled car (presumably misled by the lines), smashed phone booth and colorful graffiti help set the stage, but it’s the yellow lines that rise up from the ground and take physical form that really lend the whole work an edge of comic surrealism. A smattering of green growing up through the pavement helps, too.

The temporary exhibition was titled Riot of Color conceived of as “a post apocalyptic interpretation of the after effects of the 2011 London riots.” The dark inspiration is evident, but perhaps overshadowed a bit by absurdity. (via Colossal)

Submerged sea vessels have long been destinations for diving tourists or (intentional or accidental) marine life habitats, but what if they could serve some function still visible on the surface of the water, like a memorial to those lost when the ship sunk?

The New Concordia Island Contest winners, Alexander Laing and Francesco Matteo Belfiore, propose slicing the section of the Italian cruise ship that crashed in January of 2012 and planting a garden in the resulting voids, leaving the lower, still-submerged areas as habitat zones.

The contest itself “aims to rethink the disaster of the ship Costa Concordia as exceptional opportunity to imagine the future of the wreck and that of the Island of Giglio. It is also a chance to wonder about needs for architecture to build new landscapes on traces and remains of a traumatic event …. The jury has selected the projects that have responded in a more comprehensive way to the questions raised by the contest, interweaving visionaries contents to pragmatic and real solutions.”

The clean and simple solution of the winning proposal defers to both nature and humans, a tribute to the disaster as well as the lives lost. Other intervention propositions of runner-up submissions trended toward either extreme: leaving the wreck mainly as-is and building around it, or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, creating underwater passageways and making the remaining structure physically accessible to people.