Marvelous if also a bit morbid, these highly detailed murals show the complex workings inside giant-sized animals, revealing muscle, sinew, tendons, veins and bones in various different configurations.

Nychos is a street artist from Austria who creates spectacular, detailed artworks. He “grew up in a little village near Graz (Styria, South of Austria). He calls it the green hell. Born into an Austrian hunter’s family, he saw, at a very young age, things which normal people would consider as cruel and brutal.”

The scale of works by Nychos plays to the level of detail, and each piece is crafted differently, almost like an experiment in sequential dissections by a scientist or medical student. His subjects span the animal kingdom as well, from kangaroos and rats to whales and alligators (as well as humans).

Some of the murals are sliced cleanly while others operate like layered x-rays, revealing various depths at different points along their length.

Still others feature intertwined animals at various stages of dissection or translucency, like the two snakes above, or act alike exploded axonometric drawings with pieces pulled out from the core.

While Nychos also exhibits in galleries and makes smaller-scale prints, his large public pieces are particularly compelling (if somewhat disturbing).

Somewhere between data visualization and civic artwork, these info-driven diagrams reveal wealth disparities in the centers of America’s second and third largest cities. Herwig Scherabon‘s project, titled simply Income Inequality, uses a matrix of blocks (minimicking magnetized iron) to highlight rich and poor neighborhoods.

The city grids form a recognizable backdrop for these axonometric representations, allowing viewers to read the baseline built enviroment against the overlaid information. In turn, the millions of stacked pixel blocks end up forming an alternative landscape of skyscraper-like structures in the urban environment.

The net result is a map of the city’s invisible patterns and correlations shaped by power, money and time, revealing inequalities and mechanisms of segregation. Above: Chicago’s infamous low-income South Side (with Lake Michigan for reference). Below: poor areas of Los Angeles located directly next to the downtown core.

The final presentation was mounted on a pair of wooden boards with the city names shown on the cites, exhibited at the Glasgow School of Art graduate show. Captions on the side give more details on the diagrams.

From the artist/designer: “The two large prints (150x75cm) are visualizations of income inequality in Los Angeles and Chicago and are currently shortlisted for the Information is Beautiful Awards. They are printed on matte Somerset Velvet paper and mounted on thick wooden boards. The images are abstract diagrams of these cities that show a high resolution matrix of blocks. The height of these blocks corresponds to the income in the respective output area.”

“It is part of the design idea to inspire the viewer to look for their own neighborhood or other areas that interest them. I want to trigger a train of thought for what the reasons behind inequality might be. I am always fascinated by the patterns and correlations in the urban fabric. The politics behind urban planning tell us a lot about the people who live in these places and the powers who shape them. I think that it is utterly important to try to unveil the inequalities and the segregating mechanism that we got used to live with.”

Rather than turning toward far-flung science-fiction, these designers have extrapolated current engineering techniques and evolving technologies. This skyscraper thus fuses passive power generation, urban agricultural endeavors, modular climate-sensitive skins and mobile plug-and-play platforms.

Architects of the 20th Century learned the hard way that actually predicting the future of built environments is essentially impossible. Arup‘s engineers take a different approach with this concept, playing out a number of both feasible and fantastic ideas all in one inspiring schematic design – more infographic than proposal.

Imagine smart systems and fully-integrated transit reducing the cost and time of urban conveyance and decreasing the distance between production, storage and use of energy, food, water and other essential resources.

A lot of these themes (buildings producing more energy than they consume, for instance) are already playing out individually and in prototype form in current structures, but the ways in which they with synthesize into new structural languages remain to be seen.

The result is not a design proposal as such (though viewed on those terms, it is a thing of wonder), but an experimental illustration of the kinds of things we might find in the future, fused to and integrated with structures yet unbuilt.