Stretched and exaggerated almost to the point of absurdity, otherwise ordinary architecture takes on a bit of an uncanny feeling. Digital artist Alex Lysakowski describes it as “imaginary magnitude,” a change in proportion that’s a bit too extreme to be real, but straddling the line, sometimes making the viewer unsure whether they’re looking at a real building.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Alex Lysakowski (@mdviii_mcmxc)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Alex Lysakowski (@mdviii_mcmxc)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Alex Lysakowski (@mdviii_mcmxc)

For his series “Antistructure,” Lysakowski manipulates photos of buildings and the cargo boxes of trucks to create fictional structures that look a bit like monuments, standing tall in mundane settings.

“Antistructure is a body of work that focuses on exaggerated architectural forms within banal spaces. The farcical nature of the manipulated structures creates a surreal world of absurdity in an otherwise mundane landscape eluding to an environment beyond the realm of any real architectural forms but still preserving the potential for their existence.”

Lysakowski says his father is a chemical engineer, and as a child, he’d flip through engineering manuals and catalogs in his home office, filling his head with ideas about what could be made with the components. Maybe the results shouldn’t be real, from an engineering perspective, but there’s something fascinating about the possibility.

Check out more of Alex Lysakowski’s work on Instagram @mdviii_mcmxc.

Visions of fictional cities – whether optimistic, realistic, fantastical or dystopian – tend to take on a haze of mystery and grandiosity in Japanese anime, as epitomized in ‘Ghost in the Shell.’ Dark jumbles of nearly-identical skyscrapers lurk over the protagonists in futuristic metropolises, often emphasizing feelings of desolation, industrialization and technology run amok. If you’ve ever sighed over a particularly incredible work of fictional architecture, you might be interested in an exhibition currently on display at London’s House of Illustration.

‘Anime Architecture: Backgrounds of Japan’ is the first UK exhibition of architectural illustrations for classic anime films, featuring over 100 technical drawings and watercolor illustrations. Most of these works come from series that debuted or were most popular during the anime heyday of the 1990s, including Hiromasa Ogura’s paintings for ‘Ghost in the Shell’, Takashi Watanebe’s pencil drawings from Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and work from the films ‘Patlabor: The Movie’ (1989) and ‘Metropolis’ (2001) by Mamoru Oshii and Atsushi Takeuchi.

Sure, there are great anime works that came after these with fictional architecture that’s just as beautiful, but these days, artists use computer animation instead of hand-painting the backgrounds. In an interview with It’s Nice That, curator Stefan Riekeles explains that it took quite a bit of nudging and late-night meetings at bars to convince the artists that people would want to see these works outside the context of the films, and that they’d translate well to gallery walls.

“[Ghost in the Shell], released 1995, was the continuation of [director Mamoru Oshii’s] reflection of the Asian mega-city, which he started with Patlabor in 1989 and continued after Ghost in the Shell: Innocence in 2004. Patlabor is set in a realistic urban depiction of Tokyo. Innocence is located in a purely fictional Asian world. The world of Ghost in the Shell is a hybrid of these poles.”

“The idea was to evoke a feeling of submerging into the deep levels of the city, where a flood of information overflows the human senses and a lot of noise surrounds the people. The artists were looking for an expression of a crowded space. They found a blueprint for such a place in Hong Kong, which is exotic enough for a Japanese audience to evoke a feeling of alienation and strangeness but familiar enough to relate their daily life to.”

Anime Architecture: Backgrounds of Japan will be open through September 10th, 2017 at the House of Illustration in King’s Cross.

These fictional structures seem to be ripped right out of the concept art for a sci-fi film, envisioning a world of architecture that’s totally out of scale with humans but fittingly grand for the environments in which they’re placed. ’Last Day’ by Ukrainian architect Mykhallo Ponomarkenko is the first prize-winning entry at this year’s Fairy Tales concept architecture competition, using classical painting techniques to tell stories of a huge artificial platform that uses anti-gravity engines to escape the laws of physics.

“Landscapes have always inspired me to put something weird, unreal and out of human scale into them,” says Ponomarkenko. “Something not feasible and not practical that contrasts with the natural surroundings, but also exists at the same scale. These satirical interventions lead to new ideas and feelings about nature – they make the viewer more aware about the environment and our harmful impact on it.”

“We are flat surface creatures. Sometimes I feel that we crave it so much that the planet is going to be turned into pavement so cars can go anywhere, and our industries could continue expanding. The ‘Saturn Rings’ in my proposal represent these flat surface desires but in a more poetic, optimistic, and friendly manner.”

Organized by Blank Space, an online architecture platform, the fourth annual Fairy Tales competition announced three winners selected from over 60 project submissions. Winners are awarded prizes of $2,500, $1,500 and $1,000, respectively, and select projects will be featured in the fourth print edition of Fairy Tales: When Architecture Tells a Story. Read the story that goes along with ‘Last Day’ and see the rest of the entries over at Blank Space.

“The proposals put forth in the Fairy Tales competition create entire worlds of the imagination – they build their immersive stories as much by what they don’t say, as by what they do,” says Blank Space. “The winning entries in this year’s competition include oblique references to current events, mundane daily activities and human emotions that we all easily relate to – they make visible how we shape space, and in turn, how space shapes us.”

“The images and narratives are so wildly outlandish, and yet, so grounded that it seems like we could mistakenly stumble into any of them. They are personal and powerful – a testament to the power of architecture as a world-builder.”

“Technology can help nature understand itself,” says AUJIK, a self-proclaimed cult that melds faux mythologies, fictitious landscapes and wildly distorted architecture with a philosophy they call “animism for the Digital Age.” The quasi-spiritualist Japanese collective gives us a look into the world of their imagination via simulated drone footage, swooping us over and through their vision of nature awakened in a new way by technological integration.

“Since the late 2000’s, the online presence of mysterious nature/tech cult AUJIK quietly spread across video platforms featuring proposed active members and fabricated histories. These virtual appearances suggest decades-old lineage through theoretical schematics outlining their transgression emission, citing faux reports arguing the life of inanimate matter and modern forms of animism from fictional anthropologists and philosophers.”

“For AUJIK, nature is divided into Refined and Primitive categories. This separation presents a conflict that is the root of all chaos in the world, and in order to reach a sublime state, AUJIK generates rituals to harmonize the organic and synthetic realms. Refined nature consists of evolved technology such as robotics, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, DNA manipulations, and body enhancements. The Primitive includes fauna, flora, and the Earth itself with its precious stones, minerals, and metals.”

Natural settings, rocks, plants and even living creatures become something more than themselves, infused with a new power, growing in a way that they never actually could in our current reality, bound as it is by the laws of physics. Digital forces invade and transform everything from dark forests to dense cities, warping the architecture, creating a bizarre parallel universe.

All of the books in the world still exist, yet are just out of reach, locked up in an impenetrable fortress or stacked so high we can’t hope to reach them, in this dystopian vision by Shanghai-based artist Jie Ma. The series of fictional libraries renders information inaccessible, teasing us with glimpses of what we could have but always keeping it just beyond our grasp.

Combining futuristic fantasy art reminiscent of movie or video game concepts and architectural assemblage, Ma’s series envisions libraries as stark structures that haven’t quite been abandoned altogether, but aren’t exactly in great shape. Human figures mill around in seeming frustration, stopped from actually finding anything by darkness and disorder.

In some of the images, books are scattered around in spaces that look as if a storm has just ripped through, or they’ve been left to deteriorate for decades. It’s impossible to see the spines of any of the books, and there are no ladders offering access to shelves that tower many dozens of feet into the air. In a bibliophile’s worst nightmare, walkways to rooms full of books have crumbled away.

In others, the libraries are like off-limits military facilities, surrounded on all sides by water or mud, frustratingly devoid of actual entrances. One of these works, entitled ’Eclipse VII: Deep Reverence for Arnold Böcklin,’ pays tribute to a famous painting known as ’Isle of the Dead.’

Yet, in contrast to these scenes are more hopeful ones, in which people examine oversized books with gigantic magnifiers in orderly rooms overlooking concrete landscapes. The series seems to suggest a sense of hope for human curiosity, driving us to keep seeking knowledge no matter how many obstacles we may encounter.