Life-sized street art interventions play out scenes from a parallel universe on public surfaces all around us in the interactive works of French artist Levalet. Raised in Guadeloupe, France, the artist (also known as art teacher Charles Leval) saw the graffiti that surrounded him as part of the city’s identity, prompting him to look at the streets in a whole new way. What if everyday objects and scenes had an entirely different purpose than the ones we see for them?

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Details of the city that might otherwise be unnoticed by its inhabitants – like dangling cables, clumps of ivy and water spouts – become the genesis of strange, creative and absurd scenes, like glimpses of a world just barely out of reach. While much of Levalet’s work is wheat pasted right onto urban surfaces, he sometimes creates cut-outs that can be layered on top of the fabric of the city, giving it a whole new dimension.

“The street is a place where I can work freely, I don’t have financial or time pressures,” said Levalet in a 2015 interview with Street Art Paris. “And this is mostly about besieging public places, everyday places, and being able to put up work that creates a dialogue with the real world. I like the idea of trying to combine several realities, using the world as a medium, and as a guide for representation, positioning the artistic image, in a place that was not meant for it in the first place.”

“Topography is very important for me, this is why I always check a place before I work on it. I try to mix the world of representation with the real world by playing on the physical cohesion of the situations I put up. Architecture supports my work. Then I work on staging the artwork with photographs. Photography allows me to play with the point of view and to intensify the ‘window-dressing’ dimension of my work. Photography also allows me to create a dramatization within the dramatization by including passers-by or other elements.”

When an Amsterdam-based startup announced last year that it was training crows to pick up cigarette butts in exchange for food, the concept seemed a little ridiculous, but not because crows aren’t smart enough to pull it off. Corvids are among the most intelligent animals in the world, routinely shocking scientists with their reasoning skills, and they’re already known for snatching cigarettes right out of people’s hands. It’s the concept of training animals to clean up our messes that has many people shaking their heads, though it’s arguably a symbiotic transaction.

As it turns out, we don’t even have to wait for the results of the Crowded Cities experiment, which uses a ‘crow vending machine’ to reward the birds for collecting and depositing cigarette butts. A French theme park called Puy du Fou began its own crow cleanup crew project, employing six birds to pick up butts and other bits of rubbish and insert them into a small box.

“The goal is not just to clear up, because the visitors are generally careful to keep things clean,” says Nicolas de Villiers, head of the park. It’s also about proving “that nature itself can teach us to take care of the environment.”

The crows received their training from the park’s “Academy of Falconry,” and the pickup project is inspired by the park’s falconry show, in which crows retrieve roses and deliver them to a “princess” in a castle. The falconer keeps an eye on the situation to make sure tourists don’t drop trash just for the crows to retrieve, and keeps the birds from cheating by dropping objects other than trash into the box.

Top image: Steve Baker via Flickr CC by 2.0

An island in France populated by ‘living machines’ that seem to be torn straight from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Les Machines de L’ile has delighted visitors since 2007, and now they’re embarking on a quest to complete the largest hanging garden since ancient Babylon. The unusual artistic and cultural project is set within old shipyards surrounded by two branches of the Loire River, known for its massive mechanical elephant, 82-foot-high Marine Worlds Carousel and a gallery of the illustrations, models and films that went into the making of their machines.

The Heron’s Tree is one of the project’s greatest achievements, but it’s been under construction for over a decade. 114 feet tall and 160 feet in diameter, the tree allows visitors to climb onto the backs or wings of mechanical herons to fly over the tree’s hanging gardens. Les Machines de L’ile have launched a Kickstarter to expand it to its full potential, with a projected cost of 35 million euros and a new opening date of 2022.

The crowdfunding campaign just opened on March 6th and has already exceeded its goal by a long shot, but you can still back it for rewards like posters, sketches, hats and engraved plaques. Whether or not you contribute, you’re going to want to add this fantastical island of automatons to your travel wish list.

“Since the opening of the machines of the island in 2007, we are studying a tree-specific ecosystem through the prototype branch, already visited by more than 4 million visitors. This branch prefigures one of the 22 branches that will constitute the Heron Tree. This allowed us to test the strength, safety and greening of these hanging gardens. The containers that house the plants allow trees to be planted within the Tree itself. Currently, we are experimenting with the implementation of micro landscapes in the forks of branches.”

“In the Herons’ Tree, the hanging gardens are accessible via a double helix staircase located inside the trunk: one to go up, the other to go down. The visitors walk along lush branches and footbridges to go from branch to branch before reaching the top of the tree. From the different galleries 30m (100ft) above the ground, they will discover the Herons, the river Loire, and Nantes. The walking circuit through the hanging gardens ends at a patio bar built into a lower branch. The hanging gardens can accommodate 300 visitors.”

Encircling a 100-year-old oak – the tallest tree on the Château de Raray hotel property in France – the ORIGIN tree house by Atelier Lavit is envisioned as a tailored wooden ‘dress’ to make the oak stand out even more. This modern timber pod functions as a tree house hotel room, providing surprisingly spacious and comfortable lodgings accessed from a hanging bridge. Each facet of the geometric structure intersects the other, creating dynamic overlapping lines.

The effect is that of an abstracted bird’s nest – which is exactly what the architects were going for. “The design of the cabin, coupled with the construction techniques, led to a rationalization of the assembly logic of the branches collected by the birds to create their impregnable shelters,” they explain.

Measuring just under 250 square feet, the room includes a small sheltered patio from which the interiors are entered. Keep climbing the ladder set beside the tree’s trunk instead, and you’ll find yourself on the tree house’s rooftop terrace. Inside, the tree house is lined in pale wood with matching custom furniture. Guests enjoy a generously-sized bed looking out a large operable window to the branches beyond the glass. The room also includes a sitting area and a private bathroom.

Atelier Lavit recently took this same aesthetic in a different direction with a floating eco-hotel on a lake near Avignon, France. The series of buoyant suites on Lac de la Lionne are enveloped in criss-crossing timber slats, creating a semi-private outdoor area complete with a hot tub, while the beds inside are placed directly beneath skylights for a view of the stars.

Tall, dark and brooding, the infamous Maine-Montparnasse Tower is an unexciting skyscraper, especially by Parisian standards, but that could all change if MAD Architects converts it into a city-scale mirror. Their renovation proposal employs clever optical tricks to reflect and invert the surrounding cityscape.

When it was built, Montparnasse was the tallest building in France and heralded as a technological achievement. But unlike the Eiffel Tower, which was controversial at first but became a symbol of the city, this skyscraper never gained iconic status — in fact, it led urban building heights to be capped at seven stories. Some quip it has the most beautiful views in the city, in part because those views don’t include the building.

MAD Architects aims to change perceptions of the tower and its role in the city using concave glass panels tilted at an angle to create reflections of the surrounding built environment.

Viewers would be able to see surrounding streets, roofs and buildings in its mirrored facade. In a way, the resulting design both blends into the environment while also highlighting the beauty of the French capital and showing it from generally unseen angles.

“Today, we cannot really demolish this building and the historical regrets it stands for,” explains one of the architects behind the proposal, “but we can establish a new perspective to re-examine and think about how humanity can co-exist and interact with the tower and its environment, to bring meaning to our hearts.”

Perhaps unfortunately, while the firm was shortlisted in a redesign competition, another team was chosen to renovate the structure before the upcoming Olympic Games. Still, the design idea is out there, and another city might have its own ugly tower in need of transformation.