It’s really easy to lose a chunk of your day getting lost in the hypnotizing effects of these trippy 3D-printed sculpture animations by artist John Edmark. Drawing from spiral patterns and numerical sequences often found in natural objects like pine cones, cacti, sunflowers and seashells, the objects seem to shift and change before your eyes when spun under a strobe light. Watching the videos of the sculptures in motion, it’s hard to believe these aren’t digital animations.

“Unlike a 3D zoetrope, which animates a sequence of small changes to objects, a bloom animates as a single self-contained sculpture,” says Edmark. “The bloom’s animation effect is achieved by progressive rotations of the golden ratio, phi, the same ratio that nature employed to generate the spiral patterns we see in pinecones and sunflowers. The rotational speed and strobe rate of the bloom are synchronized so that one flash occurs every time the bloom turns 137.5 degrees (the angular version of phi.) Each bloom’s particular form and behavior is determined by a unique parametric seed I call a phi-nome.”

The artist explains that much of his work celebrates the patterns underlying space and growth, explored through kinetic sculptures and transformable objects. Highly precise mathematics come into play in both the design and fabrication of each object, more to ask questions about spatial relationships that can only be answered with geometrically exacting constructions than to put that precision on display or “exalt the latest technology.”

It’s a cool way to utilize 3D-printed objects, though, and if you want to play with the effect yourself, you can even purchase the individual shapes from Edmark via Shapeways. He offers a tutorial to repeat the results at Instructables.

The Golden Ratio has been a source of inspiration (and contention) for thousands of years, lurking behind great works of design. Venezuelan architect and illustrator Rafael Araujo is fascinated with patterns of nature and their applications to built environments, but as his artwork shows, is particularly interested in the Golden Ratio as found in natural settings.

These painstakingly created drawings trace this ratio into reality, animating everything from fluttering bird wings to the formation of seashells. Some of these sophisticated works take days or even weeks to complete — fans can also get in on the action with his recently created coloring book.

This coloring book provides a version of his pieces as frameworks for others to complete. The artist got the idea after fans started asking for prints, seeing it as a way to bring them into the process rather than simply giving them a framed product.

Using pencils, rulers, compasses and protractors, he spends as much as 100 hours on a given illustration of these mathematical expressions. Leftover lines, like those found faded in architectural drawings, give extra depth to each piece while also highlighting the geometry that goes into it.

His work shows how the geometric formulas of the Golden Ratio can be found in spirals of plants as well as the delicate flights of butterflies, all through hand drawings of each phenomenon. And as fascinating as they are in their finished form, animated images and process videos of the works in progress are especially intriguing.

Part of the challenge in his representations is their three-dimensional nature — showing complex organic curves accurately in 3D is an incredibly difficult feat of science applied to art. At the same time, something would be lost if these creations were simply done using computer programs (h/t Colossal).

Not a drop of glue or any other adhesive holds together the delicate, 2-inch-thick limestone tiles that make up this airy canopy, which billows into the vaulted ceilings of the Arsenale di Venezia at the 15th annual Venice Architecture Biennale. Conceived by Block Research Group and presented by ETH Zurich, the ‘Armadillo Vault’ is a temporary custom-built installation showing off the surprising versatility of an unyielding material that’s been an architectural mainstay for millennia. Compression keeps all 399 individually-cut, unreinforced stones in place as they stretch across the cavernous space.

The centerpiece of an installation entitled ‘Beyond Bending – Learning from the past to design a better future,’ the Armadillo Vault aims to show the world that digital design and fabrication methods can go hand in hand with humble, ancient building materials like earth and stone. Other components on display include four innovative vaulted floor systems and a series of graphical force diagrams showing how the stones fit together.

Spanning over 52 feet through the Arsenale, the canopy was initially manufactured and assembled in Texas before being disassembled and shipped to Venice, with master stonemasons tasked with setting it into place on-site over a period of two weeks. The precision of the puzzle-like assembly to hold up all that weight with very few supports is a result of mathematically analyzing the structure to control compressive forces.

Check out how the structure was designed and installed in this video from Block Research Group, including computer models that show off the tessellation and Voussoir Geometry used to design the tile assembly.

Photographing real people in actual places, Serge Najjar manages to make the mundane seem strange and fantastical, highlighting the intersection of humans and the architectural spaces they inhabit.

His planned-looking portraits of people in urban environments are surprisingly spontaneous, appearing staged but usually featuring strangers he has never met and captured as he wanders cities.

Technically, Najjar, a lawyer by trade in Beirut, Lebanon, is not even a professional photographer, though the beauty and popularity of his work would suggest otherwise.

His work, which spans from his home city to Rome and Berlin, features both generic architecture and famous places, all with his eye for making the familiar stream foreign and fresh.

While there are common threads, themes and angles to much of his photography, it is impossible to describe the commonality strictly in terms of perspective, as various works break the very conventions he generally follows.

This steel labyrinth looks like something left behind after the production of a dystopian film, its irregular grid of steel rising and falling onto the concrete surface outside Belgium’s C-mine art center. Designed by Gijs Van Vaerenbergh, the maze is an immersive experience in what the artist sees as architecture in its essential form: “a composition of walls that define spaces.” Made of 186 tons of metal, the installation features vertical surfaces towering over 49 feet in the air to properly disorient visitors.

Entering the maze, you pass through a series of geometric doorways cut into the steel, including a sphere, a cylinder and a cone. Depending on where you are in the maze, these cut-outs might offer a tiny glimpse of what’s on the other side of a wall, or open to reveal a succession of similar cut-outs passing all the way through the installation.

The steel, and how it is cut and arranged, offers a unique architectural visual that changes according to your perspective, shifting from abstract lines into distinct geometries and sometimes creating optical illusions that make you uncertain whether you’re looking at a two-dimensional or three-dimensional surface.

A nearby installation of antique mine shafts offers a different way to experience the maze: from above. You can pass through it as an active participant, and then view it as a whole, taking in its complexities from a more detached bird’s eye view.