Full-scale neoclassical and baroque buildings made of wire mesh loom over festival-goers at Coachella this week, representing artist Eduardo Tresoldi‘s largest works yet. The Italian sculptor is known for his eerie installations of translucent architecture, previously seen in a stunning indoor installation in Abu Dhabi, a ghostly ship sailing across Italy’s Bay of Sapri and the resurrection of a long-fallen church in Puglia. Entitled ‘Etherea,’ the new sculptures are a reflection on humankind’s relationship with our built environments.

“The installation plays ironically on the dualism between the pure and the filtered experiences that intertwine with one another, to eventually leave the man at the center of it all,” says Tresoldi. “With the passage from a macro-reality to a restricted one, the human body becomes a key to read, discover, measure and experience reality, just like architecture itself. An analogy between man, architecture and their surroundings is ultimately established.”

The three structures that make up ‘Etherea’ at the Coachella Music Festival stand at 36, 54 and 72 feet in height, taking Tresoldi’s sculpture to a whole new scale. They make a striking contrast with the palm trees, mountains and spectacular sunsets in Indio, California, where Coachella is set. Shots that include the crowds really reinforce just how big these creations are.

As always, the layers of mesh create a haunting sense of unreality, keeping the scenery and sky visible beyond each of the ‘buildings’ so they feel more like memories or projections than physical structures.

Photos by Roberto Conte

What if, after the demolition of a neglected building, all that was left behind was the leafy exoskeleton of ivy that once grew up its outer walls? As shanty towns all along the Yuan River in the Hunan province of China are dismantled, a piece of them remains behind, paying tribute to their historical value in this setting. V Studio presents ‘Home for Boston Ivy,’ a recreation of these building-shaped ivy structures in metal, which will serve as a trellis for real ivy in the future. These welded shapes will be placed within the new, modernized version of the city so future inhabitants can get a sense of its past.

“Houses being covered with Boston ivy can be seen everywhere in shanty towns,” they explain. “While presenting a picture of harmonious coexistence between human and nature, it is also the memory of a home for residents of shanty towns. When the ivy attaches to the building and grows, it forms the turns and enclosures of the space. V Studio’s artwork has pulled away the building which the plant has attached to, and left only the Boston ivy with twisted roots and gnarled branches in the shape of the building.”

V Studio previously completed a series of sculptures relating to the same theme, all using materials from the same site in the Hunan Changde Yuanshui right bank shantytowns. ‘Sealing’ preserved building debris in a collection of cubes that function as urban seating; information about each home that was demolished is imprinted on the cement that contains the debris.

“At present, the shantytowns are being demolished,” they say (translated from Chinese.) “In the near future, a modernized metropolis will completely cover the area and all that is available here will cease to exist. How to preserve the emory of the old city and inject the memory of the origin into the new town in the process of demolishing the old building and building a new one is the basic starting point for the creation of the series of works.”

Looming above an industrial parcel near an abandoned railway terminal in Beirut, seven balconies jut out into the air like the hulls of stacked skeletal ships. ‘Plot #1282’ by DW5 Architects is one of the first major architectural projects to be erected in a depressed area beside military barracks, fallow agricultural land and a 100-foot-wide highway. It will add 95 industrial lofts to a local that’s currently non-residential, and since other buildings will likely spring up all around it in the coming years, those balconies are strategically focused on preservable views of the city.

A maximum of two apartments will be located on each floor, with the floor slabs arranged around nine exposed cores. Each living space features minimal interior partitioning and lots of glass.

“In its present state, the site enjoys unobstructed panoramic views on all orientations through the totality of the perimeter of the plot,” the architects explain. “As a result of that, all proposed loft spaces enjoy full transparency of their facades with openings that span from floor to ceiling on all exterior elevations. In an unforeseeable future, as the surrounding plots get built, and with the gradual densification of the immediate environment, the full apertures of our facades will face unpredictable situations that our project’s morphology responds to by its continuous setback on the totality of the perimeter of the site and the gradual recess of the floor plates.”

It’s a pretty clever way to make the building adaptable to changing conditions around it, and you have to admit, it has resulted in a kinda spooky but visually dynamic silhouette.

Like hazy memories or flickers of imagination, architectural structures either long since lost or never built in the first place interact with three-dimensional space in the form of ghostly sculptures, projections or the imprints they left behind on neighboring buildings. Some are tangible yet illusory, made of transparent materials that make them seem like hallucinations, while others attempt to conjure past, fiction and fantasy with nothing but beams of light or smudges of paint left behind on brick.

Ancient Church Remains Resurrected in Puglia

Destroyed by earthquakes in the 13th century, the remains of one of Italy’s great harbor towns are long since abandoned, and only a foundation with a few crumbled stone walls is left to show for a grand early Christian basilica. Italian artist Edoardo Tresoldi raises it from the dead in the ghostly form of wire mesh, giving it a transparent effect that makes it seem not quite real from afar. In fact, the layered mesh creates an optical illusion that makes its Romanesque roof, columns and archways look blurred. This transparency makes it possible to see both the form and shape of the structure and how it interacted with its environment.

“The work of Edoardo Tresoldi appears as a majestic architectural sculpture that tells the volume of the existing early Christian church and, at the same time, is able to vivify, and update the relationship between the ancient and the contemporary,” says curator Simone Pallotta. “It is a work that, breaking up the secular controversy of the primacy arts, summarizes two complementary languages into a single, breathtaking scenery.”

Ghosts of Portland’s Industrial Past

A pair of outdoor sculptures by artists and architects Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo sketch in vague outlines of Portland’s industrial past along the Willamette River amongst all the new construction. Made of metal mesh and sited near two bridges, ‘Inversion: Plus Minus’ represent the outer shells of ordinary industrial buildings that once existed in the area. If you pass it by without giving it a good look, you might even just assume that it’s scaffolding.

6 Architectural Fossils

The imprints of buildings long gone can often be seen on their surviving neighbors for decades into the future, sometimes giving us an exact outline of their shapes like fossils on adjacent brick and stone. Not only can you see the rooflines, chimneys and outer walls, but often staircases, fire escapes and individual rooms. It’s especially intriguing when bits of wallpaper still stick to the remaining walls: we see the personalities of the individual spaces, triggering us to think about the lives of their former occupants. In some cases, fixtures like sinks, shower heads and toilets still cling to the tile-clad surfaces. Like a cross between architecture and archaeology, these imprints are reminders of a city’s past, and they’re preserved for public enjoyment by the Flickr group The Unconscious Art of Demolition.

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Ghosts Or Architecture Past 14 Fossils Of Fallen Buildings