Combining architecture, advertising and technology, this car dealership lets users punch in numbers to bring their vehicle of choice down a 15-story showroom looming above in full view. The tall lit-up facade of Autobahn Motors acts as a billboard and show space, letting fans scope out a Lamborghini from a distance then take it out for a test drive on the streets below.

The design responds in part to the lack of surface real estate in this space-crunched island city-state of Singapore, but it also serves as great marketing for the business. While not the first such automobile-vending tower in the world, it is the largest, and it works quickly: a user-selected vehicle can be brought down in just two minutes from the floors far above. Given land scarcity in cities, this unusual-looking typology makes a lot of sense, and could start to spring up in other places as well.

Meanwhile, for those in the United States: Carvana has smaller versions located in Austin, Texas and Nashville, Tennessee. These are less a response to density issues and more driven by marketing and novelty.

And while the towers aren’t quite as tall the effect is still pretty neat – modular platforms provide vehicles on demand from an array of sports cars, hatchbacks, minivans and trucks.

As a bonus for fans of quirky interactivity: their system operates even more like a vending machine – users are given a giant coin to insert, which lets them bring down the vehicle of their choice from the display racks above.

Calculated correctors, this team of vigilante street art fixers patrols for grammatical mistakes then regroups to decide on edits before hitting the streets of Quito, Ecuador, to deploy them.

Known as Acción Ortográfica Quito, the group consists of a trio who share a strange set of common interests including street art copy editing. Like rogue professors, they use red to highlight their changes or suggestions, but their good intentions do not render their actions legal, hence their strictly maintained anonymity.

“There’s a big difference in saying: ‘No quiero verte’ (I don’t want to see you) and ‘No, quiero verte’ (No, I want to see you),” notes one of the members in an interview with COLORS, “Many times, someone does not realize how a comma or an oversight can completely change the meaning of a sentence. It can change your life.”

The task can be daunting – their first fix had thirteen errors in two lines of text. Whether serious or silly, they suggest “it’s a public service and a moral obligation. We’re against spelling vandalism and we won’t break nor give up until we see a society free of spelling mistakes.”

Above, the phrase: “If in your kisses I met the essence of life, then not kissing you would be the worst sin I could commit,” for which these graffiti activists turned the verb into conditional, added and deleted commas, turned ellipsis into full stop and capital letter into lower case.

The group is also broadening its scope and mandate over time; they are aiming to add a hotline where people can phone in mistakes they spot and have begun correcting grammar on Twitter posts as well. When time permits, they also leave their name stenciled at the scene in red, like a grader signing their work for students.

Meanwhile, a similarly unconventional yet equally geeky German street artist is out to fix tags, turning them into tag clouds – it would seem this group is not alone in its quest to clean up yet preserve the essential meaning of everyday graffiti.

Anyone who has parked in a major metropolitan area has seen something like this: a vertical array of signs that provide a confusing (sometimes even self-contradictory) instructions about when you can park based on time of day or year, type of permit and other conditions.

Nikki Sylianteng, having gotten one too many parking tickets, decided to do something about the problem, developing, refining and ultimately deploying a solution on the streets to get actual feedback.

Titled To Park or Not to Park, this ongoing project started as an independent and informal attempt to see if there were better options out there but has since progressed to a council motion in Los Angeles to test such signs in a more official capacity.

For additional feedback, Nikki has sent copies of the modified signage to people in other parts of California and Minnesota to see how they fare in different cities and settings.

Combining various signs into one, the time is presented along the y-axis and the date on the x-axis. Green bars indicate acceptable times to park and red bars are used to indicate otherwise. Sometimes additional complexity needs to be addressed when permits come into play or the school year is factored in the mix (not always corresponding just to days of the week).

From the project’s creator: “My strategy was to visualize the blocks of time when parking is allowed and not allowed. Everything else was kept the same, the colors, the form. My intention was to show how a small but thoughtful change can make a big difference by save drivers a lot of time, stress, and money. I tried to stay mindful of the constraints that a large organization like the Department of Transportation might face for this seemingly small change.”

Taking over a single bus shelter on New Oxford Street, guerrilla advertisers threw everything they could think of at commuters, including (but not limited to) flying space aliens, underground squid monsters and giant city-crushing robots.

The campaign, created for Pepsi Max, takes a real-time projected display and adds (almost) impossible scenarios seamlessly to convince viewers of their authenticity.

From its creators: “Watch their reactions as unbelievable scenarios unfold before their very eyes; from a giant robot crashing through the street to a passer by being abducted by flying saucers.” With over 5,000,000 views and counting, it is safe to say that Pepsi can clearly count this one as a success.

Mutating works of public advertising with corrosive acid, this cunning urban interventionist hijacks posters from bus stops and subway stations, then adds his own message into the mix.

Vermibus takes posters then employs solvents to remake each surface in his studio, dissolving inks and colors already there and reusing materials from each de facto ‘canvass’ to make something new.

He then puts his transformed works back where he found the original or, in many cases, an entirely different site, city or even country, blending them back into the urban environment.

Having taken them off the streets, Vermibus brushes the idealized figures, slowly morphing them into surrealist versions of their former selves. He has repeated this unusual artistic process in various major cities, including and beyond his home town of Berlin.

Sometimes the commentary is clear – a model made intentionally skeletal, for instance – while others evolve (or devolve) into abstractions and parodies that seem almost inhuman.

The three fascinating short films embedded throughout this article (above and below) show his process, various examples of his work around Europe and his organization of and participation in the No-Ad Project. “Using a dubious inter-rail ticket, Vermibus set out with a set of 90 keys and his pallet of solvents to physically and temporally hijack the Western Worlds of advertisements in the name of fine art.”

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Smear Campaign Guerrilla Artist Remixes Adverts With Acid