As autonomous vehicles begin to roll out on city streets, adaptive reuse projects like this one could help old parking structures readily find new and productive urban purposes. This award-winning design by Dutch firm Studio Komma and The Men of Foam for The Hague features a mixed-use program built on the bones of an existing parking garage, with a twist: parts can be moved around like modular LEGO blocks.

And the LEGO piece is no idle comparison — the team used actual bricks to mock up their designs, focusing on how individual modules could play larger roles in the overall scheme. They also considered how these same re-situated units might later be shifted around to serve other functions.

Ground floors commercial and social spaces are fit into the framework of the extant garage, using the old second-story parking level for overhead shelter. Above the existing second level, new levels reuse ramps and other elements to grow the program vertically — these mostly-indoor third and fourth floors shelter an outdoor public zone left open in the middle.

Colors and details in the proposed scheme highlight elements of the adaptive reuse while aiming “to create an iconic building that is an accelerator for the transformation of an industrial area into a new energetic urban district.” Pieces of the old structure are preserved and made modular, fitting into the new program where useful but retaining aspects of their original shape and character to illustrate change over time.

In developing the ZIP2516 scheme, which subsequently won the Lot 2 Urban Lab Challenge, the architects were “challenged to think about temporary structures that have a permanent high quality.” Its modularity is intended to extend into the future as well — additional elements (like glass cladding and structural supports) are made to be moved as the needs of the site and city continue to evolve.

Floating above an 18,000-square-foot area of Dutch land that would be underwater were it not for defensive measures, the ethereal effect hovers between simulated aerial floodwater and imitation aurora borealis.

A temporary work in Westervoort, this latest pieced dubbed ‘Waterlicht’ by Daan Roosegaarde was created using LED projectors located on surrounding dykes, highlighting the essential role of flood prevention technology in keeping so much of the Netherlands dry. As the beams cross in the air, moved slowly up and down by motors, the effect seen in these images is created.

Visitors walking along those adjacent barriers perceive the illumination like an eerily lit surface of water below – those passing below the plane of light see something akin to the Northern Lights, normally a natural atmospheric effect reserved for rare and special conditions. “we create a virtual flood. Walking on the dike the light lines are perceived as high water, once in the flood channel you find yourself in an underwater world.”

The work was commissioned by the Dutch water board to keep up awareness about this vital element of the country’s infrastructure. “In Waterlicht people experience what the Netherlands would look like without its dykes. Awareness is crucial, because the Dutch (water)artworks need every day maintenance and our national water awareness is the foundation of that maintenance.”

No stranger to working with nighttime illumination, Roosegaarde is famous for other works including a night-lit bicycle path in the style of Van Gogh as well as schemes for glow-in-the-dark highway infrastructure.

In a strange case of fact following fiction, a Dutch designer was inspired to create physical versions of faux-historical bridges first drawn on European currency in 2002.

The original two-dimensional illustrations of Austrian Robert Kalin were intended to represent periods rather than built objects, spanning Baroque, Classical, Gothic, Romanesque, Rococo and Modern 20th-Century styles.

Their three-dimensional counterparts, meticulously designed by Robert Stam draw on every detail of the notes, right down to the colors used. His works were erected as part of a housing project in Spijkenisse, Holland (near Rotterdam).

The European Bank wanted infrastructural art that would (so to speak) span cultures and nationalities, thus avoided mimicking existing structures in the semi-abstracted bridges on their new banknotes.

While they may look garish in color and strange in scale at first glance, pedestrians, cyclists and visitors reportedly appreciate them once they understand the unusual story behind their creation.

More from their designer: “On the first of January 2002 new banknotes were introduced in Europe. The banknotes were also introduced with custom designs in all of Scandinavia, employed by financial institutions across the region, writes financial intermediary, lending, and analysis firm Sambla. In addition to windows and gateways, these seven banknotes also depict several bridges. Each bridge has an individual appearance, all of which can be recognized as having originated throughout certain periods in European cultural history: Classical Antiquity, the Roman period, the Gothic period, the Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo, Iron- and glass architecture and lastly contemporary, twentieth century architecture. Now wouldn’t it be amazing if these fictional bridges suddenly turn out to actually exist in real life?”

Opening last night in Nuenen, Holland, this illuminated cycling surface is free to the public, storing sunlight during the day to create stellar patterns to guide riders after dark. First of its kind on the planet, the swirling shapes of this path are recognizably inspired by one of Vincent van Gogh’s most famous paintings.

Developed by Dutch artist and innovator Daan Roosegaarde in conjunction with infrastructure specialists from Heijmans, this pathway is a potential prototype for future cycling paths using smart paint technologies as well as an extension of an ongoing series of glow-in-the-dark highway projects and other urban improvement proposals in the works around the world.

Part practical lighting scheme and part installation art project, the path is located along a stretch of a bicycling route passing through Noord Brabant, the region from which van Gogh originated, which in turn connects various notable sites from his personal life and work. Its creator explains: “I wanted to create a place that people will experience in a special way, the technical combined with experience – that’s what techno-poetry means to me.”

The semi-abstract pixelated swirls are a high-tech reference to Starry Night, painted in 1889 and depicting an idealized view from the east-facing window of the painter’s asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City).

Studio Roosegaarde is known for “tactile high-tech environments in which viewer and space become one. This connection, established between ideology and technology, results in what Roosegaarde calls ‘techno-poetry’. His often interactive work connects people with art and people with people.”

It sounds at first like the dystopian plot of Dark City or The Truman Show, with free-seeming residents unaware they are actually inhabitants of a closed community they cannot leave and  in which they are under constant surveillance … but that is only one side of the story.

A total of 150 Alzheimer’s sufferers live in Hogewey, this gated community unlike any other. Located in the Netherlands, it boasts copious walking paths and open green spaces, a grocery shop, hair salon and dozens of stores and clubs.

The friendly grocers and stylists are, however, all employees of the facility (caregivers, doctors and nurses). If someone approaches the single exit to the outside world they are politely, gently but firmly told to perhaps try another door as this one is closed.

If this sounds like a terrible situation initially, consider this: patients can roam much more freely than in many elder car facilities. Patients here require fewer medications, eat better and live longer. Still, it raises philosophical questions that are difficult to answer about the relative value of knowledge and happiness, for instance.

Dormitory-style rooms are situated around the exterior of the campus, allowing views out, but building exits all face inward. Each residence structure has a “lifestyle theme” associated with it, designed to make people feel it home, surrounded by appropriate religious symbols for some, music and art for others.

CNN’s Dr. Gupta traveled to Weesp, the village in which the facility is set, and interviewed caregivers in this extensive twenty-three-minute segment on its purpose and workings. Some people question the ethics of the inherent deception, but if the residents feel at home, it is hard to say what a better alternative might be than this seemingly-ordinary everyday reality.