Architects around the world strive to incorporate regional design histories into contemporary work, but Bolivian designer Freddy Mamani Silvestre takes it a step further, blending pop culture inspirations into his fantastically bizarre buildings.

Mamani is an Aymara, part of a people who were historically conquered and displaced by Incan and Spanish populations.He trained as an engineer, then grew into fame designing mixed-use mansions for the rich (generally: stores on the ground floor, apartments above and a penthouse for owners).

“Mamani’s architecture incorporates circular motifs from Aymara weaving and ceramics and the neon colors of Aymara dress,” reports the New Yorker, “and it alludes to the staggered planes of Andean temples.” It also is inspired by cyberpunk visions and science fiction films like Transformers.

Creative, eccentric, joyful, imaginative are all words that have been used to describe his work, though some see it extreme, superficial, garish or gaudy as well. It can be polarizing, with fans praising his audacity and critics decrying the lack of formal method to the apparent madness.

Silvestre works in unusual ways as well, sketching ideas onto walls or simply describing what he wants to coworkers, leaving them to execute the details. He has completed a number of projects in this way in El Alto, the highest city in the world.

A team of designers has taken iconic images of major global cities and added a “rich graphic language and vibrant visual effects” to blend each one with elements of Japanese infrastructure and visual culture.

Presenting their work at the Venice Architecture Biennale, this strange art series from Daigo Ishii + Future-Scape Architects aims to question our ideas of locality and our sense of civic imagery and identity.

What happens, they ask, when a familiar underlying environment gets an overlay, sending mixed signals to observers? Is it the underlying shape and form of a place that make it what it is, or those other visual cues that lend familiarity?

The firm set their cities on cities including New York, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen and La Paz, each time pulling in distinctively Japanese elements, from neon signage to cherry trees.

In each case, the result is a surreal hybrid, playing off cues in source photographs shot in the United States, Argentina, Denmark, France, Bolivia and Italy, becoming something that is neither here nor there, original or artificial.

“The project seeks to present an amalgamation between traditional architectural studies and surprising artistic elements.” The display in Venice consists of “a video work shown on a large-scale monitor, with six surrounding boards displaying the final scenery of each city after ‘Tokyo-lization’ has taken place.”

A group of Swedish scientists has developed a successful method for integrating conductive wire systems into plants, naturally soaked up from a gel into leaves and stems to create complete circuits in bionic hybrids. The implications, like the currents, run in two directions: power can be harvested from plants, but the plans can also be changed through the application of external energy.

Botanists and mechanical engineers from the Laboratory of Organic Electronics at Linköping University added the gel at the base of test plants, which in turn hardened into flexible wires within the stems and leaves, all without damage to the organic components. They were then able to send electrical impulses through the plants, lightening and darkening flowers and leaves.

“Although many attempts have been made to augment plant function with electroactive materials, [until now] plants’ ‘circuitry’ has never been directly merged with electronics,” write the researchers in their paper Electronic Plants. “With integrated and distributed electronics in plants, one can envisage a range of applications including precision recording and regulation of physiology, energy harvesting from photosynthesis, and alternatives to genetic modification for plant optimization.”

A number of material combinations were tried before the effective solution was discovered. Some hardened and harmed the plants while others proved toxic or provided insufficient connectivity to be effective. The transparent organic polymer they settled on is able to fully wire a living rose, creating a bionic hybrid without compromising its natural functions.

More from the abstract: “The roots, stems, leaves, and vascular circuitry of higher plants are responsible for conveying the chemical signals that regulate growth and functions. From a certain perspective, these features are analogous to the contacts, interconnections, devices, and wires of discrete and integrated electronic circuits. The four key components of a circuit have been achieved using the xylem, leaves, veins, and signals of the plant as the template and integral part of the circuit elements and functions.”

Gods, angels, cherubs and human mortals from famous historical artworks can be found browsing the beverage display at the corner store, passed out in front of the liquor shop, or riding the bus with an aptly bored expression in these clever remixes.

In his ongoing series Art History in Contemporary Life, Ukrainian artist Alexey Kondakov continues to document a fictional world in which ancient figures find themselves transplanted into modern cityscapes.

Among his hacks: Cesar van Everdingen’s Bacchus, Caravaggio’s David and Goliath and William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Nymphs and Satyr, all hacked to fit into new times and places.

The scenes are so expertly edited it is left to the figures themselves to stand out from each setting through their actions or attire. Madonna, child and lamb are, for instance, a bit of a strange find in an old apartment staircase and cherubs generally aren’t seen on the Earthly plane, at least by ordinary people.

Seven years into his experiments, the living artworks of Sam Van Aken are bearing far more than just fruit, each new variant of the Tree of 40 Fruit building on experiences learned from the last. And while simply grafting forty fruits of different kinds to a single tree is impressive, his work continues to branch out. The trees have to grow for three years before he can start to reshape them, and even then only so many grafts can be added each year.

Van Aken’s Frankensteinian creations are an endeavor forever in progress. With increasingly refined sets of controls and directions, he has been able to go beyond simply grafting dozens of types on a single tree. Carefully diagrammed, his planned plants can be designed to bloom and bear fruit year-round and in choreographed sequences, almost like a slow-motion fireworks display or performance piece.

His individual trees are displayed around the country, reflecting the climate as well as local varieties of the different regions in which they can be found. Each provides seasonal moments of surprise to passers by, producing almonds during one month then perhaps peaches or plums (or both) in the next.

From National Geographic: “Sam Van Aken, an artist and professor at Syracuse University, uses ‘chip grafting’ to create trees that each bear 40 different varieties of stone fruits, or fruits with pits. The grafting process involves slicing a bit of a branch with a bud from a tree of one of the varieties and inserting it into a slit in a branch on the ‘working tree,’ then wrapping the wound with tape until it heals and the bud starts to grow into a new branch. Over several years he adds slices of branches from other varieties to the working tree.”

“In the spring the ‘Tree of 40 Fruit’ has blossoms in many hues of pink and purple, and in the summer it begins to bear the fruits in sequence—Van Aken says it’s both a work of art and a time line of the varieties’ blossoming and fruiting. He’s created more than a dozen of the trees that have been planted at sites such as museums around the U.S., which he sees as a way to spread diversity on a small scale.”