A few years back, artist Nobutaka Aozaki started asking directions from strangers on the streets of Manhattan, then collecting those maps (hand-drawn from memory) to assemble into a huge and growing work of geographic wall art.

To aid his work, the artist pretends to be a tourist, donning souvenir apparel and carrying around a shopping bag from a popular tourist destination. He then asks New York pedestrians how to get from one location to the next, all in ways designed to fill in the gaps of his larger composition.

From Here to There, he explains, is a “map of Manhattan composed of hand-drawn maps by various pedestrians whom I asked for directions. I have collected and aggregated together small individual maps provided by strangers that constitute a contiguous map of the island of Manhattan.” Like a pre-digital version of now-popular subjective maps (like the one below, the result of this art project is a patchwork quilt made up of slips of paper ripped out of notebooks, even paper plates from street vendors — whatever is handy to draw on, scribbled upon with whatever is handy to write with, in whatever style and format is favored by the individual creators.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch evolve, and it may never be complete, but that isn’t really the point of the project. These days, few people rely on paper maps anymore, so it becomes a reflection of what people still know, or think they know, about the city around them. It also turns out to be a handy way to gauge the helpfulness of strangers on the streets of a big metropolis, showing how they respond when asked for a simple kindness from a stranger.

A new skyscraper looms over Central Park in Manhattan, towering above all the others, though at its current height of 1,100 feet, it’s not even finished. Not only is ‘Central Park Tower’ by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture an unmissable landmark for New York City, it’ll officially nab the title of world’s tallest residential building once it reaches its full 1,550 feet (472 meters.) Located on West 57th Street, also known as ‘Billionaire’s Row,’ it’s basically an unapologetic bonanza of luxury amenities for uber-wealthy occupants.

The tower has been under construction for five years, but few details have been provided about exactly what it would offer. Now that its 179 units are officially up for sale – including condominiums that are expected to go for upwards of $60 million each, as well as a $95 million unit on the 53rd floor – new information and renderings have been released.

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The first seven floors of the Central Park Tower will host a massive flagship Nordstrom’s. Three hundred feet above street level, the tower cantilevers slightly to the east to give its residents better views of the park. The building’s 179 residences range from two to eight bedrooms, measuring between 1,435 and 17,500 square feet. Each one enjoys a wide open floor plan with interiors designed by Rottet Studio; the tower’s structural elements are concealed in between the units.

And then there are all the luxuries you’d expect from such an expensive tower. Residents will enjoy over 50,000 square feet of communal spaces spread out across three floors, starting with the lounge and an outdoor terrace featuring a 60-foot swimming pool, bar, screening wall, children’s playground, cabanas and more on the 14th floor. There’s also a health and wellness center incorporating an indoor swimming pool, sauna, basketball court, steam rooms, treatment rooms, a squash court and a fitness center.

“One of the greatest responsibilities of architecture is to continue to elevate experiences yet create structures that are elegant and respectful,” says architect Gordon Gill of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture. “’Central Park Tower’ was designed to take advantage of the spirit of the great city of New York and create an address worthy of its location on Billionaire’s Row and Central Park.”

The same firm is responsible for Saudi Arabia’s ‘Jeddah Tower,’ currently under construction, which will be the world’s second tallest building once complete.

A remarkable composite with an incredible amount of detail, this photograph was assembled from nearly 200 different images of NYC representing 10,000 megapixels of data, all put together over the course of a year.

Photographer, engineer, and entrepreneur Dan Piech decided to capture his stunning shot of Manhattan (from a rooftop in Queens), titled A New York City Dream, in tribute to the bustling city on one of its busiest nights: New Year’s Eve.

“I wanted to create an extremely high-resolution photographic artwork that captured the vibrant energy our city continually bursts forth with—a seemingly chaotic energy that nevertheless has structure, order, and rhythm,” he says of the piece. Being spun into a ‘tiny planet’ type image, the city also wraps endlessly, a world unto itself.

To put all of the photographs together and align them in terms of subjects but also color content took around a year. The finished image can be zoomed in almost endlessly to the point where, as a physical print, it would span dozens of feet, while still retaining a crisp quality. VAST now sells prints.

From My Modern Met, “Piech launched VAST with an aim to bring fine art photographers with stunning aesthetics together with technical experts specialized in producing high resolution (1,000+ megapixel) images. VAST currently works with a roster of 11 artists who create these specialized images. Using high dynamic range imaging, focus stacking, image blending, and other techniques, these special photographs can be printed on a large scale with razor-sharp quality.”

New York City never sleeps, they say, and this animation shows just how active the city is by day and at night, combining elements of both in one film that represents “22 Trips to New York, 352 Hours of filming, $1,430 paid in Parking Fees, 9988 Miles Driven, and 232,000 Pictures Taken.” The result is a breathtaking architectural animation that becomes increasingly surreal as you watch.

“Traditional time-lapses are constrained by the idea that there is a single universal clock,” explains creator Julian Tryba. “In the spirit of Einstein’s relativity theory, layer-lapses assign distinct clocks to any number of objects or regions in a scene. Each of these clocks may start at any point in time, and tick at any rate. The result is a visual time dilation effect known as layer-lapse.”

The filmmaker quit his job a few years ago after the success of his Boston Layer-Lapse film and began focusing his next project on the Big Apple. To level things up, he began writing code to deal with the myriad more images this new piece would involve. “To create a layer-lapse effect, I am assigning a unique equation to hundreds of buildings simultaneously. For each frame, every building is calculating and deciding which time of day to reveal. One example of a script that yields a ‘look’ are the waves of day or night that move through some of the shots in this film.”

“To achieve the ‘look’ I can set parameters like the speed at which the wave moves across the screen, how rapidly each layer will switch from day to night or vice versa, and I’ll often use a random sinusoidal function to create a subtle oscillation inside the wave itself. Now I’ve probably lost half my audience but for those of you still reading, the final step is linking an action or a script to a piece of the music.” In the end, the work is a combination of mathematical and manual animation.

Like some ancient megalith, an imposing windowless structure in Manhattan may be even more sinister than it appears. The AT&T Long Lines Building at 33 Thomas Street was built for machines, designed to house long-distance phone lines in the 1970s, but reports now suggest it has been used by the National Security Agency as a listening post in the heart of America’s financial capital. Welcome to the home of Project X, both a supposed name of the place (also known as Titanpointe) and title of a short film about it by Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras.

Aside from its everyday functions, the 29-story, bunker-like building was constructed to house over 1,000 people in a nuclear attack (with its own food, water and generators) — what better place, really, to conceal government agents for indefinite periods of time? The building is located toward the southern tip of Manhattan, just a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. Its proximity to offices and meeting places of the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank also make it an ideal location from which to spy on such organizations.

According to reports, NSA and FBI employees and contractors working in the building were given tips on how to avoid standing out when entering and exiting the structure. They were told what clothes to wear and cars to rent to remain inconspicuous.

Edward Snowden was a major source for the associated links now bringing this all to light. Apparently, there is no direct evidence that government agencies used the actual AT&T equipment on site — it may have just been an ideal staging space for their own technologies and operations. There is, however, a major “gateway switch” on site (routing international calls) which has led some to suspect there may be more to the story. So far, of course, the NSA has declined to comment.

“This is yet more proof that our communications service providers have become, whether willingly or unwillingly, an arm of the surveillance state,” says Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The NSA is presumably operating under authorities that enable it to target foreigners, but the fact that it is so deeply embedded in our domestic communications infrastructure should tip people off that the effects of this kind of surveillance cannot be neatly limited to non-Americans.”