An infusion of art revives a cold, gray public square like a healing draught, drawing people in and encouraging them to stay a while, interact with each other and see their city from a new point of view. Every day we pass through these public spaces in a rush to get to our destinations, hardly noticing the plazas themselves or each other. These playful interactive installations bring color, movement, activities and fun to underutilized or under-appreciated locations in urban settings.

Red Planet Playground in Shanghai

In a shopping center plaza on one of Shanghai’s busiest streets, a textural red playground installation takes a formerly blank, grey space and turns it into a center of play and interaction. Created by the firm 100Architects, it includes a basketball field and lots of objects to climb, sit on, lay on or slide down. “Our proposal arose from a surreal approach, from the intention of breaking the conventional rules of perception, of what is already conceived as a reality, in order to trigger kids’ imagination and creativity as well as immersing them in a colorful experience.”

Liquid Shard by Patrick Shearn of Poetic Kinetics

A shimmering silver wave spanning 15,000 square feet hovers above Pershing Square in Los Angeles like a colossal sea creature out of its element. ‘Liquid Shard’ by artist Patrick Shearn of Poetic Kinetics is made of holographic mylar and monofilament, shimmering as it’s blown around by the wind. “Like fractals recurring progressively, we feel the currents of air on our skin but do not see the larger movements. I wanted to play in that realm with this technology I have been developing.”

Vieux Port Pavilion by Foster + Partners

Architecture firm Foster + Partners turned a Marseilles square upside-down with this mirrored canopy installation. Vieux Port Pavilion, named for its location, adds a new functional sheltered space with minimal visual impact to encourage pedestrians to gather and linger. It may be subtle, avoiding drastic changes to the character of the square, but it acts like a magnet, drawing people in to gaze up at their reflections.

Impulse: See-Saws at the Place Des Festivals in Montreal

Who could pass by a bunch of illuminated see-saws on the street and just keep walking? Impulse by CS Design and Lateral Office inserted 30 of these objects into the Place Des Festivals in Montreal, and while they’re fun on their own, users are in for an unexpected treat when they get on. “Once in motion the built-in lights and speakers produce a harmonious sequence of sounds and lights, resulting in a constantly evolving ephemeral composition.”

Live Young: Evian Swings Activate a Snow Machine

Bottled water brand Evian challenged adults to find their inner children with a pink playground at Canary Wharf in London. ‘Live Young’ consists of swings and seesaws that activate snow machines for an extra magical effect in the hope of helping locals push through the gloom of post-holiday winter. “Evian’s giant playground installations are the perfect way to help stressed workers get in touch with their ‘Live Young’ spirit by letting go and having fun.”

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Plaza Play 13 Artistic Installations Make Public Squares A Lot More Fun

Climbing walls, skate parks, art installations, theaters and even miniature marinas take advantage of the cathedral-like spaces beneath highways and bridges, revitalizing formerly disused and depressed square footage in urban areas. In cities around the world, underpasses are often fenced off, strewn with trash and generally unappreciated, but these intervention projects reclaim the space in fun and creative ways that benefit the community.

Folly for a Flyover by Assemble, England

“Starting with the idea that how spaces are imagined is often as important as their physical characteristics in determining their use, the Folly reclaimed the future of the site by re-imagining its past,” says ASSEMBLE of its ‘Folly for a Flyover’ installation beneath a disused motorway underpass in Hackney Wick. “The new ‘fairy tale’ for the site described the Folly as the home of a stubborn landlord who refused to move to make way for the motorway, which was subsequently built around him, leaving him and his pitched roof stuck between the East and Westbound lanes. The Folly hosted an extensive program of cinema, performance and play… by day the Folly hosted a cafe, events and boat trips exploring the surrounding waterways; at night, audiences congregated on the building’s steps to watch screenings, from blockbusting animation classics to early cinema accompanied by a live score.

A8ernA, Zaanstad Underpass Installation by NL Architects

Another underpass project offering access to the adjacent waterway is A8ernA by NL Architects, located on the river Zaan in the Zoog aan de Zaan village near Amsterdam. The architects describe the new highway, built on columns, as a “brutal cut in the urban tissue.” Their installation attempts to heal this cut while taking advantage of the cathedral-like space, creating an “optimistic intervention” encouraging a new type of urban life, and includes a supermarket, flower and fish shop, parking, a park and a ‘graffiti gallery.’ There’s also a skate bowl, a mini-marina, a soccer field and a small hilly park.

Underpass Park, Toronto

Toronto’s Underpass Park is not only the most extensive park to ever be built beneath an overpass in Canada, but one of the most unusual parks of its kind throughout the world. Transforming a derelict and underused space into a new urban neighborhood feature and pedestrian passageway, the park turns what was formerly a barrier between the north and south parts of the community into a connection. Murals by world-renowned graffiti artists, playgrounds, sculptural installations, sports fields and other amenities draw locals in to engage with the space on an unprecedented level.

Ballroom Luminoso Installation by JB Public Art, San Antonio

The I-35 freeway underpass in San Antonio briefly became ‘Ballroom Luminoso’ thanks to a public art installation by JB Public Art, featuring six color-changing chandeliers made of recycled bicycle parts and sprockets. After dark, the lanterns would light up, casting intricate gear-shaped shadows all over the concrete structure.

Seattle’s Fremont Troll

Frequently popping up in movies and television shows set in Seattle, the Fremont Troll is a public sculpture by four local artists set beneath a bridge in the Fremont neighborhood. The piece won a neighborhood competition in 1990 as an idea to revitalize what was, at the time, a dumping ground. The troll sculpture is clutching an actual Volkswagen Beetle.

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Underpass Art Parks 15 Fun Projects Reclaiming Disused Urban Space

Experience monumental sculpture like you never have before with a new 15-story tunnel slide that spirals around London’s ArcelorMittal Orbit monument, set to be the world’s longest. The UK is really pushing its public art to the next level by adding a record breaker to a record breaker, as the sculpture already holds the title of tallest in the nation. The slide wraps around the sculpture 12 times, and it takes forty seconds to get from the very top to the bottom in a trip through the tube.

Opening to the public on June 24th, 2016, the Carsten Höller-designed slide features both opaque and transparent sections so riders get brief glimpses of the London skyline before plunging back into darkness. A tight corkscrew section snakes its way around the red geometric structure, ending in a straight run to the ground. The slide’s total length is 584 feet.

London erected the strange and rather controversial ArcelorMittal for the 2012 Summer Olympics, offering panoramic views of the city from its location in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Tickets for the attraction are already on sale for £15 ($22), with a limited number available each day, and you can book more than one ride at a time.

All ephemeral, lasting a few weeks or maybe just a few hours, temporary street art installations are a colorful and engaging addition to ever-evolving urban settings. Some are so subtle that only the most observant of urban residents even notice them, like little sculptures of men in puddles; others are impossible to ignore, like 30-foot cardboard statues looming over the street. Some of these sculptural installations are officially commissioned while many more are stealthily assembled, guerrilla-style. Shocking, fun and often interactive, these 14 works bring art to the masses rather than cooping it up in museums.

Berlin Installation by Isaac Cordal

(image via: wooster collective)

You could easily pass by Isaac Cordal’s diminutive sculptures, which perch on electric outlets, telephone poles and bus stop benches. But if you’re observant enough to notice their presence, you’re pulled into a tiny world within the larger urban environment. This particular installation was noticed by an art lover in Berlin. Says Cordal, “Many of my sculptures I leave on the street, usually stuck on walls.  I don´t leave the sculptures on the street for people to take home. Street art is for everyone, not for just one person.  But ok, those people which have sculptures at home could at least send me a picture so I can see that the boys are well.”

900-Pound Box Man by Pablo Curutchet

(images via: design boom)

Whereas Cordal’s sculptures are subtle and small, this installation by Argentinian artist Pablo Curutchet is anything but. The 900-pound box man was installed in Boulevar san Juan and av. Marcelo T. Alvear, Córdoba, Argentina, in 2006 stood nearly 28 feet above street level and was constructed entirely out of cardboard boxes and tape. It took 11 people to mount it into place.

Human-Sized Pinscreen by Lulu Guinness

(image via: notcot)

Designer Lulu Guinness, known mostly for her handbags, created this fun ‘Be a Pinup!’ human-sized pinscreen in front of London’s St. John’s Gate in May. The interactive art installation let the public create full-sized body portraits by pressing up against 6,000 chromed capped aluminum pins in a black frame.

Segmented Street Sign Sculptures by Robbie Rowlands

(images via: robbierowlands.com.au)

These eye-catching segmented street sign sculptures are just the beginning of Melbourne-based Robbie Rowlands‘ collection of mind-bending works. Rowlands takes very precise slices of objects and even spaces (like cut-outs of floors and walls) and curls them up in various contortions. From doors and chairs to trees and water towers, Rowlands’ manipulations call to mind tightly controlled destruction.

Five Orange Spheres by Stuart Williams

(images via: behance)

For two and a half years in the 1980s, artist Stuart Williams took his five six-foot inflatable orange spheres around the world and photographed them in unlikely places, like the streets of France, New York City’s Central Park and an alpine village in Switzerland. The environmental artist is known for monumental installations including ‘Luminous Earth Grid’.

Pixel Pour 2.0 in New York City

(images via: laughingsquid)

Passersby photographed this fun sculptural installation on Mercer Street in New York City in January 2011, which features ‘pixelated’ water made of little blue and white boxes pouring out of a giant spigot. Deemed ‘Pixel Pour 2.0’, the sculpture is thought to be the work of (or at least inspired by) artist Kelly Goeller, who created the similar ‘Pixel Pour‘ in 2008.

Surreal Scenes by Mark Jenkins

(images via: xmarkjenkinsx.com)

Street artist Mark Jenkins is renowned for baffling and disturbing installations of headless, faceless human bodies as well as for his dreamy, diaphanous tape sculptures. The city is his canvas, and he paints it with utterly surreal scenes that are impossible to ignore. Whether playful, like the head-butting women, or disturbing, as in the ‘dead body’ festooned with balloons, Jenkins’ sculptures are often laced with social commentary such as the dehumanization of the homeless.

Cityscope by Marco Hemmerling

(images via: my modern met)

Literally a reflection of the city around it, Marco Hemmerling’s ‘Cityscope’ is a multi-faceted glass art installation that acts as an urban kaleidoscope, catching the light and displaying dream-like fragments of buildings. At night, the sculpture is illuminated from within, shining like a rainbow-colored crystal outside the railway station in Cologne, Germany.

Melted Ice Cream Truck in Adelaide, Australia

(images via: wooster collective)

This mysterious melted ice cream truck showed up in the suburban streets of Adelaide in South Australia in 2006. Though the image has been passed around the internet with a big question mark in place of artist credit, it is in fact ‘Hot with the Chance of Late Storm’, the work of Australian art collective ‘Glue Society‘. It was created for the 2006 Sculpture by the Sea fair.

The Brooklyn Griffin by Giant Robots

(images via: leonard lee boggs)

A robotic-looking wooden griffin sculpture looms over a desolate industrial Williamsburg street in Brooklyn, crafted from  pallets and skateboard decks. Artists Jimmy Bumble and Leonard White, who work together under the name Giant Robots, had tried assembling similar robots guerrilla-style on Brooklyn rooftops without success – an earlier version was destroyed the the building’s owner – before finding a legal home for it. They plan to come back and build more along the same strip, on Waterbury Street between Meserole and Scholes Streets.

Urban Nests on Scaffolding in Madrid, by Luzinterruptus

(images via: luzinterruptus)

Spanish street art collective Luzinterruptus placed adorable little birds into the yellow spheres, installed on scaffolding joints to prevent injuries, that they had noticed on a street in Madrid. “For our installation Urban Nests, we only had to populate the balls with 130 colored birds, that we left looking into the street from their makeshift homes in the scaffolding and of course light them, to achieve a warm, cozy atmosphere throughout the scaffolded area, inviting one to remain and contemplate such an unusual habitat.”

Inflatable Animal Sculptures by Joshua Allen Harris

(images via: wooster collective)

Inflatable animal sculptures by Joshua Allen Harris come alive when placed above sewer grates on the streets of New York. Harris crafts the sculptures from plastic bags; when a train passes, air comes gushing out of the grate, causing the animals to ‘dance’.

Economy Ice Sculpture by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese

(image via: gothamist)

The economic meltdown was illustrated in a very public and literal fashion by artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese in 2008, on the 79th anniversary of the 1929 Black Tuesday stock market crash. The ice sculpture, which spelled out ‘ECONOMY’, was placed across from the New York State Supreme Court Building in Manhattan’s Foley Square and allowed to melt. Said Ligorano of ‘Main Street Meltdown’, “To see the word ‘economy’ melting down is representational of our extreme time.”

Murdered Phone Booth by Banksy

(images via: banksystreetart.tumblr.com)

Anonymous street artist Banksy might be best known for his two-dimensional stenciled paintings, but he’s actually a sculptor, too. ‘Murdered Phone Booth’, an unauthorized outdoor art installation which appeared in London’s SoHo Square in 2006, is just one of the famous artist/documentary director’s three-dimensional works. The British Telecom telephone booth was bent and pierced with a pick-axe. BT later jokingly offered to purchase it and place it in their lobby as a “stunning visual comment on BT’s transformation from an old-fashioned telecommunications company into a modern communications services provider.”