A wooden airship has seemingly crash-landed onto the roof of the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, wedged between two white museum buildings for dramatic effect to serve as a new space for literature and reading. Conceived by Leos Valka, director of DOX, and completed by Hut Architektury, the Gulliver Airship measures nearly 138 feet long and features a basketweave-like construction open to the air, protected from the rain by a transparent roof.

Taking inspiration from the zeppelins of the early 20th century, the airship aims to reflect the optimism, technological advancements and futurism of the era, inciting a sense of wonder when you gaze up at it from the ground level. Valka says he dreamed of “an absurdly fascinating organic shape” that would have a parasitic appearance, alien to the concrete and glass of the museum itself.

The ‘ship’ is accessible from the museum’s roof, and takes advantage of plentiful natural light for a pleasant reading environment. Adding such an unconventional structure is in line with the museum’s hope to encourage innovative thinking and take risks.

The DOX facility is a reclaimed factory, its renovation nominated for the prestigious Mies van der Role Award, and its purpose is “to create a space for research, presentation and debate on important social issues, where arts in dialogue with other disciplines encourage a critical view of the so-called reality of today’s world.”

“The shape of the zeppelin is symbolic,” reads a statement on the DOX website. “The early zeppelins represented the optimistic ideals of a new era of unprecedented technological advancements. With their remarkable monumentality and hypnotic dignity that would continue to fascinate generations to come long after they had vanished from the skies, they have always embodied the eternal human desire to fly, and have represented a certain utopian ideal.”

A billionaire who’s really into magnets could fill his entire home with levitating objects, from a bed platform that costs nearly two million dollars down to his clothes hangers, houseplants, lamps, computer mouse and even salt and pepper shakers. While some of these designs are utterly lacking in practicality, others make up for it in fun.

Floating Bed

Tethered to its base with steel cables, a heavy slab of wood levitates in midair, clearly unsupported. Sold as an ‘art piece,’ which appears to be an implicit acknowledgement that few people will ever actually have this thing in their homes, the Floating Bed fittingly debuted at the Belgium ‘Millionaire Fair.” It uses the power of permanent opposing industrial-strength magnets and can hold 900 kilograms (1984 pounds) of weight. A smaller fifth-scale version can be used as a table. Truly a toy for billionaires, the bed version will set you back $1.75 million.

Air Bonsai

Everything about this little potted plant looks like an ordinary bonsai – except the fact that the tree is actually floating. Hidden inside the pot and moss ball are two powerful magnets that literally levitate the entire plant above the ‘energy base.’ No optical illusions here. Currently raising funds on Kickstarter, the project is called ‘Air Bonsai’ and comes in a range of pots, with plants to be procured locally.

Hovering Computer Mouse

Designed to relieve pressure on the median nerve of the wrist to prevent injuries like carpal tunnel, The Bat is a levitating computer mouse that hovers 40 millimeters above the pad when not in use, or 10 millimeters with the pressure of your hand. The design was supposed to be released a few years ago after a period of testing, and since that never happened, it seems unlikely it’ll ever be for sale, but it’s an interesting prototype.

FLOAT Table

Push on this Rubik’s cube-like arrangement of wooden blocks and it’ll give slightly and then bounce back, each individual cube separated from its neighbors by an inch or so of space. The tiny steel cables that can be seen between them aren’t holding them up – they’re keeping the whole thing together. The walnut blocks of the Float Table by RockPaper Robot are, of course, embedded with magnets to produce this cool-looking effect. “Each handcrafted table is precisely tuned to seem rigid and stable, yet a touch reveals the secret to Float’s dynamic character.”

Cliq Magnetic Clothes Hangers

When you need a specific garment, just tug gently on the Cliq hanger by Flow Design, which is magnetically held to any metal clothes bar. Replacing the hooks with strong earth magnets, the hangers each support up to two kilograms of weight and can also be used underneath larger metal surfaces like shelves.

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Magnetically Attractive Furniture Decor 14 Floating Designs

Over 5500 miles of abandoned railways stretching from one end of Mexico to the other enticed two brothers to build an incredible retro-futuristic exploratory car. The SEFT-1 is modeled after a midcentury vision of a spaceship with an all-metal exterior and faceted windshield, and it’s equipped with modern sensors and navigation tools as well as wheels that can ride on rails.

The railroads of Mexico were abandoned in 1995 due to flagging profits, and have been left to decay ever since. Ivan Puig and Andrés Padilla Domene, both artists, wanted a novel way to experience these nearly-forgotten transportation corridors.

The SEFT-1 can drive on roads like an ordinary car, or use its extra set of front wheels to guide it along the rails. SEFT-1 stands for Sonda de Exploracion Ferroviaria Tripulada, which translates as Manned Railway Exploration Probe.

From 2010 to 2012, the brothers took the SEFT-1 on a journey that took them all the way to Ecuador, gathering data, videos, photos, objects and stories that tell the tale of what has happened to all those miles of tracks after their official use came to an end. Those findings are currently on display at London’s Furtherfield Gallery.

What would New York have looked like, if the futuristic visions of innovative thinkers in the late-19th to mid-20th century had become reality? Midtown Manhattan could have been enclosed within a dome, as imagined by Buckminster Fuller. The Hudson River could have an enormous bridge with towers that reach hundreds of feet into the air. And of course there’s personal aircraft involved. Here are some of the most outrageous and intriguing of these predictions.

Nuke-Proof Underground New York

During the height of Cold War fears over nuclear attacks, Oscar Newman dreamed up this wacky design for a nuke-proof second New York City, to be located in a hollowed-out space hundreds of feet below the existing city. Published in 1969, this highly impractical vision ironically called for nuclear weapons to be buried deep underground and detonated to create the space.

Colossal Hudson Bridge

Gustav Lindenthal’s design for a colossal bridge across the Hudson River would have included towers that are taller than the Woolworth building (which remains New York’s tallest skyscraper.) The bridge, for which a cornerstone was built and still exists, would have been 6,000 feet long, 200 feet wide and 200 feet above the river with 12 railroads, 24 traffic lanes and 2 pedestrian promenades.

Just Imagine

In the 1930 film ‘Just Imagine‘, Depression-era aesthetics crash into wild fantasies of New York in 1980, with massive 16-lane highways, vertical architecture full of terraces and lots of inexplicable ‘high-tech’ equipment.

Elevated Railway System Leading to Lady Liberty

Cartoonist W.A. Rogers’s depiction of an elevated railway system running amok in Manhattan seems to have been a satirical commentary on expansion and development in the New York City of 1887. The cartoon shows a railway winding up the Statue of Liberty and entering the frightened-looking lady’s mouth.

Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome

And, of course, there’s Bucky Fuller’s geodesic dome. The architect, engineer and inventor (among other things) popularized this type of structure in the 1950s. This particular vision would have enclosed Midtown Manhattan “to regulate weather and air pollution.”

It’s 500 feet across and can carry 700 times more weight than a heavy cargo helicopter – yet it’s based on technology that was developed in the early 20th century. An Australian firm could make Buckminster Fuller’s 90-year-old dream come true with ‘Skylifter‘, a disc-shaped airship that could be used to deliver entire buildings to remote locations.

The piloted dirigible is capable of carrying up to 150 tons as far as 1,240 miles. It doesn’t exactly do it at breakneck speed – the airship will top out at about 45 miles per hour. But speed isn’t the point. Skylifter could enable the transport and delivery of rural hospitals and disaster relief centers  in one piece, eliminating the need for multiple trips and on-location assembly.

Skylifter uses a disc-shaped aerostat rather than a cigar shape or sphere so that the airship is unaffected by wind direction but also easier to steer. The design also incorporates a new type of propeller with hydrofoil-shaped blades, and places the control pod well below the aerostat for added stability.

A remote-controlled 10-foot prototype nicknamed ‘Betty’ demonstrates how the full-size version will work. The company expects to complete a full-sized prototype within 3 years. It’s an interesting update on an idea that infamous inventor Buckminster Fuller had back in the 1920s that involved using zeppelins to transport prefab houses, and could even bring us back to that era’s dreams of entire communities in the sky: one imagined use for it is as airborne cruise ships.