It’s virtually impossible to get a sense of just how large this world-record-smashing sand castle really is until you see a shot that includes crowds of tiny humans gathered around its base. The German city of Duisburg may be landlocked, but that hasn’t stopped it from hosting an enormous sandcastle building effort two summers in a row. Last summer, their attempt at snagging the title was foiled when the castle faced a minor collapse during the building process. This year, they unseated a record set by a 50-foot-tall sand castle in Puri, India in February with their 55-foot-tall creation.

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It took 3,860 tons of very fine quartz sand, a team of designers from 10 countries and three weeks of building time to complete. The sculptors incorporated imagery from their own nations and histories, resulting in an interesting mishmash of global influences. Look closely and you’ll spot the Great Sphinx of Giza, the Acropolis, a Buddha, Elvis’ grave and the Colosseum. A Guinness World Record jury judged the enormous sculpture on Friday, making the win official.

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Want to check it out in person? The city of Duisburg will keep the sandcastle standing through September 29th, assuming something doesn’t cause it to collapse before then. You can see lots more photos of the sand castle by searching Instagram for the tag #landschaftsparkduisburg.

Images via: manutografie, obootsman, michaela_schu, shopaholic2911

Brutalist architecture is often criticized for seeming cold, impersonal and out of human scale, but the same can’t be said for these structures when they’re miniaturized and ephemeral, destroyed in seconds by the sea. In fact, when they’re crafted out of sand on a beach, outside their usual context, we can appreciate the beauty of their geometry more than ever. Calvin Siebert’s modernist sand castles might just be better than the real thing.

While staying on Rockaway Beach in Queens during the summer, the professional sculptor and self-described ‘box builder’ crafts amazingly complex architectural structures that remain in place just long enough to photograph them, inevitably washing away. You might say that nature is… brutal.

While it’s not hard to imagine seeing some of these designs in the hills of Los Angeles, using sand as a medium enables Siebert to get more creative than the average architect in envisioning fantasy structures that could translate to concrete.

He doesn’t start with sketches, plans or even anything particular in mind, preferring to work intuitively, allowing the forms to take shape. He’s been creating these temporary works of art for the past six years, and has thousands of photos documenting them on his Flickr.

“Building ‘sandcastles’ is a bit of a test,” he says. “Nature will always be against you and time is always running out. Having to think fast and bring it all together in the end is what I like about it… once I begin building and forms take shape I can start to see where things are going and either follow that road or attempt to contradict it with something unexpected.”

“In my mind they are always mash-ups of influences and ideas. I see a castle, a fishing village, a modernist sculpture, a stage set for the oscars all at once. When they are successful they don’t feel contained or finished. They become organic machines that might grow and expand. I am always adding just one more bit and if time allowed I wouldn’t stop.”

Broken down to its most basic characteristics, the traditional Japanese zen garden inspires innovative design in everything from toys and candy to the most impossibly relaxing modern bathrooms you’ve ever seen. These unexpected takes on the traditional play on the meditative activity of dragging a rake through sand, the pleasingly minimalist aesthetic of the resulting lines and the sense of tranquility a zen garden can bring to a built environment.

Sugar Art: Edible Zen Garden

This miniature zen garden is entirely edible, with sugar standing in for sand and rocks made from black sesame candies. Created by designer Tomonori Saito, the Shinan-ji Temple Rock Garden provides you with a tiny wooden rake so you can play with your food before you eat it.

Kinetic Drawing Machine Creates Sand Art

Instead of a rake in the hands of a human, the patterns of lines in these circles of sand are created by steel marbles controlled by a kinetic drawing machine. The Sisyphus Machine by Bruce Shapiro produces mandala-like designs that swirl and change as the marbles move.

Interactive Zen Garden Installation in Quebec

This new take on the traditional Japanese zen garden replaces sand with gravel and uses three spinning tools inspired by agricultural machinery to create the patterns. Created by Talmon Biran Architecture for the International Garden Festival in Quebec, the ‘Dry Landscape’ installation requires participants to work in tandem to create their own circles without bumping into each other.

XYZen Garden Works Like an Etch-A-Sketch

Create your own relaxing DIY zen garden game with a tutorial at Instructables, which even includes shop drawings and templates. The XYZen Garden by Jonathan Odom works like an Etch-a-Sketch toy, using a pulley system to move the stylus across the sand.

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Zenith Of Zen 13 Nontraditional Takes On Japanese Gardens

Grains of sand arrange themselves into complex geometric patterns according to audio frequencies in these fascinating resonance experiments by Youtube user Brusspup. The sand is sprinkled onto a black metal plate attached to a tone generator, which emits a series of increasing frequencies. The higher the frequencies, the more intricate the designs become.

This experiment is based on the Chiadni plate, invented by German physicist Ernst Chiadni in the 18th century. Chiadni used a violin bow along the edge of a glass plate covered with sand to create visualizations of sound. The plate is divided into regions vibrating in opposite directions, bounded by lines of zero vibration called nodal lines.

The plate was bowed until it reached resonance, at which point the vibration causes the sand to concentrate along the nodal lines where the surface is still. This technique is still used in the design and construction of acoustic instruments like violins and guitars.

Brusspup often experiments with the intersection of science and art. Previous projects have included running water through sound waves to produce incredible zig-zagging shapes, and a sound-based camera trick that makes water appear to travel backwards.

Whether you’re convinced that crop circles are caused by some extraterrestrial force or believe it’s the work of humans, you’ve got to admit that some of the designs are pretty incredible. And, these mysterious and intricate field patterns aren’t the only amazing things you can see from the air – snow raked into swirly designs, Japanese rice paddy art, strange spontaneous sheep formations and even ‘transformer’ robots made from choreographed vehicles all make for impressive high-altitude viewing.

Real-Life Transformers Made from Vehicles

(images via: SoothBrush)

Award-winning French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond created ‘Project Transformers’, which utilizes different types of vehicles to create designs that look like giant robots from the sky. The first project used ambulances, fire trucks and other vehicles to perform a choreographed series of movements to form the shape of the ‘robot’. The second part of the project used buses in a field to achieve a similar effect.

Most Complex Crop Circle Discovered in Britain

(images via: The Telegraph)

The most complex crop circle ever to be seen in Britain was discovered in June 2008. The formation – which measures 150 feet in diameter – appears to be a coded image representing the first 10 digits of pi (3.141592654). Astrophysicist Michael Reed said, “The tenth digit has even been correctly rounded up. The little dot near the centre is the decimal point. The code is based on 10 angular segments with the radial jumps being the indicator of each segment. Starting at the centre and counting the number of one-tenth segments in each section contained by the change in radius clearly shows the values of the first 10 digits in the value of pi.”

Rake Art by Lenny and Meriel

(images via: Lenny&Meriel)

A couple named Lenny and Meriel, based on the island of Guernsey in the UK, use rakes to create beautiful patterns in sand and snow and then use a kite to photograph them from above. The designs have a flowing, organic feel that works perfectly with the stark, natural setting and media.

2 Crop Circles in 3-D

(images via: The Daily Mail + WIRED)

These two three-dimensional crop circle designs were photographed by crop circle researcher Steve Alexander, co-author with wife Karen Alexander of a series of crop circle yearbooks. The top photo shows a July 2007 crop circle measuring 200 feet in diameter in Wiltshire, England. Of the design, Karen Alexander said “In traditional geometry a square represents material reality and a circle represents the divine or heavenly realm. A lot of people are saying this circle represents the passageway through the physical world to the divine world.” The second photo shows another 3-D crop circle discovered near Ashbury, England.

Mysterious Moving Creek Circle

(images via: Thankful)

One morning in December 2008, photographer Brook Tyler came along an iced-over creek in Mississuaga, Canada and noticed something bizarre: there was a perfectly round, 6-foot circle of ice spinning, presumably over an eddy. It’s unlikely that it was man-made, since the ice was far too thin to walk on. Geographers say these ‘ice circles’ are caused by quick shifts in temperature.

5 Examples of Japanese Rice Field Art

(images via: Matador Pulse)

Every  year, farmers in the town of Inakadate in Aomori, Japan create vast works of art in their rice paddies. It’s done by planting purple and yellow-leafed rice along with their local green-leafed variety. These rice paddy images are visible during the growing season, until the harvest in September. The tradition started in 1993 and each of these five images shows a different year’s design.

Metatron’s Cube Crop Circle

(image via: Sacred Number)

This crop circle is an interpretation of Metatron’s Cube, a concept of ‘sacred geometry’ which revolves around the belief that through geometric form, one can gain an understanding of the nature of the world around us, and the universe as a whole. The full explanation is a bit too tedious to get into here, but suffice to say that a whole lot of thought was put into this design.

Shopping Cart Crop Circle in a Parking Lot

(image via: MakeZine)

Urban areas may not see crop circles of the traditional sort, but some creative people came up with a way to create one in a Costco parking lot, of all places – with shopping carts. The circle, created in Goleta, California, follows the natural curve created by a line of shopping carts.

Sheep Circle

(images via: The Daily Mail)

Forget crop circles – what’s even weirder is this photograph of sheep on a farm in England that spontaneously assembled in a circle. The group of roughly 100 sheep organized into a circle and stayed that way for about 10 minutes before dispersing. Even more strangely, three fields away, another group of sheep did the same at around the same time. Real estate agent Robert Bird just happened to spot them and take this photo.

Firefox Crop Circle

(images via: The Contaminated)

After the 4,500-square-foot ‘Firefox’ crop circle appeared in a field in Oregon, some who were only able to see it from photos weren’t convinced it was real. However, these photos show the OSU Linux Users Group in action, planning and creating the ‘crop circle’.  Check it out on Google Maps, too.