Imagine a world in which an abandoned city goes to seed, but rather than plants reclaiming buildings, the buildings grow and morph like unkempt weeds, twisting the skyline into impossible new patterns.

In their project Spatial Bodies, AUJIK envisions architecture as something organic, skyscrapers like trees and vines that curve, wrap and interlock to create fresh and unpredictable formations.

The team compiled aerial drone footage, manipulating it in Autodesk 3D studio and combining it with Google Maps images. The resulting urban landscapes are both real and surreal, vaguely recognizable and semi-coherent but contorted and distorted. Buildings grow from familiar foundations, but wiggle and wind in unnatural and unexpected ways.

From the artists: “Spatial Bodies depicts the urban landscape and architectural bodies as an autonomous living and self replicating organism. Domesticated and cultivated only by its own nature. A vast concrete vegetation, oscillating between order and chaos.”

Many of the shots in the film are largely static, but in a way that helps make them comprehensible to viewers: it is almost impossible to take in the scenes as they pass by even in still format. Limiting the realtime motion of structures in the video also reflects their plant-like nature, implying that these transformations will take time, just like growing organic material in the wild.

It will be a brand-new, from-scratch American city like any other, with urban, suburban, exurban and rural zones dotted with houses, malls, power plants, police and fire stations, missing only one key ingredient: inhabitants. Currently under construction in the New Mexico desert, the Center for Innovation, Testing, and Evaluation (CITE) is a sort of real-life Sim City, the “first of its kind, in scale and scope,” a unique “fully integrated test, evaluation and certification facility dedicated to enabling and facilitating the commercialization of new and emerging technologies.”

Known informally as City Lab (click to enlarge the diagram above), the 26-square-mile urban laboratory complex has a billion-dollar budget and will host all kinds of tests, including but not limited to: intelligent transportation systems, smart grid technologies and green energy strategies. Wired for data collection and replete with tunnels, system-wide scenarios can be monitored in the minutest detail, a dystopian twist on what might otherwise seem an idyllic mid-sized city capable of supporting 35,000 citizens.

Complete with all the infrastructure of a ‘real’ city, the developer’s target clients include university researchers, federal agencies and commercial enterprises. The facility aims to combine elements of private and governmental test environments like Gravesend, a military and police complex in the UK, Liberty City, a drone-oriented cityscape in the US and Mcity, a newly-built autonomous vehicle testing site in Detroit.

If you have one in your town it is a safe bet CITE has one as well, from churches and highways to a city hall and even an airport. While this place contains all a community could ever hope for, the only ‘residents’ of the place will be a staff of over 300 that maintain its infrastructure and supervise experiments. Imagine the reaction of some archeologist from the distant future, seeing a sort of dystopian settlement wired for full surveillance and connected by a vast array of underground tunnels (The Cabin in the Woods comes to mind, poster below), but at the same time oddly unoccupied and devoid of art, brands or billboards.

Noting the lack of these quintessential hallmarks of modern civilization, a professor at the University of New Mexico decided to ask what kind of public art would fit such a strange and made-to-be-deserted city. Her students solicited proposals from around the country and selected a set of winners. Ingenious ideas included: sculptural mounds made from the dirt displaced during excavation, testing paint colors around the complex for durability and weather resistance and a farcical strategy to sell lots and gentrify the faux city.

More from Pegasus Global Holdings: “As a privately-owned, privately-operated test and evaluation center, CITE is open and accessible to a wide array of public and private customer segments – domestic and international. The structure and policies in place at CITE are specifically designed to remove legal, cultural and budgetary impediments as are currently prevalent in the process of moving beyond basic research and development activities.”

If you have ever wondered how and where the Department Homeland Security evaluates drones for real-world applications, this Freedom of Information Act request reveals some of the secrets behind the operations taking place at one of these rather mysterious locations. Not to be confused with its video game namesake, tracing back to Grand Theft Auto’s own digital Liberty City, this real-world test site is fascinating to learn about remotely but not somewhere you want to have an actual vehicular adventure.

For years, the government has been testing drones for everything from monitoring infrastructure and special events to patrolling harbors and supporting first responders. Run by Robotic Aircraft for Public Safety (RAPS), Liberty City and sites like it let local, regional and national governments deploy different models of drone and decide which best suit their needs. Like Gravesend in the UK (pictured above), officers and troops are also called in on the ground to interact in these remarkably complete but staged environments.

Variegated urban terrains help those overseeing the tests determine a drone’s ability to identify key objects and individuals in the built environment, distinguish assailants and perpetrators in complex situations and track persons through challenging architectural landscapes. Simulations revolve around everything from ordinary robberies to hostage situations and terrorist attacks. The goal, ultimately, is to figure out what (completely or partially) autonomous vehicle technologies will work both generally and around specific purposes, for applications ranging from emergency search-and-rescue to broader everyday surveillance. While the work they are doing in these places is not classified as such, it is still highly secretive and much of it still remains undisclosed after years of inquiry.

Submitted via MuckRock, the FOIA request behind the details featured here sheds light on the reasons and methods behind these processes and places. Per Shawn Musgrave, “The broad objective of RAPS is to determine whether drones can play a practical role in a broad range of public safety deployments. Such applications include law enforcement, firefighting, disaster response, and search-and-rescue. The RAPS testing program evaluates each drone model for ease of operation, durability and performance in simulated scenarios. Reviewers compile their findings into a database for first responders nationwide to use when weighing a drone purchase.”

Opening this week, Mcity is a completely artificial village for self-driving cars, bringing the future of automobiles back to Michigan, the historical home of Motor City. Taking lessons from military testing facilities like Gravesend in England or Yodaville in the US, the complex is made to simulate a wide variety of conditions.

Featuring 32 acres of roads, intersections, sidewalks, streetlights, signals and building facades, Mcity is part of a statewide effort to advance connected technologies and test autonomous vehicles. More than a simulated combination of urban and suburban environments in their ideal forms, these experimental grounds also incorporate stress-testing defects like graffiti and faded lane markings as well as different street terrains, tunnels, roundabouts and multi-lane freeways on a combination of pavement, cobblestones, gravel, grass and dirt.

Given that all crashes to date involving autonomous cars have been caused by human error, it is critical not only to test the vehicles themselves but also the people they will interact with on the road. In addition to its proximity to Detroit, a key benefit of the Ann Arbor area is the varied weather in the area, with everything from hot humid midsummer days to serious rain, snow and hail in the winter. The test area can be reconfigured on demand to simulate complex intersections, blind corners and other real-world challenges.

The project represents a $10,000,000 private/public partnership between the University of Michigan, local governments and various industries, including but also beyond regional and international automotive powerhouses (Ford, GM, Honda, Nissan, Toyota but also State Farm, Verizon, and Xerox).

“We believe that this transformation to connected and automated mobility will be a game changer for safety, for efficiency, for energy, and for accessibility,” said Peter Sweatman, director of the U-M Mobility Transformation Center. “Our cities will be much better to live in, our suburbs will be much better to live in. These technologies truly open the door to 21st century mobility.”

“In addition to Mcity, MTC has three on-roadway connected and automated vehicle deployments underway. With the help of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, MTC is building on a nearly 3,000-vehicle connected technology project launched three years ago by the U-M Transportation Research Institute to create a major deployment of 9,000 connected vehicles operating across the greater Ann Arbor area. MTC is also partnering with industry and the Michigan Department of Transportation to put 20,000 connected vehicles on the road in Southeast Michigan. The third piece of the plan calls for deploying a 2,000-vehicle mobility service of connected and automated vehicles in Ann Arbor.”

Access to natural daylight has long been one of the biggest limiting factors in building design – some solutions involve reflecting real daylight from the outdoors, but until now no solution has been able to mimic natural refraction processes and fool our minds into thinking we are surrounded by actual sunlight.

Developed by CoeLux in Italy, this new form of artificial light is able to dupe humans, cameras and computers alike using a thin coating of nanoparticules to simulate Rayleigh scattering, a natural process that takes place in Earth’s atmosphere causing diffuse sky radiation. Far beyond simply making lights brighter or bluer, this approach accurately replicates how miles of atmosphere transform light within just a few millimeters of surface space. Professor Paolo Di Trapani of Italy’s University of Insubria has so far spent over 10 years working on this system.

The source of illumination is an LED projector that emits white light in a spectrum that mimics rays of sunlight – meanwhile, a sophisticated optical system creates the sensation of the distance between the sky and the sun. Though the images shown here are all real and unedited, extensive 3D modeling preceded physical tests, prototypes, live demos and, finally, the finished product. “The objective included further developments of the existing Maxwell Render software functionality to include light scattering properties, light polarization effects, custom spectrum data (through spectrum curves or raw data) and light spectrum measurements, by including a virtual spectrophotometer,” explains the inventor.

The result is an effect that carries the same qualities we are used to experiencing outside, from color and saturation to light quality. The company also boasts that these photos are untouched and that their fake skylights in showrooms fool people in person just as effectively, appearing to have infinite depth just like one would expect looking up into the sky (James Turrell’s skyspaces and this work by Christo come to mind). The entire setup is incredibly thin and thus easy to set flush with a wall or ceiling, forming a convincing faux sunlight or window.

The potential applications are effectively endless, from lighting deep indoor spaces (such as subway tunnels) to replacing natural light in places where winters drag on and daylight hours are short. The company sees opportunities in areas like healthcare and elder care facilities where it may not be possible to put patients or residents near real windows for spatial or health reasons.

Currently, three lighting configurations are possible, simulating various broad regions – Mediterranean, Tropical and Nordic – featuring various balances of light, shade, hue and contrast. They are also working on additional offerings, including simulated daytime sequences (sunrise through sunset) and color variations to reflect different kinds of weather conditions.

Present iterations can also cost up to tens of thousands of dollars but the they are aiming to bring down the price in future versions as well as through scale of production. Ultimately, one could imagine the shapes of buildings changing radically around such an invention – the creators of this breakthrough have likened it to the elevator, which transformed the way we were able to build vertically in urban environments.