On the University of British Columbia’s campus in Vancouver, a new record-setting wood structures highlights the many advantages of a growing trend: vertical timber construction. Brock Commons Tallwood House is the highest of its kind to date, providing housing for over 400 students.

The Canadian firm behind its construction, Acton Ostry Architects Inc, says that using wood allowed for a much faster building process. Offsite testing of wood-to-wood connections and structural stability meant less time onsite spent figuring things out. Combined with prefabrication techniques, these approaches helped the builders finish the tower in just 70 days.

In addition to cost and time savings, wooden structures like this one are lighter weight, requiring less energy input during construction while also making them more flexible and resistant to earthquakes. Timber buildings are also famously good at standing up to flames – wooden columns and beams will char in an inferno, and that charred surface can actually stand up longer to heat than exposed steel. While steel heats up and buckles, wood first loses its water weight, then chars and resists the flames. Even when encased in concrete, rebar can heat up, buckle and bend.

Sustainable forestry also enables them to sequester carbon while using a renewable resource — wood buildings like this open the door to carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative projects. Use of glue-laminated beams and columns also allows thinner trees and offcuts to be used in the construction process, reducing waste and growth time for harvested plants.

Some concrete was still required for the elevator cores, metal was needed for connections, and windows, of course, required glass. Still, compared to steel-framed structures, the amount of these materials used was dramatically reduced. And this project is not alone — around the world, forward-thinking architects and developers are beginning to realize that wood is a useful material for building tall.

An extensive living facade system in Bogota, Columbia, represents growth in the right direction, away from unrealistic tree-covered skyscrapers toward more sustainable and useful vertical greenery.

The Santalaia building has plants spanning over 30,000 square meters of its surface area, able to produce oxygen for over 3,000 people annually (and filter tons of heavy metals, harmful gases and other airborne particulates). Paisajismo Urbano installed this specific system, developed by Ignacio Solano.

The recent trend (in renderings and to some extent reality) of putting trees onto tall towers is problematic from engineering and ecological standpoints. “Intensive” greenery requires thicker layers of soil and more complex systems for watering, maintenance and structural support. “Extensive” greenery, by contrast, provides many of the same benefits with lower cost and less wasted energy.

Many architects are naturally tempted to place trees on buildings, which do have a few functional advantages (like providing shade and making for nice-looking renderings). Still, building residents as well as the public would be better served in most cases by systems like this one. Even then, it is important to determine in advance what the goals and intended benefits are, since any green installation is complex and requires ongoing support.

If you’re afraid of heights, a mere glance at these photos taken by Russian daredevil photographer Angela Nikolau might be enough to give you the heebie-jeebies. The 23-year-old scales some of the tallest skyscrapers in Russia and Asia, either using a selfie stick, a drone, or bringing her boyfriend Ivan Kuzenetsov along to take the photos. And as if perching on the edges of structures at such extreme heights isn’t enough, she often does yoga poses or wears stilettos while doing so.

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The self-taught climber is not too concerned about bypassing security and breaking trespassing laws to capture these incredible images, and virtually no building is too tall. Angela and Ivan climbed all 2,000 feet of the Golden Finance 117 building in Tianjin, China last fall.

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Other illegal conquests include the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the Shanghai Tower in China, the Tsing Ma bridge in Hong Kong and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Unsurprisingly, many of the photos have to be taken late at night to avoid being caught.

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Angela’s casual poses might be the most disconcerting aspect of the photos, especially for those of us who imagine death-gripping the edge if we managed to make it up that high. She’s often lounging dangerously close to certain death, holding on to a ladder with just one hand or hanging barefoot off cranes. In some images, she’s held aloft by her boyfriend, dangling hundreds of feet off the ground.

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Check out all of Angela’s images at her Instagram, @angela_nikolau.

A new series of treescrapers designed for Nanjing, China, aim to combat air pollution with plant-covered towers, but this bold vision may represent hubris more than hope.

Architect Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) project in Milan was an impressive but small-scale version of this vision to turn Chinese cities into greenery-covered cityscapes. “Two towers in a huge urban environment [such as Nanjing] is so, so small a contribution – but it is an example. We hope that this model of green architecture can be repeated and copied and replicated.”

And the figures put out to the press are impressive: these new buildings could, according to estimates, remove 25 tons of carbon from the air annually and produces a lot of oxygen in the process. Still, embedded carbon in plants has to go somewhere eventually — leaves and branches that break off of these vertical treescapes will eventually fall to the ground, adding to street-level pollution.

Projects like this face downsides and challenges, too. A lot of embedded energy (and thus: carbon) comes with retrofitting buildings to support plants. There are intensive structural requirements (for soil and trees) but also active system demands, too, that add to inputs and costs. As plants grow, they also have to be maintained — a lot more challenging than just sending window washers up and down the sides of a skyscraper.

Ultimately, it makes sense to think about how cities can go green, but adding thick and lush greenery to the sides of buildings risks being an act of greenwashing more than one of sustainable design. The ground is a much easier place to plant greenery, plus an easier space for everyone to access and enjoy. Even the above rendering of one of these planned communities makes this point indirectly: there are a lot more trees on the ground than there are on the buildings in the image.

What would architecture look like if it had no beginning or end, no ground floor as starting point nor rooftop terminus? Artist Vasco Mourao explores exactly that question in his series Ouroboros, so named after the mythical dragon/serpent forever eating its own tail.

The Barcelona-based artist (an architect by training) illustrates his impossible-sounding seems on curved and angular cuts of plywood shaped into loops.

His work indirectly addresses a key transition point in the history of architecture as well — a time when concrete, steel and glass were first combined to make taller structure possible but before the Modernists rendered these buildings sleek and simple.

Like early skyscrapers (featuring stretched Gothic decor and wood-inspired details), his designs extrapolate conventional materials and decorative approaches skyward. Their aesthetic is also reminiscent of places like Kowloon Walled City, where densification drove particularly strange connections between different structures.

Meanwhile, Mourao also draws other cityscapes on different surfaces as well, from large-scale surrealistic murals to the bottoms of skateboards, often reprising similar themes of infinity-evoking architecture.