There’s lots of competition for the title of world’s tallest skyscraper, but does anyone care about the world’s longest – even when it extends vertically into an upside-down U shape? If you were to take ‘The Big Bend’ and straighten it out to stand on one end, it would extend impossibly high into the air, especially for how skinny it is. But architecture studio Oiio seems to be poking some fun at architectural norms and ‘luxury’ at the same time with this fictional structure.

Designed to fit into New York City’s Billionaire’s Row, a controversial set of super tall, ultra-luxury residential skyscrapers that tend to block views and cast shadows into Central Park, The Big Bend wonders whether the prestige of an absurdly high structure still exists when it’s bent in half. It maintains roughly the same dimensions as a super tall structure, so does that mean the developers can charge as much for the apartments inside as they would if it extended all the way up into the clouds?

The tongue-in-cheek design repeatedly references the Monopoly-style, top-hatted caricature of a billionaire in its renderings, and the firm’s statements about their proposal reveal a frustration with the way buildings in this echelon are designed, regulated and priced.

“There is an undeniable obsession that resides in Manhattan,” says the firm. “It is undeniable because it is made to be seen. There are many different ways that can make a building stand out, but in order to do so the building has to literally stand out. We have become familiar with building height measurements. We usually learn about the tallest building and we are always impressed by its price per square foot. It seems that a property’s height operates as a license for it to be expensive. New York City’s zoning laws have created a peculiar set of tricks through which developers try to maximize their property’s height in order to infuse it with the prestige of a high rise structure.”

“But what if we substituted height with length? What if our buildings were long instead of tall? If we manage to bend our structure instead of bending the zoning rules in New York, we would be able to create one of the most prestigious buildings in Manhattan. The longest building in the world. The Big Bend can become a modest architectural solution to the height limitations of Manhattan. We can now provide our structures with the measurements that will make them stand out without worrying about the limits of the sky.”

Suspended aquariums, snowy landscapes, jungles and caves can all be found in the heart of the city, steps away from dense urban housing, in the middle of this wild skyscraper concept. Winner of eVolo magazine’s 2015 skyscraper competition, ‘Essence’ by BOMP re-introduces nature to heavily developed areas with eleven diverse landscapes built right into its core.

The futuristic urban tower design aims to be a secret garden in the middle of the city, combining architecture and nature within an environment where wildlife and greenery are rarely found outside of parks. “The main goal of this project is to position non-architectural phenomena in an urban fabric,” say the designers.

The eleven natural landscapes overlap each other within the vertical structure, including a jungle, a cave, a waterfall and even an ‘ocean.’ The landscapes were chosen for their complex range of “visual, acoustic, thermal, olfactory and kinesthetic experiences.”

Open to the public, this series of natural spaces includes fish tanks lifted 30 meters above the floor and other natural features, with different paths offering different adventures. Each is positioned beside large glazed walls overlooking the city, offering a strange juxtaposition of environments. See the rest of the contest entries at eVolo.

A skyscraper filled with corpses may sound morbid, but soon, such things may become a necessity. The earth is already packed with dead housed in oversized caskets that have been designed to outlive us all – so what are we going to do with the never-ending stream of human bodies as we face life’s greatest inevitability?

Skyscraper Cemetery for Norway

A metal exoskeleton around a central core serves as the framework for a multi-story graveyard that looks, on each individual floor, the way any ordinary graveyard would. It’s got trees, benches and memorials. The only difference is, it’s high above ground level, and roofed by the next level of graves. Norweigian designer Martin McSherry envisions the Skyscraper Cemetery that can help solve the problem of lack of burial space in the country, with a crane permanently situated beside the structure to constantly add new floors as needed.

Memorial Necropole Ecumenica, Brazil

The world’s tallest existing cemetery is Brazil’s Memorial Necropole Ecumenica, a 32-story high rise where tombs are rented by the year and private memorial rooms go for about $105,000. Because of the hot Brazilian climate, bodies must be interred within 24 hours, so the MCE, as it’s known, is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The building also contains a chapel, lagoon, peacock garden, waterfalls, an aviary full of parrots and toucans and even a small restaurant.

Tower for the Dead, Mexico City

The population of residents aged 65 and older is expected to triple in developing countries over the next four decades. That’s a big problem when it comes to burying the dead, especially in places like Mexico City where buildable area is very scarce. Creating more conventional cemeteries would mean losing valuable agricultural land and what few unspoiled green spaces are left. This proposal, Tower for the Dead, actually combines vertical necropoles with inverted skyscrapers for an 820-foot-deep subterranean complex conceived as a massive screw driving into the earth. The experience might be a little intense, as each floor has a theme based on a stage of grief.

“This project proposes an underground vertical cemetery for Mexico City – a vision that takes into consideration the overpopulation, the scarcity of land, and the psychological and sensory experience of grieving. The ‘Tower of the Dead’ allows the family members of the deceased to be reborn, after a trip to the underworld, where they just buried their loved one.”

Vertical Cemetery for Paris

This vertical cemetery concept for land-challenged Paris would create “a symbolic tower with a rightful place within the city that the deceased so much loved,” a city that currently has so little space for graves that many remains have still not been properly buried. A skylight pours natural light into the center of the tower, down into a water pond at the base, with a spiral ramp offering a walkway to the top floor. Flexible filaments on the outside of the tower each stand for a deceased person, aiming to embody their essence as they move in the wind.

Stacked Cemeteries of New Orleans

New Orleans is one city that already stacks its dead vertically, up to four tombs high. The reason for this is simple: the city is set well below sea level, so the water table is far too high for underground burial. Dig just a few feet down, and you’ll hit soggy sand. For a while, residents attempted it anyway, stacking heavy stones on top of the caskets to hold them down, but storms would bring them floating up to the surface. Families are typically stacked together within individual vaults. At the city’s infamous Lafayette Cemetery, human remains are even interred right in the walls that surround it.

Moshka Tower Cemetery, Mumbai

The Moshka Tower was designed for Mumbai to free up a significant amount of ground space for the living, accommodating all four of the major cultures and religions found within the city (Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Parsi.) Facilities are available for both garden burial and cremation. A tower of silence is located on the roof for Parsis, and additional space is available for worship, prayer and meditation. The multi-layered facade is filled with vegetation to absorb heat and CO2, and new technology enables more sustainable cremation that doesn’t fill the air with pollution.

Mountain of the Dead, Egypt

Egypt’s Mountain of the Dead, also known as Gebel al Mawta, is a Roman-era burial site that towers above the landscape of the Siwa Oasis, looking a bit like an ant hill. Made of limestone, it was developed during the 26th Dynasty of Egypt, and served as a hiding place for soldiers during World War II. Tombs cover virtually every square inch of its base as well as its terraces and all sides of the conical portion. Many of the tombs have been raided over the centuries, and robbery continues to be a problem.

Amphitheater for the Dead: Hong Kong Hillside Cemeteries

Look out onto the hillsides from a high-rise in Hong Kong and you’ll see something that’s highly uncommon in the west: tier after tier of graves built onto hillsides resembling ancient amphitheaters. Each grave within these cemeteries is shoehorned beside the other. It didn’t take long for this trend to die down in the city – the practice began in the ’60s, and by the ’80s, space ran out, so officials had resorted to interring bodies in nearby high-rise buildings. Hong Kong is twice as dense as New YOrk and four times as crowded as London, so it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with next.

There’s the inside-out skyscraper, the horizontal skyscraper and the wooden skyscraper. There’s a bizarre three-towered structure made to vaguely resemble an elephant, tusks and all. And then there’s the giant pickle. These 14 buildings are among the most bizarre in the world, and they stand out all the more for their sheer height.

Genex Tower, Belgrade, Serbia

(image via: wikipedia)

It’s the third-largest building in Europe, designed to look like a huge gate greeting visitors as they arrive in Belgrade from the west. But Genex Tower is hardly a welcoming sight to many, called “phenomenally ugly” in more than one place on the internet and dismissed as one of the worst examples of Brutalist Architecture. The twin concrete towers, joined together by a revolving restaurant, are certainly among the stranger skyscrapers in the world.

Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang, North Korea

(image via: wikipedia)

Is this the world’s ugliest skyscraper? Veiled in secrecy in North Korea, the Ryugyong Hotel sat in construction limbo for so long that people thought it had been abandoned. Its unusual triangular shape paired with a raw concrete finish made it a bit of a laughingstock among architecture enthusiasts, though recent changes since construction resumed have made it look a bit less severe.

Elephant Building, Bangkok, Thailand

(image via: thomas riddle)

Perhaps the architects who designed this bizarre building in Bangkok stepped back from their plans and thought, hmmm, this set of three concrete blocks needs something. We know – round windows for eyes and shapes that vaguely suggest ears and tusks! Or something.

Robot Building, Bangkok, Thailand

(image via: wikipedia)

When you spot this skyscraper in the Bangkok cityscape, there’s no question of what it’s supposed to be. The Robot Building was designed for the Bank of Asia to reflect the computerization of banking and is one of the last examples of modern architecture in the city. Architect Sumet Jumsai, who reportedly found inspiration in his son’s robot toy, made the building so blocky as a protest against the neoclassical and high-tech postmodern architecture that was sweeping the world in the early to mid 1980s.

CCTV Headquarters, Beijing, China

(image via: buyalex)

This 44-story skyscraper, which serves as the headquarters for China Central Television in Beijing, earned the nickname “big boxer shorts” soon after completion in 2009 for its rather unusual shape. It’s described as a loop of six horizontal and vertical sections and figuring out how to translate the design into a structural reality was no easy task, especially in a seismic zone.

Torre Velasca, Milan, Italy

(image via: david.orban)

Why is that tower shaped like a mushroom? Standing tall in the city center of Milan, the Torre Velasca definitely contrasts with surrounding architecture, though it was designed to be a modern interpretation of typical Italian medieval castles when it was created in 1954. It’s a divisive presence in the city, with some residents regarding it with affection and others bemoaning its dominance of the skyline.

Kingdom Centre, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

(image via: the full wiki)

With its unusual keyhole design, the Kingdom Centre in Riyadh would be a standout even if it weren’t Saudi Arabia’s tallest skyscraper and the world’s second tallest mosque. Also known as Burj Al-Mamlaka, the Kingdom Centre was selected as the world’s most well-designed skyscraper in the 2002 Emporis Skyscraper Awards. The architects created the keyhole in the top in order to conform to city laws that don’t allow occupied floors above a certain height.

Lloyds Building, London, England

(image via: towrs)

The Lloyds of London building is undeniably weird between its mish-mash of architectural styles and the bizarre jumble of structures clinging to its exterior. The building, which has all of its ‘guts’ including water pipes and elevators on the outside, was ostensibly designed this way so that the interior would remain uncluttered. Whether or not this approach worked (bottom two photos) is perhaps a matter of personal opinion.

Lippo Centre, Hong Kong

(image via: wikipedia)

Distinctive? Definitely. Dubbed the ‘koala tree’ for its resemblance to koalas clinging to a trunk, the Lippo Centre in Hong Kong is unlike any other office building in the world. American architect Paul Rudolph hoped to make these towers less severe with C-shaped clusters of windows that stand out in relief against the exterior.

Wooden Skyscraper, Archangelsk, Russia

(images via: the telegraph, english russia)

Built by a single man out of an improbable material, Russia’s wooden skyscraper became the tallest wooden house in the world at 144 feet and 13 stories. Nikolai Sutyagin, a former gangster, spent 15 years continuously adding additional floors to his home because he was never satisfied with the way it looked. With its creator imprisoned, the structure (never fully permitted in the first place) was crumbling and neighbors were worried about fire, leading to the building being mostly demolished in 2009 (update: the rest burned down in 2012).

Simon Rodia Towers, Los Angeles, California

(images via: wikipedia)

Reaching over 99 feet into the air, the Watts Towers – also known as the Simon Rodia Towers for the Italian immigrant who spent decades building them – aren’t exactly skyscrapers. They’re more like towering sculptures. But the steel pipe, rod and wire structures are undoubtedly landmarks in the Watts district of Los Angeles and are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Umeda Sky Building, Osaka, Japan

(images via: aleksander dragnes, rmonty119)

Strange and futuristic, the Umeda Sky Building in Osaka features bridges and a glass-enclosed elevator that criss-cross the empty space between two towers, which are connected at the top by a rooftop observatory. The building is so tall, it provides a 360-degree view of the city.

Norman Foster Gherkin, London, England

(image via: marc wathieu)

It’s been called Gherkin, Towering Innuendo and Crystal Phallus, but the unorthodox building that stands out like a sore thumb in London is officially known as 30 St Mary Axe. Designed by Norman Foster, the skyscraper was purchased for over a billion U.S. dollars, making it Britain’s most expensive office building.

Vanke Center, Shenzen, China

(image via: steven holl)

Who ever heard of a horizontal skyscraper? It may sound strange, but it actually exists, and it’s one of the most iconic designs in famed architect Steven Holl’s repertoire. Also known as the Vanke Center, the horizontal skyscraper looks like a series of towers turned on their sides and suspended above a tropical landscape in Shenzen, China.