Get a little too artsy with skate obstacles and you might end up with objects that just aren’t all that fun or functional for their intended purpose. But when Rotterdam design studio Opperclaes collaborated with furniture maker Jeroen van Sluis to bring its signature typographic art into three dimensions, the result spelled success for skaters hitting the city’s streets for Rotterdam Street Culture Weekend and the PowWow Rotterdam street art event.

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A post shared by Opperclaes Rotterdam (@opperclaes)

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“Character Type” is a series of 3D typographic installations placed in various parts of Rotterdam last fall, bringing interactive sculptures to previously empty public spaces. The enormous wooden letters seem to rise out of the pavement at odd angles, offering curves and ledges that ultimately spell out the words “ENDLESS,” “STAMINA” and “WAYS.” A fourth installation spelling out “LINES” appeared indoors for the three-day “Creating Lines” skateboarding event, which included an exhibition, full-length skate video and panel discussions.

The whole thing was captured on film by Sami El Hassani, if you want to see how the letter-shaped skate objects performed.

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Whenever oversized letters appear in the city of Rotterdam, you can probably bet that Opperclaes is involved. In addition to the “Character Type” project, they’ve produced street furniture, murals and a fun pedestrian crosswalk on the Westblaak.

Check out 15 typographic art projects and a collection of eminently skateable architecture.

If all the official signage that can be found around an average city bores you, you might not even notice the ones that are a little bit off, warning you of dangerous pigeons and tiny sinkholes or explaining the history of awkward silences in the area. Some are so small, they’re easy to just pass right by – like the one situated next to some velvet ropes and a mouse hole that reads “please wait here until called.” Your loss, really, because in this case, sharp observational skills really pay off.

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Australian artist Michael Pederson, better known as ‘Miguel Marquez Outside,’ isn’t interested in art galleries. He prefers to hide his strange and witty signs throughout cities like Sydney to be noticed and enjoyed by the public. A mental health worker by day, Pederson installs his temporary works as quickly as possible knowing they could be up for mere minutes or last for months. It’s all good as long as they make someone smile or help get them out of their own heads, he says.

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Pederson’s latest round of signs are even smaller than usual, alerting passersby to sidewalk weeds, questionable holes in shrubbery, exits to other dimensions and what they should do in the event of accidental staring on the bus. Previously, his installations have given parks solitude ratings, offered ‘personal space preference cards’ to pass out in public, and encouraged people to press a button so a trained proxy can go into a secluded wilderness area and scream on their behalf.

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If stuff like this won’t prompt you to pay closer attention to your surroundings, what will? Follow Pederson’s work on Instagram @MiguelMarquezOutside or on tumblr.

Some art just can’t be contained, even by the buildings that house it, expanding beyond these constrictions like alien appendages to burst through windows, wrap around columns and slink onto the sidewalks below. Inorganic materials take on the qualities of living things, manifesting as artificial parasitic growths as they cling to the facades of buildings in architectural installations that take on lives of their own.

Hyperbolic Installation by Crystal Wagner, Poland

An alien-like growth wraps itself around the corner facade of a historic building in Lodz, Poland, stretching tentacle-like appendages in shades of vivid pink, blue and purple. The site-specific work by Crystal Wagner is made from woven strips of plastic.

Wood Tentacles by Henrique Oliveira

Wooden forms expand to fill entire interior spaces, taking over light root systems to push through windows and doorways and into the streets, or in one case, to act as a secret system of interior tunnels. Artist Henrique Oliveira of Brazil typically installs his organic sculptures in gallery spaces, but one particular work has it bursting out of the confines of Casa dos Leoes in Porto Alegre.

10,000 Bats on the Nature Concert Hall

Thousands of bats stream straight out of the front door of the Nature Concert Hall at Zalenieki Manor in Latvia, forming a surreal cloud on its lawn. Architecture firm DJA took inspiration from the unpredictable formations found in nature when assembling the congregation of 10,000 paper bats, which create a tunnel effect when viewed from below.

Vortex by 1024 Architecture, Bordeaux, France

Strips of wood have taken it upon themselves to escape one building and grip the exterior of another, streaming toward it in a manner suggestive of autonomy. ‘Vortex’ is a generative light sculpture by 1024 Architecture almost completely made of scaffolding, installed on the Darwin Ecosystem Project’s green building in Bordeaux, France. “Merging organic materials with new technologies, this hybrid architectural artwork wraps around and embraces the footbridge between the complex’s two buildings, revealing and enhancing the venue’s dynamic energy while working as a live visualizer of energy consumption.”

Biografias by Alicia Martin, Madrid

An ornate second-floor window seems to vomit thousands of books onto the sidewalk below in this installation by artist Alicia Martin, as if they, too, are hoping to escape the building. The effect is enhanced by the movement of the pages as they’re blown by the wind. Martin has created similar site-specific installations in buildings all over her home country of Spain.

Glowing Star in an Unfinished Building by Jun Ong

Like some kind of alien life form that started out tiny and suddenly expanded, impaling an entire building upon itself, this five-story star made of light by Jun Ong suggests rapid growth that could not be contained. The artist envisions the LED sculpture as a physical manifestation of a glitch.

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Parasitic Art 11 Installations Taking Over Buildings Like Organic Growths

A “universally despised” postmodern public square in Los Angeles is getting a second look this week with the addition of a surreal glittering silver cloud that undulates in the air above the concrete, seemingly floating without any supports. Tethered from a 10-story purple bell tower to a lower corner of the park, the latticework installation is made of thousands of holographic mylar strips that flutter in the breeze. The work is a collaboration between patrick Shearn of Poetic Kinetics and the AA Visiting School of Los Angeles, a week-long design program for art students.

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Due for a makeover in 2019 that will replace much of the concrete with grass and create shade canopies, Pershing Square tends to be empty and quiet despite renewed vitality in other areas of downtown L.A. It’s one of the city’s oldest public spaces, but had its trees and grass ripped out in 1951 so a parking garage could be installed beneath it.

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Poetic Kinetics is known for creating many of the massive, colorful creations that appear at Burning Man each year. Sharon says he was inspired by nature and “the feeling that we are only aware on a very surface level of what is really going on around us. We feel the currents of air on our skin but do not see the larger movements.”

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The Los Angeles Times captured 360-degree views of the installation, which billows like a school of fish when it catches the wind just right. Measuring 15,000 square feet, ‘Liquid Shard’ will remain in place through August 11th, so stop by and experience it in person if you can.

Like hazy memories or flickers of imagination, architectural structures either long since lost or never built in the first place interact with three-dimensional space in the form of ghostly sculptures, projections or the imprints they left behind on neighboring buildings. Some are tangible yet illusory, made of transparent materials that make them seem like hallucinations, while others attempt to conjure past, fiction and fantasy with nothing but beams of light or smudges of paint left behind on brick.

Ancient Church Remains Resurrected in Puglia

Destroyed by earthquakes in the 13th century, the remains of one of Italy’s great harbor towns are long since abandoned, and only a foundation with a few crumbled stone walls is left to show for a grand early Christian basilica. Italian artist Edoardo Tresoldi raises it from the dead in the ghostly form of wire mesh, giving it a transparent effect that makes it seem not quite real from afar. In fact, the layered mesh creates an optical illusion that makes its Romanesque roof, columns and archways look blurred. This transparency makes it possible to see both the form and shape of the structure and how it interacted with its environment.

“The work of Edoardo Tresoldi appears as a majestic architectural sculpture that tells the volume of the existing early Christian church and, at the same time, is able to vivify, and update the relationship between the ancient and the contemporary,” says curator Simone Pallotta. “It is a work that, breaking up the secular controversy of the primacy arts, summarizes two complementary languages into a single, breathtaking scenery.”

Ghosts of Portland’s Industrial Past

A pair of outdoor sculptures by artists and architects Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo sketch in vague outlines of Portland’s industrial past along the Willamette River amongst all the new construction. Made of metal mesh and sited near two bridges, ‘Inversion: Plus Minus’ represent the outer shells of ordinary industrial buildings that once existed in the area. If you pass it by without giving it a good look, you might even just assume that it’s scaffolding.

6 Architectural Fossils

The imprints of buildings long gone can often be seen on their surviving neighbors for decades into the future, sometimes giving us an exact outline of their shapes like fossils on adjacent brick and stone. Not only can you see the rooflines, chimneys and outer walls, but often staircases, fire escapes and individual rooms. It’s especially intriguing when bits of wallpaper still stick to the remaining walls: we see the personalities of the individual spaces, triggering us to think about the lives of their former occupants. In some cases, fixtures like sinks, shower heads and toilets still cling to the tile-clad surfaces. Like a cross between architecture and archaeology, these imprints are reminders of a city’s past, and they’re preserved for public enjoyment by the Flickr group The Unconscious Art of Demolition.

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Ghosts Or Architecture Past 14 Fossils Of Fallen Buildings