Most urban designs are at best useful for skaters as an afterthought, or more typically: specifically created to foil skaters, but not this set of signs.

The Drive Skate Shop in Vancouver created two of these, the first of which mimics a typical and ubiquitous “sandwich board” style sign, which normally consists of two planes angling out toward the bottom for stability.

By extending those surfaces onto the ground and adding a slight curve, a skateable sign is created — ride it at your own risk, however (it’s steep!).  Metal supports provide stability, too.

The second variant is crafted from curved plywood and slopes up a wall, imitating a typical pasted posters toward the top, but turning into an angled ramp near the ground, effectively turning the whole wall into a more skate-friendly surface.

As marketing strategies go, this one has it all: simple and clever, cheap but functional and to-the-point, letting passing skaters take a stab at riding the signage then maybe stopping for some supplies when they tank their landing.

Standing nearly 40 feet tall, this giant arcing whale is composed entirely of plastic waste gathered from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, carefully assembled in a canal of Bruges, Belgium.

Following a Liquid City theme, Brooklyn designers from STUDIOKCA chose the form to help observes visualize the magnitude and shape of both what winds up clogging the world’s oceans and the creatures impacted.

The net effect is striking, the arched water mammal rising up from the deep in a graceful curve, which, upon closer inspection, is made up of white and blue refuse, stamped with languages and brands from around the world.

Dubbed Skyscraper, the sculpture brings together 4,000 square feet of discarded plastic gathered in Hawaii beach cleanups, a small fraction of the 150 million tons currently lost at sea.

And while the majestic sea creature ricing from the canal might seem large, “pound for pound that is more plastic waste swimming in the ocean than there is whales,” say the creators. “So an opportunity like this to show the type of plastic and the amount of plastic that ends up in our oceans is really important.”

Programs like Sketchup have allowed amateur artists and architects to sculpt and design in three dimensions for years, but this app facilitates far more informal works that really look like sketches in 3D.

Mental Canvas is part of a suite of software for Microsoft Surface that takes more conventional sketched forms and allows users to navigate and expand them in three-dimensional space, retaining the character of rough drawings.

The infinite-depth approach of this digital canvas software lets users zoom in and rotate their view, adding layers along the way and inspecting their work from various angles. The effect is remarkable as these illustrations show.

From its creators: CAD modelling “comes at a cost. The cost is that one, you have to have a fully resolved three-dimensional model, even if it’s just a cube; second it’s very hard to edit a CAD model, it’s not fast and fluid like a sketch. At any given moment when you’re sketching, the designer or artist has full control over everything in that representation, but with a CAD model, that’s defined by the computer.”

This clever approach liberates an artist from the ordinary constraints of a physical page or even a drawing tablet, letting them shape worlds that maintain the character of a sketch but can be used to tell and frame stories in new ways.

As with programs like Sketchup, a bookmarking tool allows users to save and store various views then retrace their steps, creating potential for 3D storytelling. It also lets a user pick the perfect shot, navigating three-dimensional space to select an ideal perspective. A dynamic dial tool, meanwhile, lets the artist rotate between colors and line qualities without backing out of the drawing.

As any good architect knows, an unfinished-looking drawing can be an asset: “A sketch has a quality when it’s unfinished; there’s so much possibility, there’s so much room for interpretation, and [Mental Canvas] expands the idea of a sketch. It makes it less flat. In architecture you always want that “Wow” design that gets everyone excited in the room, and [Mental Canvas] enhances it.”

One can see a lot of similarities here between Mental Canvas and tools being developed for augmented and virtual reality platforms. In a way, this program closes the gap, allowing users with more ordinary tools, devices and interfaces to accomplish something wonderful in 3D space.

Preserving the natural beauty of a UNESCO-protected valley in the Jordanian desert, this underground architectural complex is designed burrow and branch out beneath the surface.

This conceptual proposal by Rasem Kamal of Oppenheim Architecture features nearly 2,000,000-square-foot network of spaces containing a train station, museum and hotel. The idea aims to bring services to the area with minimal disruption to the natural beauty of the sand and sandstone of the Wadi Rum. In turn, these additions would set the stage for a residential development.

The so-called Excavated Sanctuaries bring in natural light from above via limited openings while using the thermal mass of the desert to regulate interior temperatures below ground. Inspired by the nests and warrens of ants and other subsurface creatures, the layouts are at once complex but organized, buildings semi-autonomous but interconnected. The renderings have a Dali-esque quality, highlighting the surreal as well as the serene beauty of simple architecture in a desert setting.

Aside from its contextual response, there is a deeper thesis here as well: good architecture does not have to stand out – at times, it is called upon to blend in or be invisible.

“Lately, a great many prominent architectural practices have been focusing on developing dynamic forms, new building materials, sophisticated details and tectonics as well, while only the minority of these contribute to their internal spaces,” explains Kamal.

“Consequently, this thesis aimed to flip the relationship between the explicit and implicit, by diminishing the power of external form along with exploiting all the previous efforts that were used for it to subtract spaces where we will live, experience and enjoy.”

A Berlin art collective has taken to the streets, inking urban infrastructure and laying down shirts and tote bags to create a line of unique prints … their patterns directly lifted from city streets.

Raubdruckerin (AKA Pirate Printer) press apparel to painted manhole covers, utility grates, etched signage, vents and other objects that have depth differences (and thus themselves to the relief-printing process, like woodcuts or letterpress).

The group rolls out different colors of ink, much as one would with any kind of etched or raised printing process, then lays cloth down and applies pressure. Depending on the size and type of the object in question, the prints are partial or complete pictures of a given urban artifact.

The crew has traveled to Amsterdam, Lisbon, Paris and other iconic cities to capture some of their least-noticed but still-beautiful urban artifacts, transferring overlooked parts of these places to a new style of streetwear. Naturally, each one is a little different – even when the same street fixture is used, the re-inking process results in variegation from one print to he next (via Colossal).