What began as a random hole in a São Paulo wall is now the world’s tiniest office, complete with miniature books, laptops, paperwork and design tools. Emerging creative agency Agencia Grande created the public installation to celebrate its opening while also making a statement about the unnecessarily large proportions of many commercial offices in Brazil, which can have an unintended effect on the neighborhoods where they’re located.

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A post shared by GRANDE (@estudio.grande)

“Agencies and production companies often have very big and luxurious offices, and during the years those constructions have changed the city landscape, transforming small neighborhoods into big gentrification areas,” Caio Andrade of Agencia Grande told Designboom. “We wanted to move on the opposite direction – we decided to ‘go small.’”

Set into a colorful wall in the trendy neighborhood of Vila Madalena, the tiny office is a fun way to promote the agency, encourage conversation around the issue of gentrification and encourage passersby to pause and take a closer look at their surroundings, too.

Photography by Dan Magatti

Nobody knows the needs of a city better than the residents who navigate it each day, so who better to edit, adapt and upgrade urban spaces to make them cooler and more useful? Urban ‘hacktivism’ takes underutilized architecture and infrastructure, from street signs to empty subway stations, and subverts it for a new purpose. Whether installed guerrilla-style or with the blessing of city officials, these projects make the city a more fun and comfortable place to hang out.

Arche de la Defense Occupation by Parasitic Guerrilla Architecture

What if citizens took the lack of affordable and accessible housing in cities into their own hands, and simply created their own residences wherever they saw fit? ‘Pocket of Active Resistance’ envisions how this would manifest in Paris, as guerrilla housing takes over monuments like the Arche de la Defense. Architect Stéphane Malka presents a modular housing system stuck right into the interior walls of la Defense, connected by scaffolding and catwalks.

Alleyway Squat Housing by WEAK!

The firm ‘WEAK!’ encourages the organic growth of illegal structures on all sorts of city surfaces, including rooftops, disused fields and abandoned skyscrapers, reflecting “the citizen’s right to express himself through architecture.” Among the projects they’ve brought to life throughout Taiwan is this elevated alleyway dwelling made primarily of scaffolding, which creates a new two-level residence while leaving room on the ground for pedestrians to pass through.

Parasite 2.0 Colony in Venice

Young Italian collective Parasite 2.0 took over a series of disused spaces throughout Italy as part of a 2013 urban occupation project, including the fort of the Sant’Andrea island in the Venetian lagoon. Stretching polyethylene through the frame of an abandoned building like a web, they created an amorphous series of rooms with built-in hammocks.

Cascade Project by Edge Design Institute

A staircase in Hong Kong that took up lots of space yet saw very little foot traffic temporarily became the setting for a vibrant geometric mesh sculpture with built-in seating and planters, creating a miniature park right in the middle of The Centrium. ‘The Cascade Project’ by Edge Design Institute features a living canopy of Bauhinia trees and other plants, giving the staircase an alternate and ultimately more useful purpose.

Art & Culture Center Beneath a Railway in Japan

While this project was completed with the blessing of the city of Yokohama, it’s a pretty cool example of how underutilized urban spaces can be taken over and transformed for the benefit of all residents. Situated on a once-obsolete and uneasily quiet street, right beneath a railway track, the new arts center includes a gallery, cafe and studio.

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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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Nighttime rainbows shimmer across the skies in cities from Istanbul to New York, traversing rivers, illuminating underpasses and highlighting monuments. Bringing splashes of ultra-saturated color to gray concrete scenes in urban areas as well as historic structures and even waterfalls, these rainbow light art installations seem to symbolize the ability to look on the bright side.

35-Mile Laser Rainbow

‘Global Rainbow, After the Storm’ by Yvette Mattern shone from the rooftop of the Standard High Line Hotel in New York City to 35 miles in the distance, symbolizing hope after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Despite their incredible range of visibility, the lasers used for the installation required the equivalent of two hairdryers’ worth of electricity.

100 Colors by Emmanuelle Moureaux

Lay down on a tatami mat and watch a rainbow of colors shift, swirl and change at the ‘100 Colors No.9’ installation by Emmanuelle Moureaux. Set against Tokyo’s Zojoji Temple, the work has a big impact for its size, with the colorful strands rustling in the wind.

LightRails by Bill FitzGibbons

A neglected Art Deco railroad underpass gets the attention it deserves with the addition of a network of computerized rainbow LEDs. LightRails by artist Bill FitzGibbons illuminates the passageway for safety, and to encourage its use as a gateway between downtown Birmingham, Alabama and a new urban space called Railroad Park.

Reflective Palace of Rainbows

Built in the late 19th century, Madrid’s stunning Palacio de Cristal feels even more magical and otherworldly with the addition of iridescent panels by Kimsooja. The installation, entitled ‘To Breathe – A Mirror Woman,’ created the feel of stepping inside a rainbow by reflecting the lighting effects on the windows with mirrors installed on the floors.

Night Rainbow

A ghostly-looking rainbow stretched 100 feet across London’s Trafalgar Square even after dark as part of a promotion for three new LGBT shows on British television in January 2015.

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Churches are scrawled with ephemeral graffiti, public squares transmit profound messages and trees come to life with the moving heads of Cambodian deities when artists use digital projectors to transmit imagery onto urban surfaces. These 10 artists project words, classical art, geometric shapes, mirage-like fields of color or their own photography onto everything from Capitol buildings to screens made of water.

Jenny Holzer

American artist Jenny Holzer uses words on an unprecedented scale, especially with her outdoor light projections, introducing commentary to public spaces. While the words were her own from the time she started in 1977 until roughly 2001, she has begun working with texts written by others, including the works of great literary figures and sources like declassified US Army documents from the war in Iraq.

Clement Briend

Trees come to life in the sculptural images of deities and spirits from Cambodian culture in the series Cambodian Trees by French artist Clement Briend. Highlighting the nature that can be found within urban contexts, the series transformed the streets of Paris. Says brined, “Such nocturnal visions allow us to grasp the way magic profoundly influences how Cambodian people perceive the world.”

Luftwerk

Artist duo Luftwerk, made up of Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero, integrated Chicago’s iconic Cloud Gate into a light art installation called Luminous Field. The work used the reflective qualities of the sculpture to enhance and magnify imagery that was projected onto the ground around it.

Usman Haque

Commissioned by the City of Santa Monica for Glow 08, ‘Primal Source’ by Usman Haque was projected onto a large-scale waterscreen/mist projection system at a beach location near the city’s pier to create a mirage-like effect. The light changes in response to the sounds emanating from the crowd. “Some modes created ‘captures’ whose colour, shape and movement followed the frequency and amplitude dynamics of individual syllables and sentences picked up; other modes responded to wider collective phenomena, e.g. distorting a grid in response to the crowd volume, or creating a rush of wind through a wheat-field landscape.”

Paolo Buroni

Classic art comes to the streets for all to see when Italian multimedia artist Paolo Buroni projects images onto architecture in public squares. “I like to create change – to change reality with imagination,” says the artist. His works have been commissioned for events like the Venice Biennale and has appeared in Nuremburg,, Budapest, Istanbul, Paris and Seoul.

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