If you’ve ever been intoxicated enough to feel as if the world were spinning around you at 100 miles per hour, these oil paintings by Alexandra Pacula will look familiar. But it doesn’t take excessive alcohol consumption to experience this sensation; sometimes, all you have to do is stand still on a busy urban corner and take in the frenetic motion from a place of stillness. Pacula’s paintings of nighttime city scenes are intentionally blurred.

“My work investigates a world of visual intoxication; it captures moments of enchantment, which are associated with urban nightlife,” Pacula says in her artist statement. “I am fascinated by the ambiance of the city at night and its seductive qualities. The breathtaking turbulence of speeding vehicles and hasty pedestrians evoke feelings of wonder and disorientation. The vibrant lights become a magical landscape with enticing opportunities and promises of fulfillment.”

Each of Pacula’s paintings is mural-sized, making them appear in galleries as if you could step right into them. The stylized streaks of light suggest those seen in long-exposure photography.

“I recreate the feeling of dizziness and confusion by letting the paint blur and allowing shapes to dissolve. I suggest motion in order to slow down the scene and capture the fleeting moments, which tend to be forgotten. The sense of motion is intensified with the use of quick vigorous lines and sharp perspectives. By interpreting lights in graphic or painterly ways, I create a sense of space, alluding to a hallucinogenic experience.”

Occupying an abandoned five-story apartment building in central Taipei, Ruin Academy is a living architectural laboratory where holes drilled in the walls let rain inside, plants grow from the floors and the bones of the structure serve as ‘compost’ for the future of the city. A collaboration between Finland-based Casagrande Laboratory and the Taiwanese JUT Foundation for Arts & Architecture, this project aims to “re-think the industrial city and the modern man in a box.”

Ruin Academy serves as a setting for workshops and courses for various Taiwanese and international universities in subjects like architecture, urban design and environmental art. The lines between the city and the building have been blurred with the removal of windows and interior walls, so bamboo and vegetables can be grown indoors. Students and professors sleep in ad-hoc dormitories. The mahogany elements of the interiors, like walkways and steps, are made to be rearranged as the inhabitants’ needs change.

“The Ruin Academy is looking at the ruining processes of Taipei that keep the city alive,” says Marco Casagrande on the Ruin Academy blog. The idea is that static urban structures aren’t a natural way of life, and that the ‘Third Generation City’ would mix nature with human construction in an ever-changing symbiosis. Restoring nature within cities, growing food indoors, and living in structures that constantly adapt and change is seen as a more organic way for humans to interact with our environment.

The Ruin Academy is just one of the many illegal, unsanctioned ‘parasite’ structures that have popped up on top of and around Taipei’s conventional modern buildings. Organic and often transient structures made of materials like bamboo or plastic sheeting sprout on the roofs of concrete skyscrapers and in abandoned lots, used as artist housing, urban farms, night markets and other social gathering places.

Nearly all of our most majestic architecture reflects pinnacles of achievement for our species, and one architect aims to call attention to yet another way in which we are ‘spectacular:’ our unmatched ability to produce incredible amounts of waste. ‘Monument to Civilization‘ is a vertical landfill tower that offers both a serious solution for urban waste management and a commentary on our unsustainable habits.

The third place winner in eVolo’s 2012 Skyscraper Competition, ‘Monument to Civilization’ is not just a sobering daily reminder of how wasteful we can be, and the pressing need for new solutions. It’s also a power plant, harvesting methane gas from all that rotting trash and using it to help keep the city running.

Lin Yu-Ta envisions a narrow tower reaching high into the sky. Noting that we often “build towers for towers’ sake,” the Taiwanese designer puts some meaning behind the spectacle: the 1,318-meter (4,324-foot) height of this tower proposal represents the space that would be needed to store just a single year worth of trash from New York City alone.

“The ever-growing Monument may evoke the citizens’ introspection and somewhat leads to the entire city’s waste-decreasing and better recycling. Perhaps all metropolitan cities would inverse the worldwide competition from being the tallest to the shortest.”

Half the fun of exploring abandoned places is the hunt – stumbling upon obscure sites, or determining the precise location of better-known ones with a collection of vague clues from previous urban explorers. It’s not a great idea to have hordes of curious people descending upon crumbling ruins and dilapidated structures for obvious reasons, ranging from trespassing laws to dangerous conditions. But for abandoned places aficionados who’d rather cut to the chase, the ‘Abandoned’ iPhone app by THE FORM pinpoints locations on a map.

The community-based app relies on user input to determine where abandoned sites are located. And beyond mere maps, the app allows you to post photos and stories of your own adventures. Not only does this help fill out the lore of interesting places, it can help people avoid dangerous areas or give precise instructions for easy access.

GPS mapping automatically locates and displays abandoned sites near you, and you can store a private log of your own locations if you don’t want to share with others. Rate sites from one to five stars, share your comments and contribute to locations submitted by others.

Urban exploration has long relied upon word-of-mouth. In many cases, people in the know share information about certain sites only with others who can be trusted not to damage the site, call attention to themselves, or take risks that could result in injuries. For that reason, this app might receive mixed response from dedicated urban explorers, and those interested in keeping certain sites secret from the public at large. But on the other hand, a lot of abandoned sites are in serious need of attention, and the sooner they’re saved, the more of their history can be preserved. Get it at iTunes.

via Pop Up City; top image via nocturne

Free wifi is becoming so ubiquitous in many cities, it’s hard to find a street corner where you can’t instantly connect – and most of us like it that way. Unrestricted access to virtually all of the knowledge and information in the world is nothing to sneeze at, but with it comes people who are glued to their devices instead of talking to each other. Kit Kat has a new marketing campaign that actually blocks all wireless signals within a radius of 5 meters.

The Free No WiFi Zone is a simple installation in downtown Amsterdam that creates a refuge from the internet. Reflecting the candy bar’s slogan “Have a break, have a Kit Kat,” the campaign emphasizes taking a breather from email, social media updates and other trappings of our connected culture.

“The world is becoming one big WiFi zone,” reads the ad, created by advertising agency JWT Amsterdam. “It’s available in bars, restaurants, trains, airports, supermarkets… There’s even WiFi on Mount Everest. Result? People are constantly online. Time for a break.”