Filip Dujardin is fine art and architectural photographer based in Belgium. Dujardin’s Fictions is a series of fictional structures created using a digital collaging technique from photographs of real buildings in and around Ghent, Belgium. Some of his architectural creations are structurally impossible or implausible. Some of the most intriguing buildings seem perfectly ordinary at first glance, revealing their fictional nature as the viewer registers missing or incongruous details.

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Located in Suffolk, England, this is all-glass house designed by London’s de Rijke Marsh Morgan comes with a twist — the house slides open! That’s right: ‘Four electric motors silently slide the 20 tonne outer house shell back to reveal the inner glass and steel structure. The motors that power this sliding run on car batteries automatically recharged through solar power’. The whole process takes around six minutes to complete and the house was built with the option of ‘extending the track further to allow the roof shell to cover a garden or swimming pool’.

At the height of Dubai’s outrageous building boom, all manner of ideas — from the sensible to the totally unbelievable — were entertained. The Blue Crystal Floating Iceburg lodge, powered by solar cells and intended to ‘harness the world’s natural energy sources, keeping it self-sufficient’, seems like an odd fit for an environment built upon an arid and uncompromising desert. Oh, and it was conceived to come with six ‘stories of luxury entertainment, including an underwater lounge and ballroom’. Weeha!

Not content with unveiling the world’s tallest building, nearly bankrupt Dubai is also constructing the world’s tallest Arch bridge. Designed by New York architects, Fxfowle, the bridge, which is scheduled to be completed in 2012, will be one mile long, 670 feet tall, and will carry more than 2,000 vehicles an hour in each direction.

I didn’t think there were many cooler buildings in the world than the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain -until I stumbled on another of Frank Gehry’s architectural masterpieces in the unassuming village of Elciego. Deep in the heart of the Rioja wine region, the Marques de Riscal is a luxury hotel, and its contemporary style is certainly at odds with the historic, green surrounds. However, if you’re not prepared to fork out for a meal at the restaurant, or upwards of 600 euro a night to stay there, you can forget getting any closer. Unpaying guests aren’t allowed through the gates, and you’ll feel like a nosey neighbour trying to peer over the towering fence for a glimpse. Even still, it’s definitely worth a try.

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New York-based Japanese artist Shusaku Arakawa designed this small apartment block in 2005 in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka in conjunction with his poet partner, Madeline Gins. According to the SushiLog: ‘Painted in eye-catching blue, pink, red, yellow and other bright colors, the building resembles the indoor playgrounds that attract toddlers at fast-food restaurants. Inside, each apartment features a dining room with a grainy, surfaced floor that slopes erratically, a sunken kitchen and a study with a concave floor. Electric switches are located in unexpected places on the walls so you have to feel around for the right one. A glass door to the veranda is so small you have to bend to crawl out’.

‘You constantly lose balance and gather yourself up, grab onto a column and occasionally trip and fall. Even worse, there’s no closet space; residents will have to find a way to live there, since the apartment offers only a few solutions. “You’ll learn to figure it out,” says Arakawa. Ten minutes of stumbling around is enough to send even the healthiest young person over the edge. Arakawa says that’s precisely the point. “[The apartment] makes you alert and awakens instincts, so you’ll live better, longer and even forever,” says the artist’.