This year’s designs for the Icehotel by leading artists from around the world.

About the hotel:

ICEHOTEL’s ideas originate from the place we stand on; Jukkasjärvi. The river Torne that flows outside our office windows, the cold arctic climate, The Northern Lights and the Midnight Sun. Every season allow us to get inspired by the river, whether it is crystal clear ice, rapids shooting on a riverboat or a magnificent, recently caught grayling.

This is what we have promised to offer the rest of the world; with Jukkasjärvi and Torne River as a starting point, develop and offer sensuous, inspiring and unique experiences within art, nature, accommodation and gastronomy. That reflects all seasons of the year. So it is not a only a hotel we build each winter, it is an ephemeral art project. And it is not a menu we create for every season, we cultivate the many flavours of Swedish Lapland.

The Niyama Resort in the Maldives is home to the world’s first underwater bar and club. 

Michael Anderson wants his photography to inspire all of the “aspiring vagabonds and wilderness trekkers that hope to travel one day” to get out there and have their own adventures.   

This concept plane by Airbus would make flying fun again while making it environmentally friendly. Its unusual structure was inspired by its companions in the sky.

About:

Future aircraft could be built using a bionic structure that mimics the bone structure of birds. Bone is both light and strong because its porous interior carries tension only where necessary, leaving space elsewhere. By using bionic structures, the fuselage has the strength it needs, but can also make the most of extra space where required. This not only reduces the aircraft’s weight and fuel burn, but also makes it possible to add features like oversized doors for easier boarding and panoramic windows.

In addition to the improved body of the plane, there would be outfitted with cutting edge technology to entertain passengers and to improve energy efficiency.

Warning: Watching this video will make you even more dissatisfied with the current state of air travel:

These incredible photos of glaciers in Alaska are by Noppawat “Tom” Charoensinphon.

Photographer Edmondo Senatore captures the beautiful interplay of light and atmosphere in the Tuscan countryside.

Deep Ocean Technology has announced its plans to build an underwater hotel. With helipads, a diving center, underwater tourist vehicles, a spa, garden areas and its upper level discs that will convert into lifesaving vessels if needed, they’ve thought of everything.

The Sphere by Pierre Stephane Dumas has just made a night under the stars a lot more comfortable.

This unique experience of proximity with the nature is less and less lived by urban people. Our demand in terms of comfort and our ways of life tends to dematerialize our relation with nature. Thus, a night under the stars seems to be Spartan, maybe worrying.

Our idea consists in allowing people to spend a night under the stars with all the comfort of a real bedroom suite. You will live the extraordinary light variation of the sunset until the first aurora´s tremors and the ceiling will have the Milky Way for unique limit. This unusual experience under the stars underlines also a paradox of our evolution bringing together men and nature. 

I might actually be willing to go camping now.

Iceland lives up to its name in these awesome photos of ice caves by Kanya Hanklang 

Images of the island of Sylt, Germany by Carsten Whitte

Olivo Barbieri’s tilt-shifted photography distorts the usual purpose of aerial photos, which is to see something more clearly than you could from the ground. By distorting and blurring the real life places and monuments in his photos, he alters our perceptions of reality and makes the very real places he photographs look like fakes.

Barbieri on his work:

“I was a little bit tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything,” Barbieri says. “After 9/11 the world had become a little bit blurred because things that seemed impossible happened. My desire was to look at the city again.”…

He achieves the distinctive look by photographing from a helicopter using a tilt-shift lens—a method, he says, that “allows me to choose what I really like in focus: like in a written page, we don’t read [it as an] image but one line at a time.”