When you design a city around a car, you end up with a sprawl — just look at Los Angeles or Houston. The architects at SOM are designing a green-minded city for China that will still let cars in, but the focus of the city is such that you won't really even need one, even if you're traveling all over China.

Come 2014, the world's tallest building — the Ghost Protocol-famous Burj Khalifa — will no longer be able to also claim that it has the world's fastest elevators. That honor will go to the Shanghai Tower in China, which will stand 2,073 feet with 128 floors, and have bullet-shaped elevators built by Mitsubishi that zip around as fast as cars.

Twisted steel columns somehow manage to reflect an open, airy base as they rise 1000 feet into the sky, holding a forest garden. The ambitious architectural design, though made of modern material will mimic the look of a classic Taiwanese Banyan tree forest rising above the cityscape.

Yaohua Wang Architecture's single-family "Beijing House II" can only be described as alien. Its organic-like structure and the fact that it looks like some kind of Matrix machine of war from another galaxy smashed into the side of a building makes it all the more stimulating.