Architects are confined by the limits of engineering principles, often to their dismay. Similarly, engineers are limited by the concepts of physics. But perhaps the world of art will be able to push the boundaries of architectural imagination. Today, a new multitude of digital artists are combining photography and image manipulation in an effort to bend, twist, and distort cities to their liking. Their imaginary worlds may not be possible, but they can offer new commentary on our cities, forcing us to reassess buildings and urban spaces in the process.

Spanish artist and photographer Victor Enrich began transforming architectural photos during a trip to Riga, Latvia. Having spent more than a decade as a CG artist and visualizer for architecture firms in Barcelona, Enrich was already familiar with the 3D modeling software needed to distort his pictures. “I thought that it was time to start using the techniques that I’d been learning, but on the streets,” he said in a phone interview. “So I quit my job and began to experiment with the same tools, without any specific goal other than to explore the possibilities.” In what would become the first image of a series called “City Portraits”, he photographed one of the city’s road bridges before sending the structure soaring into the sky at a 90-degree angle.

Other pictures in the “City Portraits” series depict tower blocks twisted into fantastical shapes, attaching multi-storyhigh slides onto residential blocks and creating impossibly top-heavy skyscrapers that appear to stand without structural support.

Once he has photographed a building, Enrich digitally maps the perspective and the building’s architectural lines. After bending or otherwise altering the structure, he must apply texture, color and shading to make the changes appear as realistic as possible. A single image can be completed in three weeks, though his 2013 project “NHDK”, in which Enrich manipulated a single photo of Munich hotel into a series of 88 different shapes, took over eight months to finish!

“I had to model everything—not only what I was seeing, but everything that was hidden [by the building]Imagine modeling the roof of a skyscraper that you don’t have access to, and the only thing you have is a satellite image which is blurred and pixelated,” he said.

The tradition of architectural painting has, since its popularization during the Renaissance, focused on faithfully replicating buildings or creating idealized visions of cities. But while Enrich’s art is quintessentially modern—in both method and outcome—he sees links between his work and that of conventional artists.