Solana Plains (R) escorts a distraught Elijah West, cousin of Troy Davis, out of the Towaliga County Line Baptist Church that is across from the Jackson State Prison for the planned execution of inmate Troy Davis on September 21, 2011 in Jackson, Georgia. (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

In this photo taken on Tuesday, September 6, 2016 Omar Hassan poses in front of his creation “Breaking Through Milano” in his studio in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Antonio Calanni/AP Photo)

Model Inna Magomedova uses her mobile phone while she presents “The Alive Painting” body art work by Russian artist Maria Gasanova during the Art Krasnoyarsk annual festival in Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, Russia, October 26, 2016. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

These are the ambitious plans which suggest skyscrapers of the future may house an entire city. The Endless City project is an award-winning proposal by sure Architecture, who propose turning skyscrapers into complete ecosystems. London is the proposed city for the mixed-use tower – which would feature huge ramps linking different sections of the structure. The company, whose design won the SkyScrapers and SuperSkyScrapers Competition, insist the structure would be a great space-saver in dense cities which have previously spread outwards rather than upwards. (Photo by Caters News)

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.

A man sleeps between tombstones in front of his single-room home on a hot night in the Cairo Necropolis, Egypt, October 13, 2015. In the sprawling Cairo Necropolis, known as the City of the Dead, life and death are side by side. Amid a housing crisis in Egypt, and with the population of greater Cairo estimated at about 20 million, people count themselves lucky to have a place to call home in the graveyards that date back hundreds of years. (Photo by Asmaa Waguih/Reuters)

Kale grows at Kajodlingen farm in Gothenburg, Sweden, September 28, 2016. They are doing it on the rooftops, on tower block balconies and even on a disused railway: Swedes have discovered a passion for urban gardening as a way of growing fresh food and getting back in touch with nature. Part of a global movement, an increasing number of Swedish city-dwellers are growing their own in window boxes and allotments or are visiting public gardens built in or on industrial or office spaces. (Photo by Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)