Paging Sarah Palin: You're famously able to see across the Bering Strait to Russia, but imagine if you could walk there as well.

That, in a nutshell, was the conceit behind the Bering Strait Competition, which sought ideas for bridging Alaska and Russia, via a massively--and impossibly expensive--architectural intervention. DesignBoom just posted some pretty mind-grabbing images of the second place entry in that competition, designed by Off Architecture, a French Firm.

Their proposal involved two massive seawalls, each of them 10 meters wide...

...these seawalls would in turn run straight through the heart of the islands in the strait...

...and throughout, there would be a massive gap between the walls, making way for residences, public spaces, and water lanes through which whales could swim (ignore, for a second, that the images appear to show porpoises and sharks that love warm water):

Check out more images at DesignBoom, and, for a more limited taste of the other winners, head to Bustler.