Author Archives: Ida Torres

Rebloom Studio Just Turned Flower Market Waste Into Art”

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Most vases hold flowers. This one is made of them, specifically the ones that never got the chance to be admired. Rebloom Studio, a Korean design studio, has been quietly working on a problem that most people don’t think twice about: the staggering volume of flowers incinerated or discarded at flower markets every day. Because of their short shelf life, thousands of tons of cut flowers are thrown out before they ever reach a buyer, contributing to environmental pollution in a way that feels almost cruelly ironic. The flowers get grown, transported, arranged in stalls, and then burned or dumped because no one got there in time. Flowers, of all things, become waste.

The Petal Vase is Rebloom Studio’s answer to that. Discarded flowers are collected, processed into pulp, combined with Korean paper pulp and a natural binder, and then molded into a vase form. The result is a sculptural object that carries its origins in every surface. Irregular edges, pocked textures, and soft blush and cream tones make it look less manufactured and more like something you’d find washed ashore after a long journey. Each vase is genuinely one of a kind because the flowers used to make it determine its final color and texture. No two will ever look exactly alike, which is either poetic or just good design. Probably both.

Designer: Rebloom Studio

Structurally, it’s smart. The outer shell, built from the flower pulp composite, wraps around a slender glass cylinder insert that holds the water and the stems, keeping the biodegradable exterior dry and intact while fresh flowers bloom inside. When the vase has run its course, it returns to the earth. No trash pile. No incineration. No contradiction.

I’ll be honest: sustainable design can sometimes feel like a pitch dressed up as a product. The concept lands cleanly in a press release but wobbles the moment you actually have to live with the object. The Petal Vase sidesteps that trap. The material story is compelling on its own, but the vase also earns its place aesthetically, full stop. Looking at the photographs, it reads like something between a craft relic and an art object, rough where ceramics would be smooth, warm where glass would be cold. It has weight and quiet character, and it doesn’t try to look like anything other than what it is.

That honesty feels intentional. Rebloom Studio didn’t smooth down the imperfections or disguise the process. The jagged edges at the mouth of the vase, the visible compression of petals and pulp in the walls, the slight asymmetry in the silhouette, all of it stays visible. It’s design with nothing to hide because the entire point is transparency: this object was made from something the industry had already written off.

The floral trade’s waste problem is much larger than most people realize. Supply chains built around freshness and speed leave very little room for error, and unsold flowers don’t get a second chance. That loss isn’t only environmental. It also represents agricultural labor, water use, and energy that went into growing and transporting flowers that never met a buyer. Rebloom Studio doesn’t claim to fix any of that, but the Petal Vase does something important anyway: it makes the invisible visible and puts the problem in your hands, literally, in a way that tends to stick with you.

The vase measures 120 x 120 x 230mm and weighs 200 grams. It comes packaged with the glass cylinder insert in a cylindrical box. It was released in July and August of 2025. Compact. Considered. Purposeful. At a moment when the design world is full of objects that use sustainability as marketing language, the Petal Vase makes its case through the object itself. You can see where it came from. You can feel it. And eventually, it disappears back into the ground, leaving room for something new to grow. That’s not just a concept. That’s a complete design idea.

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adidas Just Made the Best World Cup Drop for Your Dog

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adidas dropped a pet jersey collection for the FIFA World Cup 2026 and I genuinely cannot decide if it’s brilliant or completely unhinged. Maybe both. That tension is precisely what makes it worth paying attention to.

The collection features scaled-down versions of the official home kits for four national federations: Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, and Japan. Each jersey is made with interlock fabric, finished with heat-transferred federation crests and the adidas logo, and sized to fit pets of varying builds. On paper, it reads like a novelty item, the kind of thing that gets a cute Instagram moment and then disappears. But the more I think about it, the more I suspect adidas is operating on a level most people aren’t fully registering yet.

Designer: adidas

This isn’t the brand’s first move into pet fashion. They released a pet tracksuit collection in late 2025 and followed it up with Lunar New Year designs in early 2026. The World Cup drop is the third chapter, and it’s by far the most culturally loaded. Attaching pet merchandise to the biggest sporting event on the planet isn’t a gimmick. It’s a calculated bet on where consumer culture is right now. People don’t just watch the World Cup. They host parties, coordinate outfits, wear matching kits with their kids, and increasingly treat their pets as full participants in the whole ritual. adidas saw that behavioral shift and decided to meet the moment rather than wait for someone else to.

The design fidelity is where I think they actually earned some genuine respect here. These aren’t generic jerseys with a crest slapped on. The Argentina kit carries the iconic Albiceleste stripes. The Mexico jersey features the Piedra del Sol, the same Aztec sun stone print embedded in the human version. The Colombia and Japan kits follow the same logic: faithfully reproduce the visual DNA of the official tournament kits, just at a smaller scale. That level of attention to detail signals that adidas isn’t treating the pet market as an afterthought. They’re treating it as a legitimate extension of the product line, and that’s a meaningful distinction.

Whether that’s the right move commercially is a separate conversation. The pet economy has been growing steadily for years, and premium pet accessories have become a real, serious category. But there’s also a risk of diluting what a World Cup kit means. A national team jersey carries history, identity, and a specific kind of weight. Putting it on your Corgi is either a celebration of that connection or a softening of it, depending on how you feel about football culture to begin with. I lean toward the former, mostly because fandom has always been about emotional inclusion rather than gatekeeping.

What adidas is really selling here is a shared experience. The visual of a fan and their dog in matching kits is immediately legible as a moment of joy, and that’s not nothing. The FIFA World Cup 2026 runs from June 11 to July 19 across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, which means there’s an entire summer of viewing parties and matchday gatherings where this collection becomes exactly the kind of organic conversation starter that no marketing budget can easily manufacture. You don’t need a big campaign when your product photographs that naturally.

The collection became available on May 1st across North America, Latin America, and selected markets in Asia including Japan, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia, through adidas stores, retail partners, and online. The timing gives fans about six weeks to get their pets game-ready before the opening match. That’s enough runway to make it feel intentional rather than rushed. Is it the most important design release of 2026? Obviously not. But it’s a genuinely smart piece of brand work that understands its cultural moment, respects its source material, and executes with more craft than the premise suggests it deserves. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes that’s actually the point.

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A Hay Rake Inspired This Surprisingly Beautiful Entryway Piece

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Most of the furniture we buy tells no story. It comes flat-packed, gets assembled on a Saturday afternoon, and does its job quietly in the corner. We don’t think much about where it came from, what it references, or what it means. And then a piece like Restel comes along and completely reframes what furniture is even supposed to do.

Italian industrial designer Monica Graffeo created Restel after encountering traditional Alpine hay rakes. Not a digital reference, not a museum exhibit, but the actual tools. The kind that have been leaning against barn walls in the mountains for generations. She saw them and started sketching, asking herself whether the rake’s form could be translated into furniture in a way that was actually useful. The answer, clearly, was yes.

Designer: Monica Graffeo

The result is an entryway piece that functions as both a bench and a hanging structure. It’s made from Trentino Larch, a wood native to the Alpine region that gives the piece a warmth and texture you can almost feel through a photograph. Graffeo worked with Falegnameria Bosetti, a traditional carpentry firm based in Trentino, to bring it to life, which means the craftsmanship is as rooted in the region as the inspiration itself.

The design logic behind it is clean and honest, and that’s what makes it so compelling beyond the visual appeal. A hay rake’s tines are spread wide and built to hold and gather. In Restel, those same proportions become hooks and structure, organizing coats, bags, and the general chaos of a front entryway. The form isn’t borrowed for aesthetics alone. It actually earns its place by being functional in a way that mirrors the original tool.

This is becoming a more intentional conversation in design circles, and for good reason. For years, the dominant trend in home interiors leaned toward minimal and abstract, stripping objects of any cultural or regional identity in favor of clean lines that could sell anywhere on the planet. That has its appeal, but it also produces spaces that feel like they could belong to no one in particular. Restel pushes in the opposite direction. It carries a specific geography, a specific history, and a specific set of hands that made it. You can feel the Alpine landscape in it even if you’ve never been.

The versatility of the piece is worth noting too. Positioned against a wall, Restel organizes the entryway and creates a clear threshold between the outside and the inside of a home. Move it to the center of a room and it becomes a divider, something that defines space without closing it off. That kind of flexibility in a single piece of furniture is genuinely hard to pull off without the design feeling compromised. Graffeo managed it without losing any of the visual coherence.

The question I keep returning to is how much courage it takes to look at a farming tool and say, I want to put this in someone’s home. Not as a decorative nod to rural life, not as a rustic accent piece, but as a fully considered object that stands on its own as good design. The risk of that kind of referencing is that it tips into costume, into the sort of design that performs a cultural identity rather than embodying one. Restel doesn’t have that problem. It feels earned.

Graffeo’s broader practice as an industrial designer has included work for major Italian furniture brands, so she’s no stranger to furniture. But Restel reads like something more personal, more tied to a specific place and a specific curiosity. That combination of intellectual rigor and genuine affection for material culture is what separates a good design from one that stays with you. If you’ve been on the lookout for a piece that will actually start a conversation, this is it. Not because it’s strange or provocative, but because it’s honest in a way that most furniture simply isn’t.

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The Smartest Heater Has No App, No Screen, Just Bricks

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Most of the time, when we talk about innovation in home appliances, we mean sleeker apps, voice control, or some kind of sensor that automatically adjusts to your preferences. Eliot Andrault went in the complete opposite direction, and I think he was right to do it.

STEA is a personal heater designed by Andrault as his Masters project at École nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre in France. At its core, literally, are refractory bricks. Not smart chips, not Wi-Fi connectivity, not an OLED display. Bricks. The kind of material you’d find in a kiln or a fireplace, chosen specifically because it stores heat and releases it slowly. That’s the whole point.

Designer: Eliot Andrault

The idea Andrault started with is deceptively simple: how do we heat ourselves differently without giving up comfort? That question sounds obvious, but it almost never gets asked. We default to thermostats and central heating systems that warm up entire rooms, burning energy to heat the air that surrounds you and then some. STEA does something much more targeted. It creates a microclimate around the person using it, right where the body needs warmth most.

The mechanism is equally understated. STEA heats up for ten minutes, then spends the next twenty releasing that warmth. That 1/3–2/3 rhythm means the device is drawing power for only a fraction of the time it’s actually keeping you warm. It’s not a constant draw on electricity. It’s a brief charge followed by a long, quiet exhale of heat.

The material choice matters more than it might seem at first glance. Refractory bricks have what designers call thermal inertia. They don’t just get hot and then cool down the moment power cuts off. They hold that warmth and let it go gradually, which is what gives STEA its particular feeling of comfort. Andrault describes it as enveloping, and that word is accurate. It’s not the sharp, dry blast of a conventional space heater. It’s something steadier.

Formally, STEA is gorgeous in a way that feels earned. Andrault drew inspiration from traditional cast-iron radiators, and you can see it in the vertical stacking of the bricks, the monolithic silhouette, the sense of weight and solidity. What cuts through that industrial seriousness is the tubular steel handle, which introduces a human gesture to the whole thing. It makes the object feel carryable, usable, personal rather than architectural. That balance between raw and refined is harder to pull off than it looks.

I’m also genuinely impressed by how Andrault approached the end of STEA’s life before it even began. The entire device can be disassembled with a single Allen key. Materials are locally sourced and fully recyclable. It’s designed to be repaired, not replaced. In a market where most products are engineered toward obsolescence, this feels like a quiet act of defiance, and an honest one.

The context behind STEA is worth pausing on. Andrault designed this while studying in Belgium, where heating accounts for nearly two tons of CO2 emissions per person per year. That’s not a small number. And STEA doesn’t pretend to be the total solution to that problem. Andrault says explicitly that it isn’t meant to replace existing heating systems. It’s meant to propose a different relationship with warmth, one that’s more local, more bodily, more intentional.

That philosophy puts STEA in a category of objects that are harder to evaluate by spec sheet alone. It’s not competing with your boiler or your smart thermostat. It’s asking whether you could lower your overall energy use by staying warmer at the scale of your body rather than the scale of your apartment. It’s a design that assumes you’re sitting still, reading, working, resting, and gives you exactly what you need for that moment.

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Beijing Just Built a Library That Opens and Closes Like a Shell

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Most public spaces do one thing: they sit there. They look the same in the morning as they do at noon, and they expect you to adapt to them. That’s just how it’s always been. LUO Studio’s Shell Book Pavilion in Beijing decided to skip that whole arrangement entirely.

Completed in 2026 and tucked into the plaza of Xiangyun Town, a commercial district in Beijing, the pavilion is exactly as remarkable as it sounds: a 43-square-meter structure shaped like a clamshell that physically opens and closes. Not metaphorically. Not just aesthetically. The shell actually lifts and lowers through a vertical opening system, moving through incremental positions that change the entire character of the space as the day goes on. When it’s raised, it becomes a generous canopy. When it’s lowered, it contracts into something quieter and more intimate. The pavilion isn’t static. It breathes.

Designer: LUO Studio

The idea started from a personal place. The architects at LUO Studio describe prior visits to the same plaza with family, noting how the casual, child-friendly energy of the space already had a natural rhythm to it. The Shell Book Pavilion didn’t try to override that. It responded to it. That kind of grounded thinking tends to produce better architecture than designing purely for an image, and you can feel it here. The pavilion doesn’t demand your attention by being loud. It earns it by being genuinely useful.

Built with an aluminum shell structure, the design also makes a point of having no fixed front or back. Walk up to it from any direction and it reads clearly. That might sound like a small detail, but it matters enormously in a shared public plaza where people arrive from every angle and at every hour. A space that only works when you’re standing in the right spot isn’t really a public space. It’s a stage set.

Scattered around the pavilion are movable seating pieces that extend the social footprint beyond the structure’s physical boundary. The pavilion’s influence on the plaza ends up being much larger than its 43 square meters suggest. People don’t just use the space inside the shell. They orbit it. They set up nearby. They stay longer than they planned to. That’s a quiet form of design success that rarely gets enough credit.

The nature metaphor is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and it earns every bit of it. A clamshell as a form for a library is the kind of concept that could easily tip into gimmick, but LUO Studio kept the execution clean. The aluminum material choice keeps things from feeling too organic or precious. The structure carries a quiet confidence. The shell looks like it belongs in the future and on that plaza at the same time.

Scale versus ambition is the tension that makes the Shell Book Pavilion interesting beyond its novelty. This is a 43-square-meter structure in a commercial district, not a landmark cultural center with a nine-figure budget. It’s small, and deliberately so. The pavilion argues, simply by existing, that you don’t need a lot of square footage to change how people experience a neighborhood. You need a clear idea, executed honestly.

Public reading spaces have had a complicated decade. Libraries as institutions are being redefined, neighborhood bookshops are staging a comeback, and digital reading has both liberated and fragmented the way we engage with books. The Shell Book Pavilion doesn’t wade into any of that debate. It just makes a place for you to sit with a book, opens itself up when it wants company, and closes a little when the day gets quieter. It meets people exactly where they are.

The photographs by Yumeng Zhu capture the pavilion in soft natural light, and they do the project justice. The structure has a presence that reads beautifully even in two dimensions, which is usually a good sign that something is genuinely working in three. Some designs only photograph well. This one looks like it’s actually worth visiting.

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Zeugma Finally Proved Medical Equipment Doesn’t Have to Be Ugly

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Most medical devices look the way they do because nobody thought to question it. Functionality became the default justification for every cold edge, every sterile tube, every claustrophobic chamber that makes people anxious before a single session begins. HPO TECH, a Turkish engineering company with a philosophy that’s equal parts clinical and aesthetic, looked at the hyperbaric oxygen chamber and decided the whole category needed a rethink.

The result is Zeugma, a monoplace hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) chamber that, frankly, looks like it belongs on a luxury wellness campus rather than in a hospital corridor. It operates at 2.0 to 2.4 ATA pressure, delivers medical-grade oxygen through a BIBS (Built-In Breathing System) mask regulated by the rhythm of your own breath, and features an air cooler for temperature stability during sessions. All very technical, all very necessary. But what makes it worth talking about is that it was designed to feel like stepping into a space capsule.

Designer: HPO TECH

That comparison comes directly from the people using it. Tolga Kabak, CTO and co-founder of HPO TECH, has noted that most first-time users describe the experience as feeling like they’re inside something from a sci-fi film rather than a medical facility. That isn’t an accident. The entire chamber was built around the idea that how a patient feels during treatment is just as important as the treatment itself.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, for those less familiar, involves breathing concentrated oxygen at higher-than-normal atmospheric pressure. It has been used clinically for decades in wound healing, decompression sickness, and tissue recovery, but it has recently migrated into the wellness and performance space in a significant way. Biohackers, elite athletes, and longevity obsessives have adopted it as part of broader optimization routines. Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur famous for spending millions trying to slow his biological aging, conducted a closely monitored 60-session HBOT experiment using the Zeugma, tracking biomarkers from telomere length to brain function and inflammation. That kind of high-profile attention has pushed HBOT into the cultural conversation, and with it comes a new audience that expects the experience to match the aspiration.

HPO TECH clearly understood this shift. The Zeugma’s most immediately striking feature is its panoramic observation windows, unusually large by industry standards. The clear acrylic panels are not decorative. Claustrophobia is one of the most documented barriers to consistent hyperbaric therapy, and the design addresses it by prioritizing openness over enclosure. You can see out. The outside world doesn’t disappear. The interior is softly lined with ergonomic seating and reclining configurations, and the whole system is managed through an external control panel that lets operators monitor and adjust pressure without disturbing the session. It’s a closed environment that doesn’t feel closed.

The company is based in Istanbul and operates at what it describes as the intersection of diving technology, aerospace-grade engineering, and clinical science. HPO TECH builds with military and medical-grade materials, holds international certifications, and counts hospitals, sports recovery centers, and professional athletic teams among its clients. The same chamber that sits in a clinical setting also ended up at the center of one of biohacking’s most-watched longevity experiments. That’s a fairly unusual range for a single piece of equipment, and it says a lot about how well the design travels across contexts.

Earlier this year, HPO TECH introduced the Zeugma Panorama, a two-seat version that takes the visibility concept even further with six panoramic acrylic windows, including large side panels, a rear window, and a door window. It is genuinely striking. If the original Zeugma looks like a solo spacecraft, the Panorama looks like something you would find in a boutique hotel in 2045.

Whether HBOT becomes a mainstream wellness ritual or remains a specialized therapy, the Zeugma has already made its point. Medical design does not have to default to intimidation and sterility. People heal better when they feel comfortable, calm, and respected by the space around them. That is not a radical idea, but somehow it still feels like one whenever a designer actually commits to it.

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The Furniture That Grows Like a Fractal

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If you’ve ever watched a fern unfurl or zoomed into the edge of a snowflake, you already understand fractals, even if you’ve never called them that. They’re the patterns nature repeats at every scale, small details that echo the whole. Xubai Li took that idea and built furniture out of it, and the result is one of the more quietly radical pieces of design I’ve come across in a while.

The Fractal System is a set of modular, nestable plywood objects that can function as stools, shelves, or stands, depending entirely on how you choose to arrange them. Each piece is non-directional, meaning there’s no designated top, bottom, or front. You can rotate them, stack them, slot them together, or spread them across a room. The configuration changes, and with it, so does the furniture’s entire personality. A tight cluster becomes a sculptural display unit. A single piece on its own reads as a clean, minimal stool. A sprawling arrangement along a wall becomes something that looks closer to an art installation than anything you’d find at a typical furniture store.

Designer: Xubai Li

Li, who holds an MFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design, was a featured designer at ICFF, and the Fractal System has since earned Silver recognition at both the NY Product Design Awards and the MUSE Design Awards. That’s the kind of trajectory that usually signals a designer to watch, not just a one-off project.

The design’s real appeal, to my eye, isn’t purely aesthetic, though the warm blond plywood with its exposed laminate layers is exactly the kind of material choice that ages well. It’s the philosophy underneath it. Most furniture is prescriptive. It tells you where to sit, where to put your coffee, how to organize your books. The Fractal System does the opposite. It hands you a set of components and essentially says, figure it out. That level of user agency is still surprisingly rare in furniture design, where modularity often comes dressed up in rigid systems and complicated instructions.

The fractal reference isn’t just a clever name, either. Fractals are defined by self-similarity, where the same pattern recurs regardless of scale. Li applies that principle structurally: the more units you add, the more the configuration begins to mirror the logic of a single unit, just expanded. You can see it clearly in the diagrammatic sketches, where each arrangement reads like a variation on the same underlying grammar. It’s rigorous without feeling academic, which is a genuinely difficult balance to strike.

I also think the timing matters. Right now, the design conversation is heavily focused on adaptability. Smaller living spaces, changing households, a collective skepticism toward buying things that only do one thing. The Fractal System fits into that shift without pandering to it. Li wasn’t designing for trends; the work clearly came from a place of genuine conceptual inquiry. The fact that it also happens to answer a real practical need is almost incidental, and that’s often the sign of the best kind of design.

From a collector’s standpoint, this is the sort of piece that rewards attention over time. It doesn’t announce itself loudly. Photographed in a corner with morning light and a ceramic mug balanced on one of the platforms, it looks like the kind of thing someone discovered in a Kyoto studio decades ago. Grouped tightly in a gallery setting, it reads as contemporary sculpture. That range of registers is genuinely hard to manufacture.

Xubai Li’s Fractal System is one of those designs that quietly shifts how you think about the objects around you. Not because it makes a statement, but because it asks a question: why does a piece of furniture only ever have to be one thing? I don’t have a neat answer to that. But I’m glad someone built the question into plywood and let the rest of us sit with it.

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KitKat’s New Wrapper Actually Kills Your Phone Signal Completely

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We’re already a third into 2026, and one “trend” that seems to be sticking is that this is the year when people intentionally go offline or analog to take a break from our increasingly digital lives. Hobbies like journaling, knitting, scrapbooking, baking, and board games have become a regular part of people’s personal schedules. More often than not, when we do these things, we keep our phones, or at least the internet, away. Some, though, may need more “drastic” measures just to make their phones quiet for a few hours every day.

KitKat Panama, in collaboration with creative agency Ogilvy Colombia, is taking the brand’s iconic “Take a Break” slogan to a whole new level with a special concept called Break Mode. Instead of people just eating a KitKat as a way to take a break, they turned the chocolate’s packaging into an actual Faraday cage. Basically, once you put your phone into the empty packaging, all signals (calls, 4G/5G connectivity, Bluetooth, and GPS) are entirely and effectively blocked, turning your world offline and analog, at least until you take your phone out again.

Designer: KitKat Panama

How they did it was by adding multiple layers to the special packaging. The copper layer is the primary conductive material, while the polyester layers give it structural integrity. The polypropylene outer coating provides durability and everyday usability, while the precision-engineered sealing mechanism ensures that your signals are truly blocked.

This kind of technology was once reserved for medical labs and data centers but can now be found in this iconic red KitKat package (well, at least if you’re in Panama). There’s also a sustainability angle to it, as the packaging’s materials have an approximate one-year lifespan and can eventually be separated for responsible recycling.

The ritual that KitKat envisions is quite intentional: unwrap your KitKat fingers, slide your phone into the empty packaging, and fully immerse yourself in the moment. Your digital world goes quiet, and your break truly begins. It feels almost ceremonial in the best way. Kim Waigel, Marketing Director for Nestlé in Central America, summed it up well: “Break Mode goes beyond simply saying ‘Take a Break’; it empowers individuals with the physical tool to genuinely achieve it.”

The concept was introduced at some of Panama’s most high-traffic venues, including a major technology expo, a concert event, and even a university campus, bringing the experience directly to the people who arguably need a digital detox the most.

Now, before you start planning your offline hours around a KitKat wrapper, it’s worth noting that Break Mode’s commercial viability is still under evaluation. So it isn’t something you can grab off a shelf at your nearest convenience store, at least not yet. But honestly, the fact that this concept even exists feels like a sign of the times. In an era where we’ve normalized doom-scrolling and round-the-clock connectivity, simply putting your phone away has become a radical act. And leave it to a chocolate brand to make that feel like something worth celebrating.

Whether or not Break Mode ever makes it to mass market, it’s already doing its job, sparking a conversation about what it truly means to take a break in 2026. Because sometimes, the most powerful thing you can do for yourself isn’t downloading another wellness app. It’s slipping your phone into a KitKat wrapper and letting the silence do the rest.

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Iran’s Mirror Pavilion Turns a 400-Year-Old Craft Into the Future

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If you’ve ever been inside an Iranian shrine or palace, you already know the feeling. The moment you step into a space lined with mirror mosaic, you lose your sense of where the ceiling ends and the air begins. Fragments of light scatter in every direction, bouncing off thousands of hand-cut pieces of glass in a way that feels more like stepping into a living kaleidoscope than standing inside a building. That experience, rooted in a craft called Ayeneh-Kari, has shaped Persian architecture for centuries. Now, a studio called Ehsani Sharafeh Associates is doing something genuinely exciting: they’re rebuilding that feeling from scratch, using algorithms.

The Mirror Pavilion, located in Mashhad, Iran, sits inside a former industrial hall. That setup alone creates a tension worth paying attention to. The pavilion is a cubic structure inserted within the existing hypostyle framework, self-supporting and deliberately contrasting with its surroundings. From the base, the space feels restrained. But look up, and the whole thing shifts.

Designer: Ehsani Sharafeh Associates

The ceiling is where the real conversation happens. Rather than replicating a traditional vault, the team designed a three-dimensional sinusoidal surface formed by merging four pyramidal geometries. It’s a mouthful to describe, but the visual effect is anything but clinical. Hundreds of fragmented mirrors are arranged across this undulating surface through computational processes, catching light and redistributing it in ways that feel almost alive. Add stained glass into the mix, and the space starts producing color shifts that no static installation ever could.

Ayeneh-Kari became prominent during the Safavid period in the 16th and 17th centuries, when trade routes brought large Venetian mirrors to the Persian court. Many of them arrived cracked or broken from the long journey. Rather than discarding the damaged pieces, Iranian craftsmen cut them into smaller fragments and reassembled them into intricate decorative mosaics. Out of something broken came something extraordinary, and that origin story feels deeply embedded in what mirrors have meant to Persian design ever since. The craft was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2025, a recognition that feels both overdue and timely given projects like this one.

Ehsani Sharafeh Associates isn’t just borrowing the aesthetic of Ayeneh-Kari and wrapping it around a contemporary shell. The team, made up of Nasrin Sharafeh, Ali Ehsani, and Milad GholamiFard, is using computational design methods to genuinely reconsider how traditional Iranian spatial principles behave in a new context. The algorithmic approach isn’t a shortcut. It’s what allows the complex geometry and patterned arrangements of the ceiling to exist at the scale and precision they do, while still feeling like a faithful extension of a much older sensibility.

That balance is harder to pull off than it looks. A lot of design that claims to honor tradition ends up either being too faithful and feeling like a replica, or too abstract and losing the thread entirely. The Mirror Pavilion manages to land somewhere in the middle, where the history is legible but the result is clearly contemporary. You can feel the ancestry of the space without it ever feeling like a museum piece.

What also stands out is the decision to place this inside an industrial hall. The contrast between the raw, utilitarian structure of the existing space and the luminous, almost otherworldly quality of the pavilion isn’t accidental. It makes both things more interesting. The industrial hall gives the mirrors context. The mirrors give the hall something to reach for.

In Persian culture, mirrors and water have long represented purity, clarity, and illumination. Reflective interiors amplified natural light and reinforced ideas about enlightenment and divine presence, which is why mirror work appears so frequently in shrines and sacred spaces. The Mirror Pavilion carries that weight without announcing it, which might be the most impressive thing about it. Some buildings describe an idea. This one embodies it.

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Adidas Made a Marathon Shoe That Weighs Less Than an Apple

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Pick up an apple from your kitchen counter. Now imagine a pair of running shoes weighing less than that single piece of fruit. That’s the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3, and it’s not a concept shoe or a lab curiosity. It just debuted at the 2026 London Marathon, worn by Sabastian Sawe and Yomif Kejelcha, who became the first athletes in history to break the sub-two-hour marathon barrier.

The Evo 3 weighs in at just 97 grams in a UK size 8.5, making it the first sub-100-gram racing shoe Adidas has ever produced. For context, the shoe’s box weighs more than the shoe inside it. That’s the kind of engineering achievement that sounds like a flex until you understand how much it actually matters at race pace.

Designer: adidas

The secret is a new construction called ENERGYRIM, a carbon-integrated design that completely rethinks how a supershoe is built. Rather than simply layering carbon plates into foam, Adidas redesigned the relationship between the two, allowing them to work in concert rather than independently. The result is a shoe that’s 30% lighter than its predecessor, with 11% greater forefoot energy return and a 1.6% improvement in running economy. To put those numbers in context: at the marathon level, a 1.6% improvement in running economy isn’t marginal. It’s the kind of number that separates a podium from a personal best.

The foam itself is the other major story here. Adidas developed a new generation of Lightstrike Pro Evo compound that is 50% lighter than the version used in the Evo 2. That’s not a small iteration. It’s a material science leap that took three years and over a dozen tested prototypes, refined in labs in Herzogenaurach and tested at altitude training camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. Elsewhere on the shoe, the outsole ditches the liquid rubber coating from the previous model in favor of strategically placed Continental rubber, a welcome upgrade for anyone who isn’t a professional sprinter running on perfectly dry asphalt. It’s a small change that makes the shoe meaningfully more accessible without compromising the weight equation in any significant way.

From a design standpoint, the Evo 3 is striking in the way extreme performance gear tends to be: lean, almost aggressive, with a silhouette that looks sculpted rather than constructed. The toebox is narrow, almost spike-like, which is clearly a functional decision rather than an aesthetic one. The fit prioritizes containment over comfort, and that feels like the right philosophy for a race day shoe that is not designed for casual wear. You wear shoes like this to run the fastest race of your life. The trade-offs are understood, and most serious runners will make them without hesitation.

The price is USD 500, with an initial limited release on April 27, 2026, and a wider launch expected in fall 2026. That price tag will raise eyebrows. But it helps to remember that the Adizero Evo franchise has already seen athletes break three world records and win over 30 major road races since 2023, including six World Marathon Major wins and an Olympic record time. The shoe’s pedigree isn’t marketing copy. It’s a documented track record.

What makes the Evo 3 genuinely interesting beyond the running community is what it represents as a design object. It sits at the intersection of sports science, materials engineering, and product design in a way that very few consumer products ever manage. The obsession with weight reduction, the carbon geometry experiments, the altitude testing: these are the ingredients of something closer to aerospace thinking than traditional footwear development. When the research process looks more like aircraft engineering than sneaker design, the result tends to look and perform like nothing that came before it.

Whether you run marathons or not, there’s a certain pleasure in watching a brand push against what seemed like a physical limit and actually break through. Adidas didn’t just shave a few grams off an existing shoe. They asked what a marathon shoe could look like if weight were treated as a fundamental design constraint rather than just another spec to optimize. The answer is 97 grams. And somehow, impossibly, it still performs better than everything that came before it.

The post Adidas Made a Marathon Shoe That Weighs Less Than an Apple first appeared on Yanko Design.