Monthly Archives: May 2026

UNStudio’s Wasl Tower Is Dubai’s Most Sculptural Skyscraper Yet

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There’s a building rising on Sheikh Zayed Road that isn’t trying to be the tallest thing in the room — it’s trying to be the most alive. The Wasl Tower, designed by UNStudio in collaboration with structural engineers Werner Sobek, stands 302 metres above Dubai and carries with it one of the most thoughtful design narratives in the city’s recent skyline story. Conceived as early as 2014 and nearing completion, the 64-storey supertall is a landmark in the truest sense, not just because of its height, but because of what it means to stand there.

The tower draws its form from classical sculpture. UNStudio looked to the ‘contrapposto’, a Renaissance-era pose in which a figure shifts weight and twists slightly at the torso, suggesting movement mid-stride, and scaled it to 302 metres. The result is a building that appears to rotate as you move around it, its geometry shifting with every vantage point. Structurally, this feat is achieved through three massive 300-metre shear walls linked by four strategic outriggers, a system that allows the building to twist gracefully while still supporting a fully flexible, mixed-use floorplate.

Designer: UN Studio

Positioned directly opposite the Burj Khalifa along Dubai’s main north-south artery, the Wasl Tower occupies a site that was previously untouched by high-rise development. A new pedestrian bridge now connects it to the Burj Khalifa metro station, threading the tower into the city’s movement infrastructure and making it a genuine civic node rather than an isolated object. Its programming reflects that ambition — the building houses residential apartments, offices, a hotel, restaurants, and entertainment spaces, with public programming deliberately elevated high above street level.

What gives the tower its visual texture is its facade, one of the tallest ceramic facades in the world. UNStudio and Werner Sobek clad the building in a lace-like grid of glazed clay fins, a material choice that is as low-tech as it is clever. The ceramic tiles diffuse and reflect the desert sun, reducing heat gain and eliminating the need for more energy-intensive shading systems. At night, the facade takes on an entirely different quality, illuminated in a way that makes the building appear to breathe.

For a city that has never been shy about spectacle, the Wasl Tower earns its place on the skyline by being something rarer: a building with a rigorous idea behind it. It references art history, responds to climate, and reshapes a stretch of one of the world’s most iconic roads, all at once.

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The Insta360 Go 3S Retro Bundle Is a 4K Action Camera With A Viewfinder That Lets You Shoot Like It’s 1965

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The Kodak Charmera sold out repeatedly on the back of pure aesthetic energy, and Insta360 was clearly paying attention. The Go 3S Retro Bundle arrives squarely in that same cultural moment, where younger creators are increasingly drawn to cameras that feel tactile and intentional rather than optimized and frictionless. The difference is that behind the retro stripe and optical viewfinder sits a legitimately capable action camera: 4K video, FlowState stabilization, 10-meter waterproofing, and a magnetic mounting system that lets you stick it to your jacket in under a second.

The bundle swaps the standard Action Pod for a new Retro Viewfinder, a simple optical accessory with a waist-level finder and a built-in selfie mirror. It adds no processing power and carries no battery, which is precisely the point. Insta360 is betting that some creators want to feel their way through a shot rather than preview it on a flip screen, and they’ve built an entire product around that instinct.

Designer: Insta360

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The visual language is an emphatic nod to retro. That Polaroid-stripe graphic running across the front face of the Canvas White body is not a subtle nod; it’s a full commitment to a specific cultural reference, one that lands immediately in the hand. The waist-level viewfinder on top directly recalls the twin-lens reflex cameras that street photographers used in the mid-20th century, the Rolleiflex era of composing from the hip with your eyes down instead of raised. It’s a deliberate posture shift, and it changes how people interact with you when you’re shooting. Nobody flags you down for pointing a GoPro at them; a waist-level retro camera with a Polaroid stripe is a conversation starter.

What’s worth understanding is what Insta360 gave up to get here, and why that trade makes design sense. The standard Action Pod is genuinely useful: it charges the camera module, provides a touchscreen for playback and settings, and functions as a remote monitor. The Retro Viewfinder does none of that. Settings changes require the Insta360 app on your phone, accessed quickly via the included NFC skin, and the optical finder offers only approximate framing rather than precise composition. For a camera this small, shooting 4K with FlowState absorbing the shake, approximate framing is usually enough. The 12-megapixel 1/2.3-inch sensor captures enough resolution that modest crops in post are painless, and the magnetic pendant means you can switch to pure POV mode the moment precise framing stops mattering.

A separate 393mAh battery pack clips on alongside the camera module’s built-in 310mAh, bringing total recording time to 76 minutes, because the Retro Viewfinder carries no internal power of its own. For a day of casual street shooting, 76 minutes covers more than enough ground. For a long travel day, you’ll want to know where your pack is. The two-piece power solution is a fair exchange for the form factor, though it’s a consideration worth making consciously before you head out the door.

We’ve covered Insta360’s ecosystem experiments before, from the X5’s replaceable lens architecture to the Ace Pro 2’s snap-on Polaroid printer, and the consistent thread is a company willing to bet that the camera module is a platform rather than a finished product. The Retro Bundle is that philosophy applied to a mood rather than a spec sheet. Three exclusive film filters, five new color profiles including Vintage Vacation and Mono, and the analog shooting posture the viewfinder enforces all push toward a coherent experience. The Canvas White and Classic Red colorways are available now at $279.99 for 64GB and $299.99 for 128GB, and if you already own a Go 3S, the Retro Viewfinder sells separately for $48.

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The post The Insta360 Go 3S Retro Bundle Is a 4K Action Camera With A Viewfinder That Lets You Shoot Like It’s 1965 first appeared on Yanko Design.

MAD Just Opened a 46,000 sqm Silver Cloud Museum in China

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When we covered the Hainan Science Museum back in 2024, it was still a promise on renderings. The images showed a billowing silver form rising above a tropical wetland, and the honest reaction was: is this actually going to get built? It looked too cinematic, too untethered from the logic of real construction. It’s open now. And it looks almost exactly like the renders promised.

The museum sits on the edge of Wuyuan River National Wetland Park on the west coast of Haikou, in China’s Hainan Province, designed by Ma Yansong and MAD Architects. The shimmering silver exterior is made up of 843 individual pieces of fiberglass-reinforced plastic, fitted together to create a form that ripples and spirals upward like a thermal updraft. That is quite literally the design reference: the movement of warm air rising from the earth’s surface. From a distance, the structure reads as a cloud that materialized above the jungle. Up close, the seams and surface geometry become visible, but it doesn’t break the spell. It deepens it. The material choice matters too. The reflective quality of the panels shifts depending on light and weather, which means the building never quite looks the same twice.

Designer: MAD Architects

The interior is where things get genuinely impressive. The main structure is column-free, which is a structural achievement worth acknowledging on its own. The total building area is approximately 46,528 square meters. Visitors move through the museum via a spiraling ramp that ascends from the central hall across five floors, with the exhibition experience beginning at the top level on a 360-degree viewing platform with open views of both the sea and the city below. A skylight dome floods the central atrium with natural light, and the whole space feels deliberately open and unhurried. That matches MAD’s stated philosophy around what a science museum should actually feel like. As Ma Yansong put it: “A science museum is about education and imagining the future; we want nature to be part of that vision as well.”

That quote is worth sitting with. Science institutions have historically been designed to feel authoritative. Imposing facades, grand columns, marble lobbies. The architecture announces itself as serious and expects visitors to match. MAD is proposing something different: that curiosity and wonder are better triggered by a space that already inspires both. The science content doesn’t need to be communicated through the building itself; the building just needs to make you feel open to receiving it. Whether you fully buy into that idea philosophically, you can’t argue that the Hainan Science Museum fails to create a mood before you’ve even stepped inside.

The building is also elevated off the ground, which allows the wetland landscape to continue flowing underneath it. That relationship between the structure and the site feels considered rather than incidental. It prevents the building from swallowing its environment whole, which matters here given that the natural setting is precisely what the whole project is in conversation with. Standing underneath it, the ground remains soft, green, and alive. For a structure this visually assertive, it sits lightly in a way that isn’t easy to pull off.

This is MAD’s second major public project in Hainan, following the Cloudscape of Haikou, which opened back in 2021. Together, they’re beginning to form a kind of visual language along the Haikou coastline, a series of dreamlike structures that feel more like environmental installations than civic buildings. For a city actively building its identity within China’s free-trade port framework, having work like this on the waterfront is a deliberate cultural statement about where Haikou wants to stand on the global stage.

Design began in 2020. Groundbreaking was in 2021. The main structure wrapped in 2023. Five years from concept to opening doors is a reasonable arc for a project of this ambition and scale. Seeing it finally receive visitors closes a loop that many who followed its construction had been waiting for. Sometimes the renders really do deliver. This is one of those times.

The post MAD Just Opened a 46,000 sqm Silver Cloud Museum in China first appeared on Yanko Design.

Ugreen AP16 Portable Monitor’s 500 nits 2.5K display promises smooth gaming, travel-friendly productivity

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External monitors have evolved far beyond the basic plug-and-play secondary screens they once were. Over the years, we’ve seen brands experiment with more flexible and lifestyle-focused approaches to portable displays. Lenovo Yoga Pad Pro blurred the line between tablet and external monitor by integrating a built-in kickstand and HDMI input, and more recently, an ultra-premium foldable portable monitor challenged the traditional “rigid slab” design by introducing a folding form factor aimed at improving portability and multitasking.

Against this backdrop of innovation, Ugreen’s AP16 portable monitor debuts with the promise of delivering flagship-level display specs in a slim and travel-friendly package. It is designed for users who need a compact secondary screen for work, gaming, and entertainment on the go. The new model combines a high-resolution display, fast refresh rate, and slim construction, making it suited for power users.

Designer: Ugreen

The portable monitor features a 16-inch IPS panel manufactured by BOE with a 2560 x 1600 resolution and a 16:10 aspect ratio. Compared to traditional 16:9 portable monitors, the taller aspect ratio provides additional vertical workspace, which can be useful for productivity tasks such as document editing, coding, or web browsing. Ugreen has also equipped the monitor with a 165Hz refresh rate, making motion appear smoother during gaming sessions or while navigating through fast-moving content.

Brightness reaches up to 500 nits, a notable figure for a portable monitor and significantly higher than many mainstream models that typically stay around the 250-300 nit range. The screen also offers a 1200:1 contrast ratio and supports 100 percent of the sRGB color gamut, allowing it to deliver more vibrant and accurate colors. Ugreen says the panel supports 10-bit color through 8-bit plus FRC technology and comes factory calibrated with a Delta E value below 2, indicating improved color precision for creative workloads such as photo editing and content creation. TÜV Rheinland’s low blue light certification is also included to help reduce eye strain during extended use.

The monitor adopts a metal unibody construction with a thickness of just 6.5 mm and a weight of 928 grams. Its slim profile makes it easy to carry alongside a laptop in a backpack or travel bag. Rather than integrating a standard folding kickstand into the chassis, Ugreen bundles the AP16 with a magnetic stand that supports both landscape and portrait orientations while offering flexible tilt adjustments. This setup gives the monitor a more desktop-like appearance and improves ergonomics compared to many portable displays that rely on basic folio covers.

Connectivity options include two full-function USB-C ports and a Mini HDMI port. The USB-C inputs support pass-through charging, allowing connected devices to receive power while using the display. The monitor can charge connected laptops with up to 60W when connected to an external charger. The AP16 is compatible with a wide range of devices, including MacBooks, Windows laptops, iPads, recent iPhones, Nintendo Switch consoles, PlayStation systems, and handheld gaming devices from brands such as Asus and Lenovo. Ugreen has also included dual stereo speakers for basic multimedia playback.

The Ugreen AP16 portable monitor will debut in China with a retail price of 1,799 CNY (around $270). It is already listed on AliExpress for international buyers, though the imported price is significantly higher at approximately $490.

The post Ugreen AP16 Portable Monitor’s 500 nits 2.5K display promises smooth gaming, travel-friendly productivity first appeared on Yanko Design.