Within the atrium of Paris’ Le Bon Marché department store, shoppers pause to gaze at a mirrored cube punctured by a glowing full-pipe skate ramp. The installation is a partnership between Chicago architecture firm MANA and skateboarder Scott Oster, created as the centerpiece of the Los Angeles Rive Gauche exhibition.

Part sculpture, part stage, the modern skate ramp is a draw even when it’s not hosting live performances.

“Le Cube acted as a thought-provoking intersection between sport and sculptural art,” says MANA. “When a performance was occurring inside, the atmosphere was dynamic and stimulating. When it was not being activated, Le Cube sat quietly, luminously reflecting the architecture of its surroundings—warm lights, decorative iron handrails, and the famous crossing escalators of Le Bon Marché.”

The reflections were designed to create an illusion that the full-pipe was “a cylindrical void suspended within the open interior courtyard of the store,” and the mirrored surfaces amplify the displays that surround the cube on multiple levels.

The exhibition brings a little slice of L.A. to one of the world’s most refined cities, with Le Cube specifically referencing the street culture that gives Los Angeles much of its personality.

MANA hid a small access door in the base, eliminating the need for visually disruptive ladders, while safety wires protect the ramp openings almost invisibly. The reflective panels are made of lightweight aluminum to withstand vibration from skating.

Scott Oster says he wanted the piece to be a skateable work of art.

“My inspiration for the Adaptation cube was the photos I saw as a kid in the 70’s skateboard magazines of these massive cement full pipes in the desert,” he tells Le Bon Marché magazine. “My original idea was to find one of these pipes and set it on top of a pedestal, but after some research that was not a viable possibility. That’s when I came up with the idea of building one, and instead of building a full pipe sitting on a pedestal, make a cube with the full pipe inside it. I love the simplicity and form of a circle and a square.”

The newest of China’s surreal mirrored bookstores is now open in Chongqing, offering a disorienting, Escher-like experience to all who enter. Designed by X+Living, the Chongqing Zhongshuge Bookstore leads visitors through an unassuming glass facade on the third floor of Zodi Plaza and into a reflective maze full of reading materials waiting to be discovered.

Within the lobby is an arrangement of lampshade-shaped bookshelves that curve around illuminated reading spaces, their mirror images on the ceiling making them look much taller than they really are. “The bookshelves reflect on the ground and form a tunnel of books that beckons visitors to follow it deeper into space and knowledge,” says X+Living.

Further down the hallway, a “ladder hall” offers three levels of bookshelves accessed by branching staircases. The mirrors make it difficult to tell where the real shelves end and the reflections begin, but the space would be marvelous even without them. An adjacent children’s room is brighter in color, but similarly disorienting.

“Up to the 4th floor from the ‘ladder hall”’is a leisure area, where visitors can enjoy the aroma of coffee or a taste of good tea and immerse themselves into a tranquil world of different stories by reading. The ‘lampshade-shaped bookshelves’ around create scattered booths at this area, in which visitors may gather with friends to have fun reading and enjoy their leisure time. Connected to the leisure area is the extensive reading hall, where works of great minds are listed and visitors are able to broaden their eyes and enrich their spiritual world.”

Previously, the same studio designed floor-to-ceiling curved and mirrored bookshelves at the Yangzhou Zhongshuge bookshop, creating the effect of a tunnel of books. Check it out here.

Mirrored inside and out, a new installation set in a snowy valley in Switzerland will never look exactly the same twice. Created as part of this year’s alpine arts festival Elevation 1049 by Los Angeles-based artist Doug Aitken, “Mirage Gstaad” almost disappears into the stark landscape when gazing at it from a distance, while inside its prismatic reflective planes produce somewhat of a disorienting effect.

Bent, folded and multiplied, the scenery around the cabin is the star of the show, constantly evolving depending on the time of day, the weather and the quality of the light. On a sunny day, the mirrored ranch-style cabin can be intensely dazzling, and its facades are equally striking at sunrise and sunset. Aitken describes it as “chameleon-like.”

“In the tradition of land-art as a reflection of the dreams and aspirations projected onto the American West, Mirage Gstaad presents a continually changing encounter in which subject and object, inside and outside are in constant flux. With every available surface clad in mirror, it both absorbs and reflects the landscape around in such ways that the exterior will seemingly disappear just as the interior draws the viewer into a never-ending kaleidoscope of light and reflection.”

“As Mirage Gstaad pulls the landscape in and reflects it back out, this classic one-story suburban house becomes a framing device, a perceptual echo-chamber endlessly bouncing between the dream of nature as pure uninhabited state and the pursuit of its conquest. Situated against the backdrop of Videmanette in Gstaad, Mirage Gstaad will bring the idea of the Manifest Destiny and the American West into contact with the European landscape and the tradition of the sublime.”

Mirage Gstaad is on view until January 2021, and is accessed on foot from the Gruben of Shönreid strain stations via hiking trails.

Life is tenuous and luxury easily lost, as illustrated in brilliant glittering fashion by this perfect replica of a Mercedes Benz S550 that has seen better days. Can arbitrarily assigned status be maintained even once an object has been used, abused and discarded for newer and nicer things? Artist Jordan Griska ruminates on these questions and contradictions with ‘Wreck,’ a crushed vehicle reproduced in faceted mirrored stainless steel.

Though its appearance intimates violence and destruction, the car remains undeniably beautiful thanks to all of those individual panes reflecting light at a slightly different angle, making it look like an oversized gemstone. Philadelphia Contemporary, which premiered the sculpture last fall at the city’s Pier 9, notes that the sculpture touches on the ways in which debauchery and decadence can spin out of control.

“Wreck is based on a computer-generated model of a luxury sedan, in a video game, which was manipulated to look like it was involved in a crash that resulted in a fatality,” says Griska. “I crafted 12,000 individual pieces of mirror-finish stainless steel, over the course of almost two years, in order to transform that model into a full-sized three-dimensional monument.”

“The perfect geometry and flawless materiality of the piece reflect the inspiration of idealized digital design, in stark contrast with the grimness of the reality it represents. Beauty, technology and engineering collide with death and reality.”

Pinched, warped, rippled, steeply angled and mirrored until they disappear into the sky, these buildings are not quite what they seem at first glance. Sometimes, it takes a nice long look at their outlines and proportions to determine where their facades actually begin and end, and how they can possibly be balanced so precariously.

Rachel Raymond Mirror House

In the space once occupied by the historic Rachel Raymond House in Belmont, Massachusetts, a beautiful mirrored illusion rose: ‘Mirror House’ by Pedro Joel Costa Architecture and design, which pays tribute to the original home’s modernism while looking to the future.

The Dancing House, Prague

Prague’s ‘Dancing House,’ also known as ‘Fred and Ginger,’ is actually the Nationale-Nederlanden building by architect Vlado Milunic, built in cooperation with Frank Gehry in 1996. One of the dual towers of the building appears to be warped and distorted, as if someone squished it up against the other.

Australian Customs Service Building, Melbourne

From most angles, it’s virtually impossible to tell what’s going on with the facade of the Australian Customs Service Building in Melbourne, clad as it is in an unusual graphic black and white pattern. The theme is reportedly repeated inside.

Pinnacle at Symphony Place, Nashville, Tennessee

The tall and thin mirrored Pinnacle at Symphony Place almost manages to disappear into the sky altogether when conditions are just right, becoming like a ghostly suggestion of a building instead of something decidedly solid and real.

Lucid Stead by Phillip K. Smith III, Joshua Tree, California

Alternating its logs with long stretches of mirror, artist Phillip K. Smith III makes his Joshua Tree installation ‘Lucid Stead’ blend with its environment so effectively it seems to be little more than a few dark brown lines floating in the desert.

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Optical Illusion Architecture These 11 Buildings Are Not What They Seem