Waterproof and windproof seem like small bonus features next to the dazzling look of this jacket design, the shell of which is covered in microscopic spheres that mimic the adaptive camouflage of squids.

Developed by Vollebak, this high-tech creation used lasers to embed these tiny balls into resin along the triple-layered surface of the garment, creating a slick metallic oil-like effect by day and then a dazzling spectrum of reflective wonder at night.

“The Black Squid Jacket focuses on replicating the elements of squid skin that make it hyper-visible,” explains the designer. Whereas “a squid uses microscopic plate-like structures on the surface of its skin to change color, our jacket uses disruptively-structured microscopic glass spheres.’

“When light hits the jacket, it travels through the curved surface of these black glass spheres and strikes the back of them, before being reflected back at the original light source and scattered away from it simultaneously, so that the fabric looks like it’s emitting light.”

Within two years, the city of Chengdu aims to swap out its ground-based street lighting with the soft glow of an artificial moon, casting light across 50 square miles of the urban landscape.

Wu Chunfeng, chairman of Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute, announced the news at a national mass innovation and entrepreneurship event earlier this month.

Reflective panels on board the machine will pick up and redirect the sun’s rays. The satellite will actually glow multiple times brighter than the moon itself, creating a dusk-like atmosphere on demand. The precise illumination can be varied in different sections of the city as well.

The project may sound like a moonshot but it’s not without precedent: Soviets tested similar light-reflecting satellites decades ago, aimed to illuminate darker northern regions, and on the ground: cities in valleys have also been known to use giant reflectors perched on adjacent mountainsides.

Like stills from some rainy noir film, these paintings are deceptively realistic in part due to their abstraction — unresolved details look like a trick of the lens rather than the work of a brushstroke.

Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Philip Barlow‘s canvases capture all the elements we expect to see on an urban stroll — cars, people, street lights — but renders them into a haze familiar to photographers (and perhaps those who have had too much to drink).

Individual figures and other details blend together into a rainbow of colors against the night sky. Figure crosses ground. “The figures in the landscape serve as carriers and reflectors of the light that falls upon them,” says the artist. “Bathed in the luminosity, it is my hope that they would become more beautiful. To me, light is the ultimate subject because it embodies the pinnacle of all reality.”

“Although I work within a long tradition of landscape painting,” explains Barlow, “my depiction of the ‘seen’ landscape is simply a vehicle through which I navigate territory of another nature. A landscape less ordinary; where the line between the physical and the spiritual realm has seemingly been removed.”

However, these scenarios are not intended to be of a surreal nature. Hopefully they will seem curiously familiar and convincingly real.” Indeed, the more abstract the individual work, the more realistic it seems to appear.

Perfect for a pop-up market in Seoul that appears only overnight and on weekends, these collapsible and stackable structures take up little space when not in use and can be deployed and stored quickly and easily.

Designed by Motoelasico for the capital city of South Korea, the temporary tents provide space for craftspeople and designers to set up shop and sell wares. Then, during the week, the units can be left on site without taking up public space.

Two site-specific variants were developed for two locals along the Han River. One site is narrow and long, and its design solution consists of a series of foldable ‘V’ structures on wheels covered with orange tarps.

Each unit houses three vendor booths with roll-up sides to for visibility and ventilation. The fronts and backs are open allowing views through to the river behind the sellers as well.

The other site is a broader and more built-up area of benches and greenery, and its solution draws on the model of stackable supermarket carts. Booths are independent and pyramidal, but can be slid into one another for storage.

These yellow-clad units have more flexibility in this less-linear space, able to be arrayed around corners and arranged in different ways depending on demand.

While both are responses to a particular place and set of needs, they also serve as a useful model for other cities looking to create open-air markets — simple, durable, practical but also fun, colorful and inventive.

In Facades 3, the latest in a series of such sets, French photographer Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy ones again visits flatland, imagining the world constructed like a stage set from virtually two-dimensional building fronts (or sides).

In architecture schools and firms, students and designer often draw or photograph (or these days: turn to Google maps) to capture the street- or ally-facing parts of buildings adjacent to their site — an exercise to understand the context around their new vision.

In previous iterations of this series, the photographer focused on day-lit scenes, often occupied by people and cluttered with other contextual cues. In this latest set, calm, quiet and lonely evenings along country roads are the focus instead, all the more eerie as subjects.

Gaudrillot-Roy adds a twist to this approach, looking at structures from an angle, but nonetheless imagining them to be two-dimensional. He accomplishes the effect by photographing real places, then nearby landscapes to infill gaps when he subtracts. The surrealistic results call into question what lies beyond shared public space, highlighting the invisible voids concealed by facades.