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.

Using cheap and repetitive materials sounds like a recipe for kitsch, but this furniture-oriented facade clad in generic black chairs (at around $5.00 USD a piece) manages to pull off an elegant and refined look.

The clients, MY DVA (a furniture company), were looking for something additive, layered onto the existing bland building, but also reflecting their function (to showcase office and school furniture). The ideal solution would promote their wares while also entertaining visitors. It also had to be inexpensive.

Versed in product and urban design, Ondrej Chybik and Michal Kristof of studio CHYBIK+KRISTOF, took these concerns into account when designing the facade. Tapping into their respective backgrounds, they came up with cladding literally composed of product designs that also fits a neighborhood theme of repetition (filled with identical blocks of flats).

In total, the team used 900 Vicenza seats, a regular offering of the company, to form an undulating black box around the showroom, which functions well with the reduced light provided by these exterior shading elements.

Inside, the space was pared down to expose a raw concrete ceiling, from which suspended curtains hang to create little galleries — adjustable lights in these zones simulate different lighting conditions for furniture client spaces.

Staff offices are located along the edges, off to the sides and out of the way behind translucent partitions, leaving a large, open, blank-slate showroom for furniture buyers.

Combining architecture, advertising and technology, this car dealership lets users punch in numbers to bring their vehicle of choice down a 15-story showroom looming above in full view. The tall lit-up facade of Autobahn Motors acts as a billboard and show space, letting fans scope out a Lamborghini from a distance then take it out for a test drive on the streets below.

The design responds in part to the lack of surface real estate in this space-crunched island city-state of Singapore, but it also serves as great marketing for the business. While not the first such automobile-vending tower in the world, it is the largest, and it works quickly: a user-selected vehicle can be brought down in just two minutes from the floors far above. Given land scarcity in cities, this unusual-looking typology makes a lot of sense, and could start to spring up in other places as well.

Meanwhile, for those in the United States: Carvana has smaller versions located in Austin, Texas and Nashville, Tennessee. These are less a response to density issues and more driven by marketing and novelty.

And while the towers aren’t quite as tall the effect is still pretty neat – modular platforms provide vehicles on demand from an array of sports cars, hatchbacks, minivans and trucks.

As a bonus for fans of quirky interactivity: their system operates even more like a vending machine – users are given a giant coin to insert, which lets them bring down the vehicle of their choice from the display racks above.

Offering more than a traditional storefront space or conventional shopping website could individually, this hybrid showroom allows shoppers to experiment with different combinations of furnishings and fixtures both physically and virtually.

Created by London studio Bureau de Change for Made.com, the space is designed with a series of screens as backdrops for various sets of staged furniture and fixtures, allowing accessory items to be projected alongside for shoppers to compare and evaluate in relation to physically-present pieces.

“The projections provide a true, adaptable representation of the products, at the right scale, in the right place. Without them, the room sets feel unfinished, so for us they were the missing link to achieving a flexibility you can normally only achieve online,” say the designers.

Again bridging the physical and digital, various displays have sample swatches that can be taken by would-be buyers but others also have tablets that will let people peruse related items or rearrange potential settings.

Like a gallery or work of installation art, the idea was to create something interactive that also made maximum use of limited and very expense London commercial real estate, drawing people in, serving a function but also engaging them beyond their past or expected shopping experiences.

“This is such a bustling street, with so many stores vying for your attention, we wanted to produce something unexpected – an idea that would set it apart from the traditional format of lots of products in a display. The space was designed on a tight budget and timeframe but [the designers] brought a lot of ingenuity and flair and turned an old rundown bookstore into a crisp, spacious and inviting design for our customers”