Spacon put three images in one sheet of aluminum for Adidas Copenhagen

In brief. For the Adidas flagship in Copenhagen, local studio Spacon built two site-specific pieces: a perforated aluminum curtain in the fitting rooms and three photographic carpets in the Originals footwear area. The curtain uses changing perforation density to carry three images at three viewing distances: a satellite view of Copenhagen, a runner and an Adizero shoe. The carpets print vintage shoe boxes and rare sneakers from two local collectors. The lesson: local content built into the material is harder to fake than a graphic on a wall.

Most fitting rooms give you a mirror and a hook. At the Adidas flagship in Copenhagen, the wall you’d expect to ignore is a corrugated aluminum curtain that changes what it shows depending on how far away you’re standing.

The piece is by Spacon, a Copenhagen architecture and design practice, and it’s one of two site-specific installations in the store. The curtain is a perforated aluminum sheet formed into a continuous sine wave. The density of the perforations shifts across the sheet, calibrated for three viewing distances, so one surface holds three images: a satellite view of Copenhagen centered on its lakes with a crosshair on the store’s coordinates, a runner mid-stride, and a close-up profile of an Adizero shoe.

Retail often handles local relevance with a graphic: a city name on a wall, a skyline on a lightbox. It’s cheap, it swaps out easily, and it reads as a graphic. Here the local content is cut into the material, which is harder to fake.

Look at the close-ups and you’ll see why this is a fabrication story as much as a design one. There’s no screen. The image comes from hole size, spacing and the light coming through the sheet.

If you want to borrow the trick, here’s what we’d want to know before quoting it:

Designboom received this project through its reader submissions, so the description is the studio’s own, and it doesn’t give the gauge, the dimensions or the shop that made it. Those are the numbers you’d need to price your own version.

Out in the Originals footwear area, Spacon laid three oversized photographic carpets. The prints show a field of vintage Adidas shoe boxes, sealed, open and empty, with rare sneakers from two local collectors, Joachim Idestrup Friis and Alexander Cummings, set into the grid. Benches on folded metal legs sit right on top.

A printed carpet isn’t a hard thing to make. What makes this one worth looking at is the sourcing that came first. Somebody went to the people who actually care about these shoes, and their collections became the graphic. That gives sneaker people a reason to stop and look at the floor, and it gives the store something other Adidas stores don’t have.

Brience is a Toronto-based custom fabrication and experiential design studio, so we can’t look at this without asking what it would be here. Swap the lakes for the waterfront trail or the streetcar grid. Swap the collectors for the people who’ve spent years on whatever your client sells, whether that’s sneakers, records or hockey cards. The local part has to come from somewhere real.

We’d start a brief like this by asking whose names, places or stories could sit in the material itself, because that’s content the people in the room already care about. Spacon’s carpets run on that idea at retail scale.

If you’re working on a flagship or a fit-out and the local layer is still a graphic on a wall, it’s worth asking what it would take to build it into the material. That’s a conversation we like having.

Source: designboom, “spacon shapes aluminum curtain and shoe box carpets for adidas copenhagen” (October 2026). Project submitted by the studio through designboom’s reader submissions.