Spacon's Aluminum Curtain Maps Copenhagen for Adidas Flagship

Copenhagen practice Spacon Studio has built two site-specific installations for the Adidas flagship store in Copenhagen, and one of them hides three images in a single sheet of perforated aluminum.

The fittings room zone gets the more technically ambitious piece: a continuous aluminum curtain formed into a sine-wave profile, perforated across varying densities calibrated for three viewing distances. Stand at the right spot and the sheet reads as an aerial satellite view of Copenhagen, centered on the city's central lakes, with a crosshair marking the store's exact coordinates. Move closer and a silhouette of a runner mid-stride emerges, then a close-up profile of an Adidas Adizero shoe.

The corrugated surface does double duty as architecture and optics. It screens the fitting rooms while the undulating metal catches ambient retail lighting, turning what Spacon describes as local running topography into a kinetic partition.

How does a carpet become an archive?

The second intervention works from the floor up. In the Originals footwear section, Spacon laid three oversized photographic carpets printed with a field of vintage Adidas shoe boxes — sealed, open, and empty. Embedded within that photographic field are rare archival sneakers photographed from the private collections of two local collectors, Joachim Idestrup Friis and Alexander Cummings.

The move converts regional sneaker-collecting culture into large-format floor graphics. Instead of displaying heritage shoes in vitrines, the store lets shoppers walk across a flattened archive of them.

What ties the two pieces together?

Both installations draw on the same twin references: Copenhagen's urban running culture and the material archives of the city's sneaker collectors. The aluminum curtain encodes the running city as data — coordinates, topography, a runner's stride. The carpets encode collector culture as image.

That's a deliberate shift for retail design. Rather than importing a generic global brand language, the project treats local specificity — down to the store's own coordinates on a satellite map — as the design material.

Project details:

• Name: Custom object for Adidas Store
• Designer: Spacon Studio (@spacon.studio)
• Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
• Brand: Adidas

The project arrived via designboom's DIY submissions feature, where readers submit their own work for publication. For a flagship in a city with a documented running culture and an active collector scene, the installations point at a broader retail strategy: brands commissioning studios like Spacon to make store geography — literal coordinates included — part of the shopping experience.