Recently unveiled in Marseille, France this giant mirrored canopy called the Port Vieux Pavilion was designed by architecture firm Foster + Partners. The pavilion measures nearly 150 feet (46 meters) long and is made of highly polished stainless steel meant to reflect people and the surrounding environment of Marseille’s World Heritage-listed harbor. 

 Simon Beck’s snow-trampled art. 

French artist and designer Arnold Goron created a window installation for seven high fashion stores of Isabel Marant with installations of aluminum plates stapled to wooden structures.

Goron says he had wanted for some time to create an installation using aluminum plates, but there were ‘’too flat and looked cheap.’’ When he found the ‘‘snail plates”, a typically french design, covered with small embossed circles, he knew it would work well and ever changing, beautiful light reflections would appear during the day — over 10,000 plates were used.

The installations can be seen at fashion designer Isabel Marant’s shops in Paris, New York, Madrid, Beirut, Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo.

A few weeks ago, I was on the east coast visiting colleges, and while in New York, my mom and I dropped into the Isabel Marant store in SoHo. This installation is awesome and really work’s with Marant’s aesthetic. And don’t even get me started on the clothes…………….

In the Russian village of Kamarchaga, in the Siberian taiga, Russian pensioner Olga Kostina has used 30,000 plastic bottle caps to adorn her home with colorful patterns and images - making it somewhat of a local landmark. Over many years, in the isolated rural town situated just in the perimeter of the taiga’s forest, Kostina collected the lids and once she felt there was enough she created detailed murals across the walls of her home with images of traditional macrame motifs and various creatures living in the neighboring woodland. Hammering every cap by hand, Kostina used the conventional macrame technique of weaving and knit knots to fabricate the detailed mosaics. (via designboom)

Via This Is Colossal:

Japanese artist Yamamoto Motoi was born in Hiroshima, Japan in 1966 and worked in a dockyard until he was 22 when he decided to focus on art full-time. Six years later in 1994 his younger sister died from complications due to brain cancer and Yamamoto immediately began to memorialize her in his labyrinthine installations of poured salt. The patterns formed from the salt are actually quite literal in that Yamamoto first created a three-dimensional brain as an exploration of his sister’s condition and subsequently wondered what would happen if the patterns and channels of the brain were then flattened. Although he creates basic guidelines and conditions for each piece, the works are almost entirely improvised with mistakes and imperfections often left intact during hundreds of hours of meticulous pouring. After each piece has been on view for several weeks the public is invited to communally destroy each work and help package the salt into bags and jars, after which it is thrown back into the ocean, a process you can watch in the video above by John Reynolds & Lee Donaldson.

Yamamoto recently finished a new installation at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Artin Charleston, South Carolina and will soon be in Los Angeles at the Laband Art Gallerywhere he’ll begin work on a new piece. You can stop by the gallery August 29, 30, 31 and September 4, 5, 6, 2012 from 12-4pm to see the work in progress which will finally open in its completed state on September 8th. You can follow along via his blog. (via fastco)