Fresh New York City work by A.S.V.P.: “Future Cop” wheat-paste street art on a lamp post in downtown Manhattan.

Battered old Toyota mini-truck as surfer wagon in Jaco, Costa Rica. Love the collection of stickers on the back.

Not sticker art per se, but lots of stickers of mostly surfing and surfing-related brands on the wall at the Los Amigo sports bar and Mexican restaurant in the surf town of Jaco in Costa Rica.

If you’re a huge European soccer (“football”) fan, like we are here at Global Graphica, then this month witnesses a rare series of matches between arguably two of the world’s best football clubs, both from Spain: Real Madrid CF and Barcelona FC.

Due to their successes this season in three simultaneous club league and tournament competitions, the two clubs are facing each other four times this month. One final regular season match in LA Liga, the Spanish League, plus a meeting as the finalists in Spain’s Copa del Rey tournament (a.k.a., the Spanish Cup), and two meetings, one home and one away, against each other in the European Champions League. The last is the biggest prize of all.

Ahead of the Copa del Rey final today in Valencia, Spain, Adidas has produced a commercial capitalizing on the intense rivalry between the two clubs.

Droll, punnish surfer-tourist-town bar humor in Tamarindo, Costa Rica: “TIPPING is NOT a city in China.” Sigh.

Stencil-like signage painting of a steaming cup of coffee outside a cafe in Jaco, Costa Rica.

The candy-color POPS sign in front of its heladeria at a road stop in rural Costa Rica. POPS is a chain of fast-food ice cream restaurants in Central America.

The capital city of Costa Rica doesn’t have much of a high-rise skyline to speak of. But one unmissable architectural landmark on San Jose’s urban landscape is a massive brutalist skyscraper that’s home to the Instituto Nacional de Seguros.

Depending on your point of view, the building is either an ugly eyesore, an oddly ambitious and out of place gesture of modernist architecture, or it’s an architectural gem, a shining, living example of brutalism.

In any case, the structure is one of the largest in  San Jose and it’s architecturally significant. The brutalist style was an influential architectural  movement that came of age in the 1950s and was in vogue for a time in the  ’60s and ’70s, a time when many large cities in Latin America were experiencing a building boom.

Some more pictures of vintage-modern architectural style in the Costa Rica capital of San Jose. Pictured here is the School of the Republic of Peru across from Morazan Park in downtown San Jose.

San Jose, the capital city of Costa Rica, like many a Latin American capital in the 1950s and ’60s, went through a building boom.

The city is dotted with many low-rise buildings and a few skyscrapers that are testament to some of the prevalent contemporary and forward-looking styles of the era.

Some of these structures have not aged well. Others have a certain vintage-modern, diamond-in-the-rough quality.

Of the better ones, you can see the timeless quality of the architectural design and imagine them being restored someday. Below is a building on a side street off of Avenida Central in downtown San Jose.

The the beautifully lit and design shelf in the refrigerated vodka bar — a bar within a bar — at Nic’s Martini Lounge in Beverly Hills, in Los Angeles.

Sexy mannequins with orange bob-cut hair model Chanel style in the shop window at the French luxury brand’s store in Beverly Hills, in Los Angeles.

Fresh work by Haculla (a.k.a., artist Harif Guzman) in his usual spot on an old garage door on Lafayette Street, next to Cafe Select and across from Petrosino Park in SoHo. This paint job references the “pimped-out” D.I.Y. car sub-culture, which overlaps several American ethnic, music-based and hobbyist sub-cultures. “All cherried out” and “More ounce to the bounce” complete the picture, as does the signature “Haculla Lives.”

These “Obey Irony” wheat-paste posters we’ve been seeing around downtown New York City in recent weeks made us wonder if this is Shepard Fairey or a cheeky homage or plagiarist.

The tubular metallic entrance to the flagship New York City store of Japanese clothing label Commes des Garcons in Chelsea.