Architecture has long shaped the way we move through cities. This summer in Philadelphia, it’s shaping the way people listen, too.

Beginning Jul. 1, the historic facade of the Village of Industry & Art (VIA) at 320 South Broad Street will become the centerpiece of Sounds of Philadelphia, a public installation that transforms the adaptive reuse project into an open-air listening room. For two hours each day through Sept. 22, sculptural speakers mounted to the building will broadcast a playlist celebrating the city’s musical legacy, inviting passersby to pause, gather, and experience Philadelphia through sound.

Photography by Ed Newton

Rather than asking visitors to step inside a gallery or performance venue, Sounds of Philadelphia extends culture onto the sidewalk. Running daily from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., the free installation fills the building’s front steps and surrounding plaza with music written, recorded, or inspired by Philadelphia, spanning soul, jazz, hip-hop, punk, indie, and more. Designed by Scout in collaboration with fabricator Tim Gleeson, the seven-foot-tall speakers—crafted from Baltic birch plywood and MDF—function as both sculptural objects and working sound equipment. The result is less a scheduled performance than an invitation to linger—a reminder that public space can foster moments of connection as readily as programmed events.

The project builds on VIA’s broader mission of positioning artists and creative organizations at the center of city life. Housed within the former University of the Arts buildings on Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts, the evolving campus has become home to a growing community of cultural organizations, making the installation a natural extension of the building’s role as both workplace and gathering place.

Photograph by Ed Newton

“What I love about Philadelphia is that connecting with strangers over culture and expression is so much a part of the rhythm of daily life,” says Lindsey Scannapieco, managing partner at Scout. “You’re walking down the street and someone’s dancing, someone’s singing, people are just in it together.”

The city-inspired playlist was curated in partnership with the Philadelphia Music Alliance, the nonprofit organization behind the city’s Walk of Fame along the Avenue of the Arts. The oversized speakers become sculptural interventions in their own right, allowing the building’s architecture to serve as both a visual landmark and a source of sound. By pairing Philadelphia’s musical history with a temporary architectural intervention, the installation blurs the line between public art, placemaking, and civic infrastructure, allowing the building itself to participate in the city’s cultural conversation.

At a moment when public spaces increasingly compete for attention, Sounds of Philadelphia offers something refreshingly simple: an opportunity to stop, listen, and experience a familiar streetscape through a different sense. For the duration of the summer, one of Philadelphia’s historic facades won’t just frame the city—it will help tell its story.

Sounds of Philadelphia will be on view from July 1 through September 22, 2026, at the Village of Industry & Art (VIA), 320 S. Broad Street in Philadelphia. The installation is free and open to the public daily from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Learn more at villageofindustryandart.com.

Editorial Transparency: This article was developed with the assistance of AI tools, which may have been used for research, outlining, editing, or copy refinement. Reporting, fact-checking, and editorial decisions were made by the Design Milk editorial team.

When NYC starts to heat up in the summer, things change. The city blooms as people travel from across the globe to experience the confluence of history, modernity, and culture. There’s also the hustle, the speed, and the smells. Nestled in the heart of NYC’s Meatpacking District is an exhibition that begs you to slow down.

Now on view at Tuleste Factory, If You Want Peace features work by Stefon Diggs and SI VIS PACEM, a collection he debuted at Design Miami 2025 in December. Drenched in a blue that almost perfectly resembles the sky on a summer afternoon, the exhibit features the NFL wide receiver’s furniture pieces alongside surrealist paintings by Lindsay Dawn, SI VIS PACEM co-founder. The pairing creates an otherworldly dialogue that gives a distinct illusion of floating in space.

Organic curves and spatial relationships are key to this collection—scale is essential to making a place feel like home. The upholstered mirrors shown below take up quite a commanding presence in the room, succeeding in creating another dimension just beyond the wall. A sense of softness and play extends across the collection, even to the toy soldiers. It’s large enough to feel subversive, while small enough to feel whimsical.

One of our favorite tableaus is The Tree, The Lenis Ashtray, The Otium III In Cream, and the ladybug-inspired Good Luck (featured above from left to right). A modular sculpture, The Tree features far-extending roots and full branches of leaves, casting a distinctive dappled effect on the walls and floor. Built in the style of a beverage or end table, The Lenis Ashtray features a cupholder, separate from the main tray. The Otium III retains a lightness in the cream exterior and organic shape, inspired by a lake.

Once figures of vintage gameplay, toy soldiers are transformed into mini side tables. The sculptural green pieces are simultaneously nostalgic and functional.

His SI VIS SPACEM project provides Diggs creative freedom in the design process.

“I find the greatest sense of peace in myself and in the spaces I create,” he says. “With this exhibition, I wanted to explore that feeling through an environment that feels a little more wild, inviting, playful, and deeply human, while still holding a sense of sanctuary.”

Centered on embodied comfort and security, each piece holds its own while working cohesively within the collection.

Stefon Diggs

To learn more about Stefon Diggs and SI VIS PACEM’s exhibit If You Want Peace at Tuleste Factory in New York City, visit tulestefactory.com.

Photography by Matthew Gordon and Roshan Jacob.

Emerging throughout Renaissance Europe as conspicuous displays of wealth and knowledge, wunderkammers, or cabinets of curiosity, contained carefully amassed collections of oddities, natural elements, and era-distinctive examples of material culture. The reserve of particularly learned rulers, aristocrats, members of the clergy, and scholarly scientists, these encyclopedic assemblages of religious relics and antiquities were often housed within sumptuously adorned, holistically themed environments.

As time progressed and spatial scale reduced significantly, the act of considered hoarding moved from rooms into furnishings: intricately compartmentalized cabinets.

Returning to this age-old paradigm while also playing up that shift is polymathic Belgian artist Katrien Van Der Schueren. Rendered in her idiosyncratic, hand-carved fragments, the new The Ark of Us wall-sculpture series transforms the traditionally elite and showy wunderkammer practice into one that feels more widespread and discreetly personal.

Though decidedly maximalist in aesthetic and formation, these puzzle-like reliefs conceal secret chambers, perfectly suited to hold anything meaningful one might want to store away for safekeeping. The sum of many parts, a single mural can conceptually become a portrait, composed of held artifacts that each represent a different lived experience.

Presented at former fashion entrepreneur Lisa Perry’s residential gallery concept, Onna House, in East Hampton, the intricately adorned panels—both architectonic and molten—captivate against the stark white, modernist interior. They are strikingly articulated by natural light flooding in through floor-to-ceiling windows and large skylights.

Th artist presented her first Ark at pad Paris with gallery Jag. The body of work available at Onna house is the first and only collection in the Ark of Us series in the United States.

Van Der Schueren creates these unified, almost fossil-like compositions by physically cohering natural wood, stone, metal, plaster, resin, and pigment. Pushing the conventional limits of the craft techniques involved, she creates complexly detailed topographies––worlds in and of themselves.

To learn more about this and other programming, visit onnahouse.com.

Photography by Rodrigo Rize.

Rising along Copenhagen’s ever-changing harbor waterfront at this year’s 3daysofdesign festival was a 22-foot-tall monolith undulating with variegated aluminum extrusions. Unbeknownst to those on the ground, this semi-enclosed, temporary structure replicated the exact contour of the iconic vase seminal designer Alvar Aalto developed for Finnish glassware brand Iittala 90 years ago. Conceived by local multivalent studio TABLEAU and constructed by Norwegian sustainable metal purveyor Hydro, the monumental undertaking was a clear celebration of the design principles that underlie Scandinavian design, carried across all three countries represented.

“To be given the opportunity to design a pavilion for Iittala to celebrate the anniversary of such an iconic design as the Aalto vase is a dream come true, and something we’re deeply grateful for,” says Julius Værnes Iversen, Founder and Creative Director of TABLEAU. “We wanted to create an impactful pavilion that gives visitors a space to experience the beauty of design.”

The pavilion is a game of scale if there ever was one: an almost meta evocation amplifying the intrinsic links between object and architecture. Aalto trained as an architect and practiced across disciplines with little constraint, making the translation from vessel to inhabitable structure feel especially fitting.

“Bringing the Alvar Aalto vase to this measure required both the right material and engineering expertise, and the properties of aluminum extrusions made it the ideal choice for this kind of architecture,” says Asle Forsbak, Hydro Extrusions Marketing Director. “The project proved that it can be done on a large scale with a low carbon footprint.”

After the short run of the display, the modular slatted components were recycled and put back into the company’s production cycle. “We brought our full capability to bear on a single, iconic shape,” he adds.

Inside, versions of the former—the full gamut of the reissued Aalto City Vase collection—were strategically suspended on discrete, nearly invisible bases. True to the original form, this refreshed offering comes in carefully calibrated colorways reflective of waterfront capitals: Berlin, Amsterdam, Tokyo, New York, Helsinki, and, of course, Copenhagen. On offer are deep cobalts, clear whites, and bubbly golds. Much like the structure itself, an iridescent quality helps articulate the dramatic yet resolute curves.

To learn more about each party that contributed to the creative synergy, visit iittala.com, hydro.com, and tableau-cph.com.

Photography by Haavard Holmaas.

With “Entrate,” curated by Martina Muzi, MAXXI has been making the most of its lobby by inviting architects to animate the space and truly draw visitors in. Last year, Nacho Carbonell devised an evocative setting in Rome’s Zaha Hadid—designed modern art museum with Memory, in practice. Taking the baton for the second edition is another Spanish practice: TAKK, founded by Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño in Barcelona, have conjured a fantastical ambience that is also deeply rooted in the here and now. The architecture duo’s Con-Vivere captures its namesake vibe of conviviality — proposing how we could and should live together as humans and in relationship with non-human species.

It begins with a crib-like oval welcome station crowned in lights and dripping with florals. Luzárraga and Muiño have made a point of refusing the Modernist notion that decoration is frivolous, and their installation abounds with the flourishes seen in some of their previous work, from flowers woven into surfaces to vegetables as nourishing, cleansing and beautifying interior elements.

“There has been a lot of discussion on ornament in architecture during modernism,” says Luzárraga. “The excuse was that ornament attracts dust and disease but there was also something behind that: The idea that ornament was more related to feminized labor and therefore has to be banned. So, we also like working with ornament and with techniques that are more associated with feminized labor — and with colors less associated with architecture.”

She points to the six-meter-diameter sofa — upholstered in pink faux fur — that beckons visitors to relax collectively and “do nothing;” we live in capitalism but we don’t always have to be productive. At its center hangs a voluminous floral bouquet with calming aromatic qualities.

Then there is the tower that supports various species of edible Mediterranean plants in a cascading planter system irrigated from above; when the bounty is ripe, there will be a banquet at the tables below. In this shared harvest, the contemporary clarion call for food sovereignty nestles up against ancient ways of living and doing.

In the “wellness bed,” meanwhile, rest is modulated by both fragrant vegetables and light therapy.

 Water is the sustaining life source. A fountain that TAKK refers to as “a water parliament” invites visitors to climb up for a jacuzzi experience. Like all the pieces in the installation, it’s playful but conveys a serious message: We are interconnected with the natural systems around us and every impact we make on them has a profoundly reverberative effect for all species. Luzárraga finds it encouraging that some waterways, like the rivers granted legal rights, now have political agency.

I walked past Kawai Kanjirō’s house and studio twice before I found the door I was looking for. Located on a quiet side street in Kyoto, the unassuming museum dedicated to the life and work of the influential folk potter blends in with all the other machiya townhouses typical of the city, with the metallic sheen of its kawara roof tiles, dark wood latticed windows, and curved bamboo inuyarai screens extending from the plastered facade to the sidewalk. I’m sure that if I could read Japanese, the distinctive wood sign—carved by Living National Treasure Kuroda Tatsuaki—proclaiming the name of the museum would have caught my eye. Otherwise, only a small plaque by the door reads in English: “Kawai Kanjirō’s House Entrance.”

I carefully slid open the wooden door and stepped inside, taking note of the shoes-off etiquette as my eyes adjusted to the dark room. To my right, I was greeted by a carved wooden sculpture of a hand, index finger pointing to the sky—a piece that foreshadows the mystical quality that the home, and all of Kanjirō’s work, seems to emanate. I stashed my sneakers in a cubby at the door and slipped into a pair of communal house shoes before being warmly welcomed in.

The interior of the home offers about as much explanation as the exterior. In the folk tradition of anonymity and embracing the unknown, few signs exist—in Japanese or English—to tell you where to go or what you are looking at. You are entering someone’s home, after all, and while you will find a few expected museum displays and exhibition labels throughout the two floors, I can imagine that the overall experience of the house is much the same as when the artist lived, worked, and fired his massive eight-chamber noborigama climbing kiln here from 1937 until his death in 1966.

Who Was Kawai Kanjirō?

Kanjirō is best known for his role in establishing Japan’s mingei, or folk art, movement alongside his friends, philosopher and art critic Sōetsu Yanagi, potter Shōji Hamada, and British studio potter Bernard Leach, who helped translate and disseminate the movement’s work and philosophies to Western audiences. Largely considered a reaction to Japan’s rapid post-Meiji Restoration modernization, mingei—or “art of the people”—established a new standard of beauty that its founders believed could only be located in the utilitarian, everyday objects made by Japan’s ordinary, often anonymous craftspeople, rather than by renowned individual artists or master craftsmen.

I received my introduction to the mingei movement through Western art academies, including a brief stint working at the Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, where I physically handled and helped catalog many jewels of studio pottery movements worldwide. But I did not learn about Kawai Kanjirō until I visited his home in Kyoto last March. This was not because he was less productive than his counterparts or somehow less influential to the mingei movement, but likely because Kanjirō himself never set foot inside the United States during his lifetime, nor did he ever exhibit work in the country. In fact, most of his pieces have never left Japan—until now, exactly 100 years after the movement was conceived.

For the first time, Japan Society in New York presents a solo exhibition celebrating the potter and national treasure’s life and work, bringing his private collection of ceramics, woodwork, and calligraphy from his former house in Kyoto to Manhattan’s “Japan House.” Titled Kawai Kanjirō: House to House and on view through May 10, 2026, the exhibition celebrates a milestone international exchange of culture and art.

Mingei, From Kyoto to Manhattan

Curated by Michele Bambling, gallery senior director at the Japan Society, and Tamae Sagi, curator of the Kawai Kanjirō House and granddaughter of Kanjirō, House to House explores the artist’s oeuvre through the lens of his home, which the curators describe as his “largest and most comprehensive creative work.” Designed by Kanjirō himself and built by his brother, a master carpenter, the house remains a living example of the mingei movement.

“From the outside, one could never guess what a vast storehouse of art lies beyond the door,” friend and Japanese American writer Yoshiko Uchida wrote in 1953, in an essay excerpted in We Do Not Work Alone, the slim, copper-colored volume that can be purchased at the museum in Kyoto and at Japan Society. Today, the same is true: stepping into the house feels like entering a time capsule of 20th-century Japanese craft. When exploring its grounds, one can feel the artist’s emphasis on the importance of everyday objects.

“One is immediately impressed by [the house’s] massiveness and sturdiness,” wrote Uchida. “There is nothing flimsy or unstable about it.” Japan Society evokes this sentiment through the display of a large section drawing that shows the mechanics of the home, alongside a wall of perspective sketches and photographs of the house’s interior made in situ by the Rome-based exhibition designers Milk Train.

These prints highlight not only the building’s architecture, but also the trove of furniture and objects one can find throughout the house: a bamboo stool that transforms into a child’s chair when turned sideways, barrel-shaped straw stools, squat chairs made from old wooden mortars once used for pounding rice, an alcove desk, and his two potter’s wheels—most of which were designed and made by Kanjirō himself. The drawing even depicts the friendly tortoiseshell house cat that greeted me during my visit, patiently sitting through visitor photoshoots and mewing at me to let her back into the house when I re-entered from the courtyard kiln area.

Japan Society’s main gallery presents Kanjirō’s ceramics chronologically, from his earlier Chinese- and Korean-inspired works to his later, more abstract and asymmetrical vessels, splashed with his signature hand-mixed copper, iron, and cobalt glazes. The final room is dedicated to the artist’s experimental late-career wooden sculptures and masks, which echo the same motifs as his ceramics: hands pointing to the sky, figures from Japanese folklore, and, of course, cats.

The white display tables and cases throughout the galleries were designed to evoke the joinery of the Kyoto home’s construction, while their varied heights allude to the different levels at which works are arranged throughout the home’s interior. On the walls surrounding the tables, visitors encounter a selection of Kanjirō’s 1960s calligraphy: poems that read as Zen meditations. One, in particular, stands out: “The eyes hear; the ears see.”

Evoking a Buddhist Standard of Beauty

The difference between seeing and knowing underscores the mingei movement, emphasizing its strong ties to Japanese Buddhism. To best “see” Kawai Kanjirō’s work, perhaps we should heed the words of his dear collaborator and fellow founder of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum, Sōetsu Yanagi.

In his 1940 essay “Seeing and Knowing,” Yanagi wrote: “First, put aside the desire to judge immediately; acquire the habit of just looking. Second, do not treat the object as an object for the intellect. Third, just be ready to receive, passively, without interposing yourself.” He continues, “If you can void your mind of all intellectualization, like a clear mirror that simply reflects, all the better.” For Yanagi, this “non-conceptualization,” or the Zen state of mushin—“no mind”—“springs the true ability to contact things directly and positively.”

For Kanjirō, “God” and “Buddha” were simply labels for the unknown force bigger than us all, what the artist called “The Unknown Self.” The artist told Uchida, “The unknown self is revealed through the work of the hands and the body, and it is that unconscious element in every man that prods him on to new achievements.” He believed that anyone can practice the art of making beautiful things, and that the unknown self is always the force that drives a person’s actions forward.

This belief in beauty as truth, and in beauty as a means of connecting to the spirit through art, is at the heart of mingei. Yanagi wrote, “Every artist knows that he is engaged in an encounter with infinity, and that work done with heart and hand is ultimately worship of life itself.” The writings of Yanagi and the works of Kanjirō show us that not only is there no distinction between truth and beauty, but there is also no difference between fine and applied art. The great ceramicist Bernard Leach, a close friend of the mingei movement, described this breaking down of distinctions as “perhaps Japan’s greatest contribution to world culture.”

Craft in the Face of the Unknown

What Leach did for Yanagi’s texts—translating and presenting them “so that the western world may penetrate that which Buddhism contains for the seeker looking for the meaning of beauty in the face of truth”—is also what Japan Society is doing for contemporary viewers of Kanjirō’s life’s work today.

While the artist died 60 years ago, the underlying themes of his work highlight the very nature of human life and creation—themes that were relevant during the rapid, machine-driven industrialization of the 20th century and remain so today, in our present age, as every aspect of society is increasingly infiltrated by machine learning and artificial intelligence. The mingei sentiment—that every ordinary person has the ability and agency to produce beautiful, truthful objects with their own hands—echoes a statement I hear independent artists and craftspeople saying a lot today: it is better to make bad art than generate AI “art.”

In his writing, Yanagi articulated the belief that “fundamentally, human beings, Eastern or Western, need belief, free play of imagination, and intuition in their homes and workshops or they become starved. All of the cog wheels and electronic brains cannot assuage these human needs in the long run.” There is no better example of an imaginative, intuitive art and design practice than that of Kawai Kanjirō.

Kanjirō’s work, and the broader context of mingei, are living reminders of what it means to be human, and I think people are craving more of those reminders right now. As a whole, Japan Society’s Kawai Kanjirō: House to House stands as a generous offering and a reminder of what it looks like to create with, and find beauty in, the work of humanity’s first tools: the hands.

Elsewhere in Japan, Kawai Kanjirō and Shōji Hamada, a concurrent exhibition, is on view at Tokyo’s Japan Folk Crafts Museum, the institution the two potters helped establish with Yanagi 90 years ago, in 1936. And in Japan Society’s central gallery, visitors can watch an excerpt from film footage chronicling the making of the exhibition through the words of Kanjirō’s granddaughter and co-curator. Visitors are encouraged to donate to fundraising efforts so that the curatorial team can continue creating a feature-length film that will further spread the message of mingei and Kanjirō’s legacy to audiences beyond New York and Japan.

Just as the mingei founders had no real way of knowing the long-term effects of industrialization on their craft, today’s artists and designers cannot fully begin to comprehend the effects of machine learning on our work and industry. Maybe a Zen mindset is the best approach here. As Kanjirō said, “There is excitement and stimulation in not understanding a thing completely. The unknown is fascinating.”

Photography courtesy of Jaxson Stone.

Montreal is no stranger to Brutalist architecture. The iconic utopian housing complex that overlooks the St Lawrence River (Habitat 67 by Moshe Safdie for Expo 67) is just one of many, albeit the most famous. During the 6 years that I lived in the city, my time was marked by raw, unfinished concrete—from Concordia University’s Hall Building to Place Bonaventure Metro station, and many others. In fact, much of the architectural landscape of the city bears the weight of its brutalist forefathers. It’s in this context that Montreal-based culinary studio Menu Extra crafted a gastronomic experience rooted in brutalism, local flavours and immersive design.

“After our activation at Habitat 67, we felt compelled to highlight other, perhaps lesser-known gems of Montreal’s modernist built-heritage. There’s a grounding quality to brutalist architecture that creates a striking backdrop for an experience exploring fine dining as ritual. The raw materiality and monumental character of these spaces naturally lend themselves to a sense of contemplation,” shares Creative Director Samuel de La Courtemanche.

Designed as part of Montréal en Lumière, an annual winter festival set in the city’s downtown core, Menu Extra transformed Chapelle des Franciscains in Rosemont into a cinematic, chartreuse-tined stage for a multi-course tasting menu of Québec’s finest flavours. Created by a multidisciplinary team of sommeliers, chefs, designers and other creatives, the soiree was dubbed Efflorescence—a name that aptly combines art and brutalism, referencing both the chalky powder excess that appears when water evaporates from concrete and a state of flowering.

Designed by Menu Extra and Montréal-based design studio Martha, the graphic identity of Efflorescence is anchored in architecture, with an elongated typography and logotype that references the geometry of its setting.

Blooming from within the stark, but soaring, vaulted ceilings, a 40-foot-long, communal dining table draped in sultry green fabric—with a hollowed diamond motif that mirrors the ceiling—emerges as the central focal point. In its center, guests can discover a fluted-acrylic lightbox full of live plants, designed to mimic Canada’s boreal forest. Other design touches included aluminum chairs designed by LESORR to complement the raw surroundings, steel stands displaying the menu’s core ingredients (scallops from the Magdalen Islands, among other local delicacies) and a soundscape by local artist KROY paired with two futuristic speakers designed for the event by MYCOAUDIO. Designed by Creative Director Samuel de la Courtemanche with Creative Producer Amanda Prow, the immersive set design was meant to inspire interactions between guests and foster a sense of exploration and discovery.

“Our experiences are ephemeral in nature, which inspires guests to be truly present, knowing the moment cannot be repeated,” says Co-Founder and Sommelier Alexis Demers.

Illustration by Nicolas Lapierre.

With the chefs cooking on full display and a choreographed service—which included an aromatic hot towel and scented smoke to complement select dishes—Menu Extra channelled fine dining as ceremony. And like a call to prayer, the sound of a bell guided guests to their seats.

Rooted in seasonality, the menu—created by Francis Blais, Co-Founder and Executive Chef of Menu Extra with selected wines from Co-Founder and Sommelier Alexis Demers—featured Nova Scotian lobster, scallops from the Magdalen Islands, citrus grown by Vyckie Vaillancourt in Laval, and more.

Photography by Vanessa Cassar and Jeremy Dionne.

With sterile white cube exhibits now a memory of a bygone era, contextualized displays have become the norm across the design industry. Independent talents, established brands, and leading galleries are now primarily staging their wares in fully furnished, total-work-of-art domestic settings. The idea is to suggest – or clearly indicate – how their products and limited-run works might actually live in the spaces they’ll eventually inhabit. Few, however, fully respond to the existing conditions and histories already in place.

Cue téte-a-téte, a group exhibition mounted by emergent New York art and design platform Playinghouse at two vastly different locations during last month’s Milan Design Week. Curated by Margherita Dosi Delfini, assistant curator at the Design Museum, the emphatically site-responsive exhibition brought together artworks and furnishings imagined by a wide array of contemporary independent talents. The meticulously arranged selection accentuated the various material and formal qualities of each locale.

True to the relatively new platform’s mission of highlighting the intersection between function, familiarity, and invention, the works on view embodied the idea that playfulness can carry as much weight as practical rigor.

At Villa Pestarini, seminal Italian architect Franco Albini’s prototypically Rationalist residential project completed in 1939, works crafted in eggshell, glass, reflective metals, and other complementary materials played up the home’s distinctive proportions and pared-back yet still slightly ornamental detailing. The space was staged as a study transfixed in time, personalized for quiet contemplation.

Anna Dawson’s formally inventive fused-glass Calle Sconce diffused soft light upward and downward, while her Sun Pendant riffed on the cleverly transposing qualities of restraint and expression. The hexagonal, concave-edge ceiling mount emitted light through a gently bulging amber dome. The distinctive shape was repeated in Romain Basile Petrot’s Khemis Checkerboard Game table.

A similarly nuanced play on formal configuration defined Caleb Engstrom’s Dry Kiss Chair I & II concepts, produced in slightly sumptuous crushed eggshell and lacquer. The villa’s oh-so-subtle nods to Moderne and Art Deco ornamentation were translated through Liyang Zhang’s Florence Curtain Sconce. Spherical finials sat atop a patinated brass volume projecting light through movable silk drapes.

At Certosa District, the palette was starkly different and decidedly industrial, calling back the complex’s previous function. Semi-functional and non-functional sculptures rendered in rubber (Atelier Fomenta’s monumental yet elastic Rubber Tables), plastics (Maha Alavi’s somewhat architectonic cast-resin Frooot Bowl), and metals (Francesco Rosati’s Table For a Married Couple, composed of two perpendicularly positioned “téte-a-téte” chairs) reinforced the rawer spatial language of the site.

Photography by Elizabeth Carababas.

As the pageant queen of design weeks, Milan tends to go all out. And this year, the city-wide festivities were bigger and bolder than ever. The name of the game: balloons. From the most luxe brand-activations to emerging artist installations, giant inflated creatures and air-filled experiences emerged as a clear visual motif of the festival. Here, check out 5 standouts that rose above the crowd.

Courtesy of 10 Corso Como.

Courtesy of 10 Corso Como.

1. Moncler’s Octopus Invasion at 10 Corso Como

As if the celebrated creative hub, concept store and restaurant 10 Corso Como wasn’t iconic enough, this year’s pop-up took things to new heights—literally. Part of Moncler’s Puffy Summer campaign, the building’s facade was taken over by a giant, balloon octopus in a striking maroon hue. Bursting through windows and wrapping around walls, Moncler’s supersized mascot made for a thrilling observation from the street, and a fearsome presence for anyone who dared to dine (or shop) in the belly of the beast. And as far as fashion forecasts go, I’ve personally fallen for the puffy summer propaganda.

Photography by Giuseppe Miotto / Marco Cappelletti Studio. Courtesy of Sara Ricciardi Studio.

Photography by Giuseppe Miotto / Marco Cappelletti Studio. Courtesy of Sara Ricciardi Studio.

Photography by Sophie Sobol.

2. Serotonin: The Chemistry of Happiness by Sara Ricciardi Studio

Part of Brera Design District 2026, this colourful installation — titled Serotonin: The Chemistry of Happiness — by artist Sara Ricciardi for American Express explores the hormones that create human happiness. Made up of large, tie-dyed blue and pink balloon balls juxtaposed against the bones of the historic Loggia of the Pinacoteca di Brera, the installation is true to its name: a joyful surprise and a dynamic contrast. And for those who waited in line to walk within the installation, they’d find that the giant forms moved and breathed like living organisms.

Courtesy of Ulises.

Courtesy of Ulises.

Courtesy of Ulises.

Courtesy of Ulises.

3. Škoda Auto x Ulises Studio: Škoda Epiq

Located at the Palazzo Senato for a week-long takeover, this collaboration between Czech automobile manufacturer Škoda Auto and multidisciplinary design firm Ulises Studio looked like a video game brought to life. Led by Spanish architect, artist and studio-founder Ricardo Orts, the larger-than-life balloon installation was designed to promote the upcoming launch of new all-electric car, Škoda Epiq — plus a marketing campaign that would be heavily influenced by modelling clay. Drawing on this playful spirit, the result is a kind of adult fun house with slides, ball pits, relaxation zones, a mobile cafe and more. With over 60,000 visitors during its run, this installation was a crowd-favourite (it even received top prize for Fuorisalone 2026 as the top-rated installation.)

Photography by Giovanni Genzini. Courtesy of Sara Ricciardi Studio.

Photography by Giovanni Genzini. Courtesy of Sara Ricciardi Studio.

Photography by Giovanni Genzini. Courtesy of Sara Ricciardi Studio.

Photography by Giovanni Genzini. Courtesy of Sara Ricciardi Studio.

4. Dalfilo’s Dream Walkers

For anyone walking through Brera during Milan Design Week, you may have seen a troupe of ethereal wanderers dressed in all-white, carrying giant inflated pillows. These were the Dream Walkers—brought to life by Samira Cogliandro and Cult of Magic performers. Promoting a capsule collection of bed linens, dubbed Land of Dreamers, designed by Sara Ricciardi Studio for Dalfilo’s new flagship store on Corso Garibaldi 60, this dreamy performance and promotional stunt certainly turned heads. Plus, their jumbo balloon pillows surely stirred up some longing for tired tourists.

Photography by Sophie Sobol.

Photography by Sophie Sobol.

5. Marea / Tide by Habits

Inspired by the intersection of suspension, inflatable art and kinetic environments, Marea / Tide by Milan-based industrial design studio Habits spotlights a new, interactive aerial structure that explores how spatial thresholds shape social space. Created by a team of engineers, prototypists and software experts, these lightweight helium-filled modules react in real-time to user engagement, creating a responsive canopy that draws close and rebounds according to a robotic system of monitors, sensors and micro-fans. With a fluid choreography, the project name references the rise and fall of the tides.

Adrienna Matzeg’s work often recalls bright summer afternoons, her vibrant table scapes conjuring a lunchtime setting at an alfresco cafe. But her latest series, After Hours, departs from her previous work completely. The punch needle pieces on black linen depict nighttime moments as conjured by memory. The collection, on view at Toronto’s Abbozzo Gallery, is Matzeg’s first physical solo show (she also exhibits her tapestries online). And it draws inspiration from her experiences on a trip to Jeju Island, South Korea and Kyoto, Japan.

It was so hot and humid during the days that Matzeg and her partner could only sightsee in the morning and at night. “I had this crazy vertigo the whole trip. So that’s what defined the night portion of this project,” she explains. “We did more at night because of how uncomfortable it was to go outside during the day.” The two had also purchased a new camera that allowed them to use a film-like setting. The result: dreamy images of cities at night.

When she got home, Matzeg also bought a colour printer; she printed out her photographs, cut them out and pinned them up. Images of a 7-Eleven facade lit up from within, a lantern glowing against a wall and – of course – a portable fan lying prone on an inscrutable surface are just some of the textile depictions she crafted from these images. One of the most evocative is of a taxi heading out into the night. “In Kyoto, the cabs are all these vintage crown comfort Toyotas, and they all have different little emblems on the top for the different companies — like a flower clover. They’re so precious.”

Matzeg sources her cotton threads in France and Japan. The black linen was completely new to her. “What the black linen does is take these scenes from a crazy, busy part of the city and everything else just falls away.” The objects and architectural structures sometimes seem to be floating against the backdrop — Matzeg likes to play with how she positions them on the canvas — the way that “memory comes to the surface, and everything else is just empty space around it,” she explains. “And I think that’s very special.”

For Matzeg, nudging fibre art from the realm of hobby craft is a core consideration. “I intentionally try to elevate the medium in the way that I approach it — in the detail, in the colours that I choose, also how I think about it, which is more like painting.” She’s shaping her scenes by sculpting shapes and carving colours, rather than relying on line work. This means that her architectural themes are uncannily tangible, even if they also feel like flattened snapshots. She’s translating the chrome and plastic surfaces of a karaoke bar facade into thread; she’s blending her loops into smooth gradients. “I think about it more in terms of planes and materials,” Matzeg says.

At the After Hours show at Abbozzo Gallery, the works are installed in shou sugi ban frames (by Superframe) and mounted on an aubergine-painted wall. Together, they appear like a series of windows into vibrant remembered moments — the vivid hues and sharp forms of the scenes popping against their black backgrounds like vivid reliefs. Sometimes, they even gently wrap around the borders of the canvas, blurring the boundaries between object and frame. They’re on show to delight and inspire until May 30.

All photos courtesy Abbozzo Gallery.

“For Massimo, design was life and life was design,” New York–based designer Michael Bierut once said of his mentor Massimo Vignelli (1931–2014), with whom he worked early in his career. Bierut spent a decade in the 1980s under Vignelli’s watchful eye, absorbing the dos and don’ts of Swiss-centric graphic design.

“In those days,” Bierut recalled, “it seemed to me that the whole city of New York was a permanent Vignelli exhibition. To get to the office, I rode the subway with Vignelli-designed signage, passed people carrying Vignelli-designed Bloomingdale’s shopping bags, and walked by St. Peter’s Church, with its Vignelli-designed pipe organ visible through the window.”

Massimo, together with his wife and lifelong collaborator Lella Vignelli (1934–2016), is now the subject of A Language of Clarity, a retrospective exhibition at Triennale Milano co-curated by Francesca Picchi, Marco Sammicheli, Martin Kerschbaumer, and Thomas Kronbichler (Studio Mut). The show celebrates the couple’s enduring legacy, emphasizing their contributions to modernism, visual culture, and multidisciplinary design. Jasper Morrison’s Office for Design, with David Saik, shaped the exhibition as a coherent system—an environment that itself reflects the Vignelli mindset. Displays of printed ephemera are meticulously arranged in cases, framed, and hung with graphic precision, presenting an all-encompassing overview of their commercial print work.

“Clarity, for the Vignellis, is not an aesthetic preference; it is an ethical and methodological position. Their work is always rooted in a logical process, grounded in essentiality and reduction,” wrote Sammicheli, Director of the Museo del Design Italiano at Triennale Milano. The exhibition is a collaboration with the Vignelli Center for Design Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology (USA), which has preserved more than 750,000 documents, objects, and artifacts spanning book design, visual identity, corporate systems, posters, exhibitions, products, furniture, and architectural photography.

From the outset, the couple operated in near-perfect harmony. Both grew up in Italy—Massimo in Milan, and Lella, born Elena Valle, in Udine. They first met at an architecture conference in 1949, then crossed paths again in Venice while studying at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV), where both their personal and professional partnership began to take shape. They married in 1957 and briefly moved to Chicago, with Lella going on to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), before returning to Milan at the height of Italy’s postwar design renaissance. There, they built a practice that moved fluidly across disciplines—graphics, products, exhibitions, and interiors—for clients including Olivetti, Pirelli, Venini, La Rinascente, Poltrona Frau, and Xerox.

According to Picchi, the Max dinnerware was originally conceived for an Italian manufacturer of plastic figurines and toys. The Vignellis persuaded the company to produce their elegant, modular, stackable, and affordable tableware design; however, the set was never distributed. Though the project initially failed to reach the market, it was later revived through New Yorker Alan Heller and his connections to the American market. Today, it is considered a classic, having received Italy’s highest design honor, the Compasso d’Oro, in 1964.

When Massimo—co-founder and design director of Unimark International (1965–71)—was invited to lead its New York office, he and Lella relocated to the United States. There, they developed corporate identities for major clients including Ford Motor Company, Knoll, Alcoa, Bloomingdale’s, and American Airlines. In 1971, they founded Vignelli Associates, marking the beginning of a new chapter. As Sammicheli observes, “The move to New York is presented as a moment of expansion. It coincides with their rapid international recognition and with the testing of their language within a new economic and cultural system.”

Their output during this period reflects a deeply systematic approach to design—visible in typographic programs, signage systems, publications, posters, and the now-iconic New York City Subway map, all shaped by a precise graphic language. As Picchi notes, “One of the central ambitions of the exhibition is to restore visibility to Lella Vignelli, whose contribution has too often remained unjustly in the background. Lella was an architect of remarkable rigor and sensitivity.” Her work ranged from interiors for the Artemide showroom to furniture for Poltrona Frau, as well as the Handkerchief Chair for Knoll—projects that embody her enduring elegance and exactitude.

Looking back, it feels timely to reassess the Vignellis’ place in design history. While their work was at times underrecognized within the broader narrative of Italian design—particularly between the mid-1960s and 1980s—today they are understood not only as champions of Italian modernism, but as architects of a universal design language defined by discipline and a remarkable consistency that continues to resonate across generations.

The exhibition remains on view at Trienalle until September 6, 2026. To learn more or find tickets, visit tktktk.

Photography by Delfino Sisto Legnani of DSL studio © Triennale Milano

As Milan Design Week comes to a close, the Fuorisalone installation that lingers in my mind is once again that which puts a design spin on the familiar. MIT professor and architect Carlo Ratti partnered with Mutti to create House of Polpa, a temporary structure that turns one of the most ubiquitous pantry staples into an immersive architectural experience. Canned goods are rarely the subject of design discourse, yet their cultural presence is undeniable, as Andy Warhol underscored decades ago.

Here, that same basic can became the starting point for a different kind of exploration. Installed beneath the portico of the Università degli Studi di Milano, approximately twenty thousand cans of Mutti tomato pulp were supported by a steel substructure that allows them to be stacked and gradually removed without compromising their stability.

Visitors walked through the red volume spanning more than 25 meters. Inside, the experience move beyond the visual. Subtle cues of scent, texture, and sound created a sensorial environment referencing the tomato supply chain.

Circularity is also embedded throughout. The flooring, developed using a Mapei resin made from dried tomato peels recovered from processing waste, reinforces the project’s ethos. Nothing there was purely symbolic. Each element points back to cycles of production, use, and reuse. In essence, the project is designed to be ephemeral.

Visitors were invited to remove a can of Mutti Polpa as an example of participation through consumption. The dissolving structure will extend the exhibit’s life into many pasta dinners throughout the region. For the cans that remain, they will be donated. The dispersal of the project is what makes it so compelling. The installation’s destination will be someone’s kitchen, showing how design can minimize waste by thinking beyond single use.

Images by Saverio Lombardi Vallauri, courtesy of INTERNI Magazine.