From Hosoo’s 12th-generation Kyoto looms (founded 1688) to Koyori’s Tokyo debut (founded 2021), Japanese craft collaborations with western designers have spent the last eight years quietly inverting the catalogue model: the workshop is the fixed asset, the foreign designer is the variable, and the brief travels rather than the loom. The news event that anchors May 2026 is Craft x Tech Tokai, the second edition of Hideki Yoshimoto and Maria Cristina Didero’s programme, opening 30 May at Kudan House in Tokyo with six designers paired to six Tokai-region workshops; the streetwear-meets-Struer bookend is Hiroshi Fujiwara’s Fragment Design x Bang & Olufsen pop-up at Isetan Shinjuku on 20 May, ten days before. Read together they sketch the working geometry of the form. ...

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2027 will be the first edition in the show’s 47-year history to be co-directed by a husband-and-wife studio that has built almost everything in salvaged tile and recycled brick — and the first to give equal billing to the woman whom the Pritzker jury did not name. When the 20th International Architecture Exhibition opens to the public on 8 May 2027 at the Giardini and Arsenale, Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu — co-founders of Amateur Architecture Studio in Hangzhou — will become the first Chinese curators ever to take the directorship, working under the theme Do Architecture — For the Possibility of Coexistence Facing a Real Reality. The pre-opening runs 6–7 May; the show closes 21 November 2027. ...

The Antwerp Six fashion architecture is not a metaphor — it is a postcode, a 1893 department-store building at Nationalestraat 28, and a hand-drawn list of six graduates from the 1980–1981 cohort of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. On 28 March 2026, MoMu opened “The Antwerp Six”, the first museum-scale survey of the group, exactly forty years after Walter Van Beirendonck, Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk Van Saene and Marina Yee drove a rented van to the British Designer Show at Olympia and were branded, by reporters who could not pronounce their names, with the label that stuck. The exhibition runs until 17 January 2027. The building it sits inside has been holding the lineage together since 2002. Everything else in this piece is the map. ...

For the first time in La Biennale di Venezia’s 130-year history, the institution has named an Exclusive Partner — Bvlgari, on a 2026–2030 contract that spans three editions of the Art Biennale and anchors a purpose-built Spazio Esedra pavilion in the Giardini and a Fondazione Bvlgari collateral show in the Marciana’s Salone Sansovino. This is what the Bvlgari Venice Biennale partnership actually is: not a sponsorship line in a catalogue, but a title invented for the occasion, written into the institution’s architecture of patronage so that the LVMH-owned Roman jeweller occupies a tier above every other corporate name attached to the 61st International Art Exhibition. No monetary figure has been disclosed, and we are not going to invent one. ...

The Audo Copenhagen Tribeca showroom opened in early May 2026 at 62 Laight Street as the Danish design house’s first flagship outside Scandinavia — a roughly 3,500 sq ft ground-floor space inside a landmarked New York City building, with interiors by Jonas Bjerre-Poulsen of Norm Architects and styling by New York interiors stylist Colin King. The room is arranged as a sequence of residential vignettes around a single Androgyne dining table, with paintings and sculptures by the Portland artist Benjamin Ewing placed across the floor. It is also the clearest statement so far of what the 2023 merger of Menu, By Lassen and The Audo under Italian group Design Holding was supposed to produce: a single Danish house with a single language, exportable to a single American room. ...

The carlo mollino zanotta archive deal is now public, dated, and contractually shaped. On 15 April 2026, Italy’s Agenzia del Demanio — the state property agency that manages Carlo Mollino’s artistic heritage on behalf of the Italian State — announced the outcome of a public tender awarding Zanotta the exclusive industrial-design licence on a selected group of 30 Mollino projects, sourced from drawings held in the Fondo Carlo Mollino at the Politecnico di Torino. The licence runs through 2043. Seven of the 30 designs were already in Zanotta’s catalogue under earlier tribute editions; the other 23 have not been reissued since their original mid-century versions. The first to enter serial production is the 1950 Vertebra table, unveiled at Zanotta’s Milan flagship during Milan Design Week 2026. ...

On Saturday 16 May 2026, Demna staged the gucci cruise 2027 times square show on a runway laid down the centre of Broadway between 46th and 48th Streets, with Gucci taking over roughly fifty surrounding skyscraper-mounted screens to do it. The pre-show video began at 8:30 p.m. local time and intercut nature footage with mock product ads — Gucci Time, Gucci Life, Gucci Acqua, Gucci Gym, Palazzo Gucci Hotel — before Cindy Crawford closed the collection in a black feathered gown and Tom Brady walked it head-to-toe in leather. The show ran behind high black barriers while Midtown traffic, sirens, and honking continued outside. Read against Demna’s first Gucci outing at Memoria seven months earlier, this was the inversion of that 4th-century Milanese basilica: a deliberate move from sacred silence to commercial saturation, staged on the most over-photographed intersection in the world. ...

On 11 March 2026 the Praça do Comércio acquired a new tenant, and the Patricia Urquiola Andaz Lisbon opened its doors at R. do Comércio 132 — a 170-key conversion by Patricia Urquiola for Hyatt’s Andaz lifestyle brand, with Lisbon practice Moerschel Arquitectos as architect of record. It is Hyatt’s first Andaz in Portugal, the first opening since the brand’s refresh, and the sixth hotel in a Urquiola lineage that already runs through Lake Como, Milan, Rome and Knightsbridge. The Baixa address overlooks the Tagus from the river edge of the 18th-century Pombaline grid; the building itself is older than the hotel and considerably older than the lifestyle category it has been enrolled into. What Urquiola has done is a reading rather than a rebuild. ...

Eight painter and sculptor collateral shows fan out across Venice’s palazzi for the 2026 Biennale — and two of them, Baselitz and Barry X Ball, share an island. The Venice Biennale 2026 painters question is rarely answered properly because the answer is geographic, not alphabetical. The 61st International Art Exhibition runs 9 May to 22 November 2026, but the painter-and-sculptor collaterali opened on a staggered calendar between 25 April and 9 May, which means the city has been absorbing them one palazzo at a time. Hernan Bas at Ca’ Pesaro, Anish Kapoor at Palazzo Manfrin, Georg Baselitz at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Marina Abramović at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Nalini Malani at the Magazzini del Sale, Sanya Kantarovsky at Palazzo Loredan, Barry X Ball inside Palladio’s basilica on San Giorgio Maggiore, and Fondazione Dries Van Noten at Palazzo Pisani Moretta — that is the list, and it does not move. ...

Pauline Deltour, who died at 38 on 5 September 2021 after ten years running a Paris studio that produced roughly 180 industrial-design objects, has finally been given the survey her catalogue deserved: the Pauline Deltour MADD Bordeaux retrospective is the first show to hold all of those objects in a single room. “Pauline Deltour, une apparente simplicité / An Apparent Simplicity” began on Wednesday 22 April 2026 with a 7 p.m. reception at 39 rue Bouffard and runs until 21 September 2026, the inaugural show of the partially reopened museum. It is co-curated by Bérengère Bussioz, Konstantin Grcic, Caroline Perret and Étienne Tornier, with exhibition design by Perret (CPWH) and Grcic assisted by Claire Pondard. The Pauline Deltour MADD Bordeaux survey is the first time her commissions for Alessi, Muji, Lexon, La Chance, Hem, Tolix, Discipline, Forge de Laguiole, Established & Sons, Cire Trudon, COR, JEM and Puiforcat have been gathered in one place, and the show is unusually graph-shaped: the curatorial premise is that an industrial designer’s life work is best read as a network of brands, artisans and dates rather than as a chronology of forms. ...

Frank Gehry’s first posthumous exhibition opens on 14 May 2026 at Gagosian Beverly Hills, six months after his death at 96, and it is — pointedly — not a building show. The four sculptures and ten fish drawings hung at 456 North Camden Drive collapse fifty-four years of Frank Gehry object design, from 1972’s Easy Edges cardboard chairs to 2023’s copper Fish on Fire, into one room. Titled simply “Frank Gehry” and running until 27 June 2026, the show was organised by Gagosian with the Gehry family and designed by his own studio in the months before his death. ...

Jonathan Anderson’s Dior Cruise 2027, staged inside Peter Zumthor’s still-warm David Geffen Galleries at LACMA on 13 May 2026, is the first Dior cruise show in Los Angeles since Maria Grazia Chiuri’s 2018 collection in the Upper Las Virgenes Canyon and the first ever directed by a creative director who simultaneously runs Dior menswear, womenswear and haute couture. The Jonathan Anderson Dior Cruise debut closed a thirteen-year arc that began at Loewe in September 2013 and routed, in just over twelve months, through three Dior appointments, the dissolution of the Chiuri-Kim Jones two-house structure, and the handover of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize to a new pair of artistic directors at Madrid. ...

Konstantin Grcic’s scenography for “Pauline Deltour: An Apparent Simplicity”, the roughly 180-object survey of his former assistant that opened at MADD Bordeaux on 22 April 2026, is the seventh major exhibition the Munich-born industrial designer has co-curated or staged since 2009, and the first in which his role is to memorialise rather than to introduce. Co-curated with Bérengère Bussioz, Caroline Perret and Etienne Tornier, the show is one of the inaugural exhibitions of the partial reopening of the Musée des Arts décoratifs et du Design at 39 rue Bouffard in Bordeaux, and the clearest demonstration to date that Konstantin Grcic exhibition design is a second body of work running parallel to his industrial output for Magis, Vitra, Plank and Mattiazzi. ...

On 14 May 2026, LVMH sold Marc Jacobs to an $850M joint venture between WHP Global and G-III Apparel Group, ending a 29-year ownership that began the same year Marc Jacobs was named creative director of Louis Vuitton. The deal closes a chapter of LVMH divestitures that has, since 2020, quietly reshaped the group around three categories — leather goods, jewellery, wines and spirits — while pushing American designer brands, English shirtmakers, and minority creative-founder stakes out of the portfolio. The story is not the Marc Jacobs sale on its own. The story is the pattern: LVMH bought Tiffany, backed Phoebe Philo, and lined itself up for Giorgio Armani while shedding Off-White, Thomas Pink, Stella McCartney, and now Marc Jacobs in roughly eighteen months. ...

On 14 May 2026 the navy Burberry check went up on the sun loungers, parasols and deck chairs of the Hôtel Belles Rives in Juan-les-Pins, signage reading “Burberry Cap d’Antibes” screwed to the jetty, and the fashion hotel takeovers 2026 calendar acquired its loudest summer chapter. Daniel Lee, chief creative officer at Burberry since September 2022, is the named author; the Estène-Chauvin family, who have run the 43-room Art Deco hotel since Boma and Simone Estène bought Villa Saint-Louis in 1929 and opened it as Hôtel Belles Rives in 1930, are the hosts. The residency runs to 30 September 2026 and arrives in a year already crowded with houses moving into hospitality real estate: Loro Piana’s Casa Brera in Milan, Tom Dixon’s Mua Mua at Mulino Estate, Hermès at Capella Kyoto, and the Chanel Cruise show at Casino Municipal de Biarritz. The pattern is not a coincidence. ...

On 11 May 2026, Domus confirmed that Zanotta had been granted an exclusive licence to manufacture 30 Carlo Mollino designs, awarded by Italy’s Agenzia del Demanio via public tender — the year’s most consequential entry in a wider wave of mid-century archive revivals that runs from Cassina’s Le Corbusier Inédits at Salone del Mobile 2026 back through the same company’s 1965 LC Series, sideways into Pierre Jeanneret’s Chandigarh furniture, and out to the $33.5M Claude Lalanne mirror suite auctioned at Sotheby’s New York three weeks earlier. The Mollino licence closes a circuit that the Cassina template opened in 1964. ...

On 1 May 2026, “Zaha Hadid: I Think There Should Be No End to Experimentation” opens at LUMA Arles in the Parc des Ateliers, Arles, France, running until Spring 2027. The zaha hadid paintings luma arles survey, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Arthur Fouray and Lucas Jacques-Witz and produced with the Zaha Hadid Foundation, occupies The Tower, Archives Gallery and Cherry Tree Gallery inside Frank Gehry’s 56-metre stainless-steel pile and reframes every acrylic, ink wash and competition perspective Hadid produced between her 1977 AA thesis and the 2012 Heydar Aliyev Center as the operative drawings of her architecture, not its decoration. ...

Jongjin Park’s Strata of Illusion won the Loewe Craft Prize 2026 at National Gallery Singapore on 12 May with a paradox: a chair-shaped porcelain sculpture made from thousands of sheets of paper, folded and stacked into a block, then fired until the paper burned away and gravity warped the shell. Park, a 44-year-old Assistant Professor at Seoul Women’s University, took the €50,000 main prize and the silver trophy at a ceremony that drew the Loewe Foundation jury — fourteen judges including Deyan Sudjic, Patricia Urquiola, Frida Escobedo, Abraham Thomas and Loewe’s new co-creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez — to Singapore for the first time in the prize’s ten-year history. Two special mentions of €5,000 each went to Álvaro Catalán de Ocón with the Baba Tree Master Weavers of Ghana for Frafra Tapestry #2 (2024), and to Graziano Visintin for Collier (2025), a set of geometric gold necklaces inlaid with niello. The shape of the answer to “what won the Loewe Craft Prize 2026” is therefore not just a name but a method: paper as a kiln-fugitive substrate, porcelain slip as a skin, gravity as the final hand. ...

When FOA’s Yokohama International Passenger Terminal opened at Osanbashi Pier in 2002, no one called it parametricism. Twenty-four years later, when Zaha Hadid Architects’ Audi Origin pavilion arrived at Portrait Milano in April 2026, no one called it anything else. The parametricism lineage is the story of how a working method became a style, how a style became a brand, and how a brand became — depending on who you ask this month — either the dominant grammar of late-capitalist architecture or a premise that has quietly expired. The shape of the answer is a near-quarter-century arc with three protagonists (FOA, Patrik Schumacher, ZHA), one corpse (the 2008 manifesto’s optimism), and one open question — which is what the Audi Origin pavilion at Milan Design Week 2026 was really for. ...

Toyo Ito spent five decades teaching Japanese architecture to dissolve the line between building and atmosphere; in 2026, at eighty-four, he turned around at Triennale Milano and dedicated the show to someone else. Andrea Branzi: Continuous Present, open at the Palazzo dell’Arte until 4 October 2026, is conceived by Ito as a posthumous reading of the Florentine radical who died in 2023. The institutional curators of record are Stefano Bassoli and Francesca Alessandrini, but the conceptual force is Ito’s, and reading the show without the rest of his work — White U, Silver Hut, the Tower of Winds, Sendai Mediatheque, the TOD’S facade, Tama Library, Taichung — is to miss the argument. This piece walks the Toyo Ito architecture lineage from a concrete U-shape built for his sister in Nakano in 1976 to a Milan exhibition that argues a different Italian read of the same questions Ito has been asking in Japan for fifty years. ...