AMO Design Crossovers: Prada to SolidNature

AMO opened a stone-carved supermarket inside the ME Milan Il Duca on 22 April 2026, and in doing so produced the cleanest summary in twenty-seven years of what the AMO design crossovers actually are: a think-tank that designs objects when the brief is to make a brand legible at one-to-one scale. The Il Sonno Supermarket, made with SolidNature for Designboom’s Room for Dreams programme at Milan Design Week 2026, stocks onyx bananas and travertine milk cartons on shelves under fluorescent light, twelve SKUs available to pre-order through SolidNature until 21 June 2026. AMO director Samir Bantal framed the installation as “freezing the idea of time.” The harder question the installation answers is one Rem Koolhaas opened in 1999 when Prada commissioned the New York Epicenter store: what does the research arm of an architecture firm do when it is not designing buildings?

The shape of the answer is that AMO, for twenty-seven years, has been the wing of OMA that translates Miuccia Prada’s seasonal vocabulary into rooms, exhibitions, pavilions, runway sets and, now, stone groceries. The Il Sonno Supermarket is not a departure from the Prada brief — it is the same brief applied to a different client. SolidNature founder David Mahyari commissions architects to do with stone what Prada commissions AMO to do with fashion: build the world in which the material reads as itself. Below, the supermarket, the 1999 founding commission, every Prada runway set AMO has built since 2004, every architecture-adjacent design project from the Seoul Transformer to Countryside at the Guggenheim, the Venice Biennale work that established AMO as a curator, and the SolidNature thesis that puts onyx bananas on the cover.

Il Sonno Supermarket, ME Milan Il Duca, April 2026

The Il Sonno Supermarket opened on 22 April 2026 at ME Milan Il Duca, the Foster + Partners-renovated hotel on Piazza della Repubblica that anchored Designboom’s Room for Dreams programme for Milan Design Week 2026. The installation occupies a single retail-scaled room inside the hotel, dressed as a corner shop with refrigerated cases, wire baskets, price labels and overhead fluorescent strips. The merchandise is the design. Bananas are carved from onyx in three ripening tones; milk cartons are travertine, the paper-fold creases rendered in stone; milk bottles are Flamingo Nebula marble, the pink-and-cream veining matching the colour-of-the-product brief; steaks are red marble, marbled with white fat in the same pattern a butcher would cut for. The sandwiches are the most architecturally legible object — layered travertine, red marble and green onyx, the cross-section reading as a section drawing.

Every object in the supermarket is carved from reclaimed off-cuts from SolidNature’s quarry-to-fabrication waste stream. The twelve SKUs — bananas, milk cartons, milk bottles, steaks, sandwiches, plus six further objects rotating through the shelves — are available to pre-order through SolidNature until 21 June 2026. The pricing is positioned at the high end of stone-object commerce, in keeping with the bespoke-fabrication character of the work; SolidNature has not published a public price list, and orders go through the brand’s project sales channel. The off-cut sourcing is the load-bearing economic note: the supermarket is, in the SolidNature schema, a way to monetise the residual material that quarry-cut slabs leave behind.

Samir Bantal, AMO’s director since 2018, framed the installation in the Designboom interview around the line “freezing the idea of time” — the supermarket as a still life that holds the everyday object at the moment before it is bought, eaten, discarded. The framing is consistent with AMO’s exhibition-design vocabulary: the room sets up a single legible thesis (groceries as monuments) and lets the visitor read it without further explanation. Bantal has run AMO from Rotterdam since 2018, having joined OMA in 2008; his prior AMO projects include the Countryside, The Future exhibition at the Guggenheim New York in 2020 and the 2018 SS Prada women’s set with 2x4.

The supermarket sits inside the Room for Dreams programme, which Designboom curated across multiple suites and public rooms at ME Milan Il Duca during the 19 to 25 April 2026 design-week dates. Other contributors to the programme included independent studios working in textile, lighting and ceramics; the AMO-SolidNature installation occupied the ground-floor retail-shaped room because the supermarket conceit required corridor-scale visibility. The hotel is on Piazza della Repubblica, a fifteen-minute walk from the Salone del Mobile shuttle stops at Brera and a five-minute walk from the Fuorisalone activations in the Porta Nuova district.

The Prada Epicenter and the founding of AMO, 1999

AMO was founded in 1999. The trigger was the commission from Prada to design the New York Epicenter store at 575 Broadway, which Rem Koolhaas accepted on the condition that OMA’s research arm — until then an informal in-house unit doing speculative work for OMA’s architecture projects — be formalised as a separate entity with a separate staff and a separate identity. The Epicenter brief required research that exceeded the architectural deliverables: studies of luxury retail, customer behaviour, the geography of SoHo, the technology of point-of-sale systems, the structural condition of the 1909 Beaux Arts building OMA was renovating. AMO was set up to handle the research; OMA handled the architecture. The store opened in December 2001.

The Epicenter commission established the working method that every subsequent AMO design crossover has followed. AMO produces the thesis — the conceptual frame that the project will read against — and OMA, or a third-party fabricator, produces the object. For the New York store, the thesis was the “wave” of the central performance space, a sloping zebra-wood floor that turned the basement into an amphitheatre when the boutique furniture was cleared. For the Prada runway sets that started in 2004, the thesis is seasonal and changes every six months. For the Il Sonno Supermarket, the thesis is the stone-as-grocery still life. The constant is the gap between research and object that AMO institutionalised in 1999.

The Prada relationship that the 1999 commission opened has been continuous since. Beyond the New York Epicenter and the runway sets, AMO designed Prada’s Beverly Hills Epicenter (opened 2004), the Prada Transformer rotating pavilion in Seoul (2009), the Fondazione Prada headquarters at Largo Isarco in Milan (opened 2015), Serial Classics and Portable Classics exhibitions at Fondazione Prada (2015), and a series of OMA*AMO for/with Prada exhibitions including Ca’ Corner della Regina in Venice (2011). The relationship is the longest single-client engagement in AMO’s history; nothing else AMO has done — including the SolidNature work — approaches the duration or the breadth.

The Koolhaas-Miuccia working relationship is the operative substrate underneath the institutional one. Koolhaas and Miuccia Prada have collaborated on the Prada projects since the late 1990s, with Koolhaas crediting Miuccia for the conceptual framing of each season and Miuccia crediting Koolhaas for the architectural translation. The working method is conversational rather than briefed: Miuccia describes the season; AMO returns with a thesis; the runway set is built; the show happens. The lineage of sets between 2004 and 2026 reads as a record of that conversation.

Prada runway sets, 2004-2026

AMO has designed Prada’s runway sets continuously since 2004 — twenty-two years across men’s and women’s collections, two shows per season, four shows per year, roughly eighty-five sets in total. The sets are built in temporary architecture inside the Fondazione Prada Deposito at Largo Isarco in Milan, the Via Bergamo headquarters before that, or off-site Milan venues when the scale required them. The cataloguing below lists only the sets that produced design-press coverage substantial enough to enter the Prada-AMO canon; many seasons produced sets that AMO regards as iterations on prior work rather than independent statements.

The 2007 AW menswear set was the spiralling orange fossil-like environment that wrapped the runway in a single continuous spiral of foam-rendered stone, the colour pitched between Pantone orange and rust. The 2011 AW menswear set was the two-storey steel house, a literal building inside the show space, the runway running through its ground floor and the upper storey hung with the season’s coats as if in a domestic closet. The 2012 SS womenswear set was the asphalt road with foam cars — the runway as roadway, parked cars on either side, the models walking down what read as a Milan side street. The 2018 SS women’s set, designed with 2x4, was the illustrated-cartoonist environment, the walls and floor printed with a single illustrator’s-line drawing that extended around the room. The 2023 SS menswear set was the oversized paper doll’s-house, a scaled-up children’s playhouse with the proportions and cutout-furniture vocabulary intact.

Each of these sets functioned as a frame for the collection rather than a backdrop. The 2007 spiral wrapped the menswear in fossil imagery that the season’s textures referenced. The 2011 steel house gave the AW coats a domestic interior to be read against. The 2012 asphalt road tied the SS womenswear to urban-street ready-to-wear in a way that pre-empted the season’s press coverage. The 2018 illustrated environment turned the show space into a single inhabitable drawing; the 2023 doll’s-house made the menswear legible at the scale of toy-furniture proportions. The constant is the AMO method: a single thesis, executed at one-to-one scale, that the collection reads against without explanation.

The continuity of the relationship matters for the SolidNature crossover. AMO has been making temporary scenographic environments at Prada-scale fabrication standards for twenty-two years; the Il Sonno Supermarket is the same fabrication competence applied to a smaller room with a different client. The wire baskets, the fluorescent overhead, the price labels and the carved stone groceries are all built to the same Deposito-grade quality that the spiralling orange fossil set was built to in 2007. The brief changed; the workshop did not.

Pavilions and exhibitions: Seoul Transformer to Countryside

The architecture-adjacent design projects AMO has produced for Prada outside the runway sets include the Prada Transformer in Seoul (2009), the Fondazione Prada Milan headquarters (opened 2015), the OMA*AMO for/with Prada exhibition at Ca’ Corner della Regina in Venice (2011), and the Serial Classics and Portable Classics exhibitions at Fondazione Prada in 2015. The Countryside, The Future exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2020) is the largest AMO-led project outside the Prada relationship; it was commissioned by the Guggenheim and ran from 20 February to 14 August 2020, with most of the run truncated by the COVID-19 closures.

The Prada Transformer was a tetrahedral rotating pavilion installed in Seoul’s Gyeonghui Palace grounds in 2009. The structure had four faces — a hexagon, a cross, a circle and a rectangle — and was rotated by crane between four configurations to host four sequential programmes: a fashion exhibition, a film festival, an art show and a special event. Each rotation reoriented one face as the floor and another as the ceiling, with the architecture itself doing the curatorial work of redefining the space for each programme. The pavilion ran from April to July 2009.

The Fondazione Prada headquarters at Largo Isarco opened on 9 May 2015 in the redeveloped Largo Isarco distillery complex south of Milan’s centre. The campus comprises seven preserved industrial buildings and three new structures, including the gold-leaf-clad Haunted House, the elevated Podium and the Cinema. The Torre — the white concrete tower visible from the Milan ring road — opened in April 2018. The complex hosts Fondazione Prada’s exhibition programme, the Prada Foundation art collection, and the Bar Luce designed by Wes Anderson. The architecture is OMA-led; the curatorial and exhibition-design layer is AMO, with the Serial Classics and Portable Classics inaugurations in 2015 establishing the exhibition-design vocabulary the foundation has worked within since.

The OMA*AMO for/with Prada exhibition at Ca’ Corner della Regina in Venice opened in May 2011 as part of the Fondazione Prada’s Venice satellite programme. The exhibition documented thirteen years of OMA-AMO-Prada collaboration through models, drawings, photographs and reconstructed fragments of prior runway sets. The catalogue published with the exhibition is the principal printed record of the AMO Prada work between 1999 and 2011. Serial Classics (May to August 2015) and Portable Classics (May to September 2015) opened together at Fondazione Prada Milan and at Ca’ Corner della Regina; both exhibitions paired Roman and Greek classical sculpture with AMO-designed display structures that treated the antiquities as serially reproducible objects.

Countryside, The Future at the Guggenheim New York was the largest single AMO commission outside the Prada portfolio. The exhibition occupied the museum’s full rotunda from 20 February to 14 August 2020 (most of which was COVID-closed), and presented a thesis-driven survey of non-urban human settlement: agriculture, data centres, rural labour, climate adaptation, animal husbandry, gated communities. The exhibition was credited to Rem Koolhaas, AMO and Samir Bantal as joint authors, with research contributions from a network of universities and research institutions Bantal had been working with since 2014. The exhibition catalogue, published by Taschen as Countryside, A Report, runs to 350,000 words and is the most extensive AMO publication to date.

Venice Biennale: AMO as curator

AMO’s Venice Biennale work establishes the firm as a curator on its own terms, separate from the Prada relationship. The four principal Biennale projects — Cronocaos (2010), Public Works (2012), When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 (2013), and Elements of Architecture (2014) — span the 12th, 13th, 14th International Architecture Exhibitions and the Bern 1969 reconstruction at Ca’ Corner della Regina. Each was directed or co-directed by Koolhaas with AMO research support, and each produced a printed catalogue that has entered the architecture-curatorial canon.

Cronocaos opened at the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale (Kazuyo Sejima’s “People Meet in Architecture”) in 2010 as an OMA-AMO research project on preservation. The thesis — that architectural preservation has accelerated to the point of preserving buildings before they have aged — was presented through diagrams, photographs and a wall-mounted timeline. The installation was co-directed by Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf and Stephan Petermann. Public Works followed at the 13th Biennale in 2012 (David Chipperfield’s “Common Ground”) as a thematic survey of OMA-AMO public-sector projects.

When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, curated by Germano Celant with Thomas Demand and Koolhaas, opened at Ca’ Corner della Regina in 2013 as a Fondazione Prada satellite project to the 55th Venice Art Biennale. The exhibition reconstructed Harald Szeemann’s 1969 Kunsthalle Bern exhibition When Attitudes Become Form inside Ca’ Corner’s eighteenth-century palazzo, overlaying the original gallery floor plan and wall positions onto the Venetian rooms. AMO did the spatial-design work; the curatorial direction was Celant-Demand-Koolhaas. The exhibition is one of the most-cited curatorial projects of the 2010s, on both the art and the architecture sides.

Elements of Architecture at the 14th Biennale in 2014 was Koolhaas’s own directorial project as curator of the Biennale itself. The Central Pavilion was reorganised into fifteen rooms, each dedicated to a single architectural element: floor, ceiling, wall, window, door, stair, escalator, elevator, ramp, balcony, facade, roof, fireplace, corridor, toilet. AMO produced the room-by-room research and the published catalogue Elements of Architecture, a 2,600-page Taschen volume that compiles the fifteen elements into a single architectural reference. The Biennale’s thesis — that architecture should be read at the scale of its elements rather than its monuments — has shaped a decade of subsequent architecture pedagogy.

The Biennale work establishes the AMO method outside the Prada client relationship. The room-by-room thesis structure of Elements of Architecture is the same structure that the Il Sonno Supermarket uses — one room, one legible thesis, one fabrication standard. The reconstruction logic of When Attitudes Become Form is the same logic Serial Classics applied to Roman sculpture in 2015. The exhibition-as-publication logic that produced the 2,600-page Elements catalogue is the same logic that produced the 350,000-word Countryside report. The Prada commissions and the Biennale commissions feed each other; AMO is not two firms.

SolidNature and the stone-as-luxury thesis

SolidNature was founded in Amsterdam in 2011 by David Mahyari and his brother. The company sources, fabricates and supplies more than 600 stone varieties from a network of 150 quarries across thirty-plus countries — the largest single-source stone catalogue in the European luxury market. The product mix runs from slab supply to bespoke architectural fabrication: bathroom surfaces, kitchen islands, restaurant interiors, lobby cladding, retail-store floors, sculptural objects. The clientele is split between architecture practices, interior designers and direct-to-consumer commissions; the company’s headquarters and showroom are in Amsterdam, with project offices in London, Los Angeles and Dubai.

The architectural collaborations are the marketing engine. SolidNature has produced installations with OMA (the Prada relationship is the bridge to AMO), Sabine Marcelis (the Dutch designer whose stone-and-resin work has dominated the Salone del Mobile programme since 2018), BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), Alex Proba (the Los Angeles-based designer whose colour-blocked stone tabletops have been the SolidNature signature in the US market), and Studio Ossidiana (the Rotterdam-based architecture practice whose Petrified Carpet at the 2020 Venice Biennale used SolidNature stone). Each collaboration is a single project; SolidNature commissions the design, supplies the stone, fabricates the object, and uses the resulting installation as a portfolio piece.

The AMO collaboration sits at the top of the design-press hierarchy of SolidNature’s installation portfolio. The 2026 Milan Design Week run included the Il Sonno Supermarket at ME Milan Il Duca and ancillary installations at the SolidNature Milan project office during the same week; the supermarket carried the design-press coverage. The pre-order window — twelve SKUs available through 21 June 2026 — converts the installation from a one-week scenographic event into a four-month commercial campaign, with the press coverage that ran during the design week functioning as the marketing for the orders that close in June.

David Mahyari’s positioning of the company is the thesis underneath the AMO collaboration. SolidNature sells stone as a luxury material on the same register as the leather, silk and gold that the European fashion houses sell. The bespoke architectural fabrication is the equivalent of haute couture; the slab supply is the equivalent of ready-to-wear; the off-cut reclamation that produced the supermarket’s groceries is the equivalent of the deadstock-as-design vocabulary that Marni, Marine Serre and other fashion brands have used since 2018. The AMO commission gives the thesis its most-photographed object: the onyx banana on the fluorescent-lit refrigerated shelf, which is a still life that doubles as a price list.

AMO design crossovers, 1999–2026

The table is not exhaustive of every Prada show set or every AMO research project; it lists the projects with substantial design-press coverage in the AMO canon. Two patterns become legible across the twenty-seven-year span. First, the Prada relationship is continuous from 1999 to 2026 with no break; every other client is a single-project relationship. Second, the work scales from research (1999) through retail interior (2001, 2004) through scenography (2004–2026) through architecture (2009, 2015, 2018) through exhibition curation (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2020) and back to scenography-as-product (2026). The Il Sonno Supermarket is, in this reading, the synthesis of the scenography and the exhibition lines: a room that is also an object catalogue.

The Bantal era and the design-object turn

Samir Bantal’s tenure as AMO director since 2018 has shifted the firm’s centre of gravity toward exhibitions and design objects and away from pure-architecture support work. The Countryside exhibition in 2020 was the first major project he led as director; the SS 2018 Prada women’s illustrated set was his last as a senior staff member before the directorship. Between 2018 and 2026, AMO has produced fewer architecture-research deliverables for OMA’s building projects and more standalone exhibition and design commissions. The Il Sonno Supermarket is the most fully realised design-object project of his directorship.

The shift matters for the SolidNature crossover because it explains why AMO took the commission. AMO under Koolhaas’s direct control in the 2000s would have read the SolidNature brief as too small — a single-room installation with a twelve-SKU pre-order catalogue is not the scale of a Prada Transformer or a Fondazione Prada campus. AMO under Bantal reads it as a complete project: the room is the thesis, the off-cut sourcing is the economic argument, the pre-order window is the commercial outcome. The brief is small in floor area and large in conceptual density, which is the Bantal-era AMO sweet spot.

The other Bantal-era projects that share this profile include the Prada Frames programme — the annual symposium AMO has organised at Fondazione Prada during Milan Design Week since 2022 — and the various Prada exhibition designs at the Largo Isarco campus from 2020 onward. Prada Frames in particular has functioned as the rehearsal space for the Il Sonno Supermarket idea: a research-driven thematic frame, a single curated room, a printed catalogue, and a Milan Design Week date that delivers the design-press coverage. The 2026 edition of Prada Frames ran in parallel with the supermarket; the AMO-SolidNature project sat outside the Prada portfolio but inside the same week and the same press cycle.

The succession question — who runs AMO after Bantal — is the open one. Bantal is forty-three in 2026; Koolhaas is eighty-one. The relationship between AMO and OMA continues to flow through Koolhaas’s seat at the head of both firms, but the operating direction of AMO is Bantal’s. The SolidNature commission is, in this reading, a Bantal signature: a small, dense, marketable design-object project that produces a still life and a pre-order list rather than a building. Future AMO commissions are likely to look more like the supermarket and less like the Seoul Transformer.

Stone-as-marble-as-material: the wider 2026 design-week frame

The Il Sonno Supermarket is one of three significant stone-as-luxury installations at Milan Design Week 2026, alongside SolidNature’s parallel showroom programme and the Dimorestudio stone-furniture presentation at the Palazzo Cingoli. The wider frame — stone as the design-object material of the moment — has been building since Salone 2022, when Sabine Marcelis’s Totem of Stone for SolidNature established the scenographic vocabulary the supermarket inherits. The 2024 and 2025 editions of Milan Design Week saw stone installations from Studio Ossidiana, Patricia Urquiola for Budri, and Formafantasma for Antolini; the 2026 edition takes the vocabulary into the still-life-as-grocery territory that the AMO commission opens.

The economic logic underneath the design-press coverage is the off-cut question. Quarry-to-fabrication waste is the single largest cost line in the European stone-fabrication industry, and brands like SolidNature, Antolini and Budri have spent the last five years building marketing programmes that monetise the residual material. The Il Sonno Supermarket is the most extreme version of this marketing — taking the smallest residual off-cuts (banana-scale, milk-bottle-scale) and turning them into the highest-margin product the brand sells. The pre-order list is the conversion mechanism; the AMO commission is the marketing.

The Milan Design Week 2026 dates ran from 19 to 25 April, with the Salone del Mobile fair at Rho Fiera Milano and the Fuorisalone programme distributed across the city. The ME Milan Il Duca opened the Room for Dreams programme on the first weekend; the AMO-SolidNature supermarket was the lead installation of the programme through the entire week. The press coverage ran across Designboom, Dezeen, Domus, Wallpaper, Architectural Digest and the design supplements of the New York Times, the Financial Times and Corriere della Sera between 22 April and 5 May. The pre-order deadline of 21 June 2026 closes the campaign roughly two months after the week ended.

What the supermarket says about the next AMO commission

The Il Sonno Supermarket is the cleanest argument AMO has made in twenty-seven years that the firm’s research method scales to any brief. The 1999 Prada Epicenter was research-as-architecture. The 2010s Biennale work was research-as-curation. The 2020 Countryside was research-as-publication. The 2026 supermarket is research-as-product, with the SolidNature pre-order list functioning as the deliverable that the architecture, curation and publication lines have not been able to convert into. The argument is that AMO can take the same room-by-room thesis-driven method that produced Elements of Architecture and run it through a stone-carving workshop into twelve SKUs on a refrigerated shelf.

The next AMO commission to watch is whichever client books the firm next on the SolidNature model — a single room, a single thesis, a fabricated object catalogue, a pre-order window. The Prada relationship continues in parallel; the 2026 SS and AW shows have already happened, and the 2027 SS sets are in development at the Deposito. The Biennale work continues at the next-Architecture-Biennale rhythm. But the SolidNature model is portable, and the design-press coverage that Il Sonno Supermarket has generated will make it portable to other material-driven luxury brands looking for an AMO collaboration that does not require a Prada-scale budget or a Largo Isarco-scale campus.

The biographical detail that anchors all of this is the Koolhaas-Miuccia-Bantal triangle. Koolhaas opened the relationship in 1999. Miuccia has framed every Prada-AMO brief for twenty-seven years. Bantal has run the AMO side of every project since 2018, and is the credited director of the SolidNature commission. The three-generation working relationship is the institutional memory that makes the AMO design crossovers legible as a single twenty-seven-year arc, with the Il Sonno Supermarket as its 2026 conclusion. The next chapter — Bantal’s solo direction of AMO after Koolhaas — will tell us whether the supermarket is an anomaly or the new shape.

The onyx bananas, in this reading, are not a joke. They are the AMO method at its smallest scale: a single material, a single thesis, a single object that reads as itself. Miuccia Prada has been buying that method for twenty-seven years. David Mahyari has just bought it for four months, with a pre-order list that closes on 21 June. The price of the onyx banana is the price of the AMO design crossover compressed to a single SKU.