Archive

Lina Ghotmeh’s “Reality is Fluid” manifesto, published in Domus 1112 on 28 May 2026, is best read backwards — as a Rosetta stone you hold up to Stone Garden in Beirut, the 550,000-brick Hermès leather workshop in Normandy, and the timber Serpentine Pavilion of 2023 to discover that they were all making the same argument before she gave it a name. The Lina Ghotmeh manifesto is short on prescription and long on syntax — a single ecological sentence stretched across two decades of built work, from the 356-metre Estonian National Museum in Tartu to the unbuilt revolving forest observatory at Nanto. Read in order, the projects index the manifesto more clearly than the manifesto indexes the projects. ...

Stefano Boeri’s Rome work has, in eighteen months, turned from a one-off Colosseum-perimeter commission into an 8,000-square-metre rooftop garden on an ATAC tram depot the city had left empty since 2006 — and the gesture grounds the Milanese Vertical Forest vocabulary, formerly reserved for new towers, into the city’s nineteenth-century industrial fabric. The Stefano Boeri Rome catalogue is small but precisely split: Stefano Boeri Architetti is converting the 16,000 sqm Deposito delle Vittorie at Piazza Bainsizza in the Prati-Della Vittoria district, while sister practice Stefano Boeri Interiors has just finished the southern-ambulatory restoration of the Colosseum for the Parco Archeologico del Colosseo. Two projects, two practices, two centuries of fabric — and one designer, Stefano Boeri, translating a Milan signature into a Roman idiom. ...

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? ...

Frank Gehry will spend his 97th year (b. February 1929) drafting a parametric glass canopy over the tram station at the Getty Center, a hilltop institution he had not touched since the early 1990s. The frank gehry institutional commissions catalogued below — from the 1989 Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein to the May 2026 Getty tram-station revamp confirmed by Dezeen on 29 May — span 37 years, four continents and a single argument: that civic culture deserves a roof shaped like weather. The new Getty job, awarded to Gehry Partners alongside WHY Architecture and landscape studio Olin, bookends the run that started on Rolf Fehlbaum’s grass in Baden-Württemberg. ...

When Ferrari rolled the Luce under Santiago Calatrava’s Vela dome in Rome on 25 May 2026 — five seats, four rear-hinged doors, 1,050 horsepower, 0–100 km/h in 2.5 seconds, €550,000 — the jony ive lovefrom portfolio finally had its supercar. The Luce is the seventh year of LoveFrom, the San Francisco studio Jony Ive and Marc Newson opened in June 2019, and it is the clearest answer yet to a question the design press has been circling since Ive walked out of Apple Park: what does a post-Apple Ive practice actually build, and for whom. ...

Gucci becomes the first luxury fashion house to title-sponsor a Formula 1 team on 27 May 2026, the Luca de Meo era at Kering announcing itself with a 130-character renaming of the Enstone-based constructor to the Gucci Racing Alpine Formula One Team from the 2027 season. The deal answers a question that has hung over luxury for thirty-five years — would a fashion house ever own the topline of a Grand Prix car the way Marlboro and West and Vodafone once did — and it answers in red, green and gold rather than the BWT pink and blue Alpine has worn since 2021. Gucci President and CEO Francesca Bellettini’s statement, “Gucci becomes the first luxury fashion house to serve as Title Partner in Formula 1,” is the screenshottable line. The harder question is what every other house has done in the paddock since 1969, and why none of them did this. ...

Marco De Vincenzo’s 27 May 2026 appointment to Givenchy as Head of Leather Goods Design completes an eighteen-month restructure that has put designer-led leather goods leadership in place at every commercially significant LVMH house except Berluti. The question this piece answers — every LVMH house with a dedicated leather goods design lead in 2025–2026, and where each designer came from — turns out to map almost perfectly onto the group’s wider talent rotation since Jonathan Anderson left Loewe in March 2025. Eight houses, eight different reporting structures, one consistent decision: at the houses where the bag drives the P&L, the bag now has its own author. ...

Bjarke Ingels’ CityWave closes the only multi-architect tower district Milan has built in half a century, 22 years after Arata Isozaki, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind won the 2004 masterplan for the 36.6-hectare former Fiera grounds. The question — every tower in the Milan CityLife towers district, by architect and completion year, 2015 to 2026 — has a clean answer because the consortium that won the competition imposed a clean rule: one signature tower per Pritzker-class author, then one residential complex per author, then a final phase by a single invited practice. Isozaki’s Allianz Tower delivered in 2015, Hadid’s Generali Tower in 2017, Libeskind’s PwC Tower in 2020, and BIG’s CityWave is nearly complete as of May 2026. That is the district. Everything else — the park, the metro stop, the residential blocks, the LEED Gold pre-certification on the office towers — is scaffolding around four projects by four authors. ...

When Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby announced on 20 May 2026 that their London studio would close after 30 years, they ended a partnership that put one product into the hands of 8,000 Olympic torchbearers and another under millions of office workers. The question this piece sets out to answer is the simplest one anybody asks after such an announcement: what, exactly, did Barber Osgerby make between 1996 and 2026? The answer is roughly four dozen products of consequence, spread across a tight roster of manufacturers — Vitra, Flos, Cappellini, B&B Italia, Established & Sons, Knoll, Hermès, Isokon Plus, Mutina, Fredericia and Emeco — plus one Olympic torch, one circulating coin, and two sister practices that outlived the founding studio in different corporate hands. What follows is that catalogue, in order. ...

The giambattista valli buyback from Artémis, announced by Business of Fashion in May 2026, is the second time in eight years that a Paris fashion house has undone a Pinault-family bet — the first was Stella McCartney rolling back the 2001 Kering joint venture in March 2018. Valli’s reacquisition of his namesake house, Giambattista Valli SAS, from the holding company chaired by François-Henri Pinault closes a nine-year minority-to-majority arc that began with a 2017 stake and a 2021 control move. It is a small deal by Kering or LVMH standards, but it is the second clean unwinding of a founder-house from Artémis since the Stella McCartney departure, and it arrives during the most aggressive founder-buyback cycle in three decades. ...

Sou Fujimoto’s House of Dior Shinsaibashi opened in Osaka on 21 May 2026 as the third star-architect Dior maison in East Asia in 23 years, after SANAA’s Tokyo and Christian de Portzamparc’s Seoul. The new four-storey flagship in the Shinsaibashi-suji shopping district wraps a ribbed, undulating facade — Fujimoto’s reading of haute couture drapery — around interiors by Peter Marino and an upper-floor restaurant by Anne-Sophie Pic. Dior Shinsaibashi is the most architecturally legible chapter yet in LVMH’s 23-year campaign to commission named architects for its Asian flagships rather than fit out anonymous retail shells. ...

The audo copenhagen norm architects relationship is the longest brand-architecture alignment in the current Scandinavian design industry, and it is the reason a 1979 flatware company called Menu and a 1942 Lassen-family lighting house called by Lassen now share an 1880s neoclassical building at Aarhusgade 130 in Nordhavn that simultaneously functions as a showroom, a boutique hotel, a concept shop, a cafe, a restaurant, an event space and a stack of residences. Audo Copenhagen is the consolidated brand name that the Design Holding portfolio formalised in 2019 to operate that building and the catalogue inside it. Norm Architects is the studio that drew the building, that draws most of the furniture inside it, and that — in May 2026 — re-staged the entire format in lower Manhattan as Audo House Tribeca. The brand was assembled around the architecture. That is the unusual thing to record. ...

Frank gehry furniture is a single 54-year argument that any material — corrugated cardboard, ColorCore plastic laminate, bentwood maple, mirror-polished stainless steel, ColorCore again, then bronze and copper — can be made to behave like architecture. The argument opens in 1972 at the Easy Edges workshop on Cloverfield Boulevard in Santa Monica, and it closes, posthumously, on 14 May 2026 in the back room of Gagosian Beverly Hills, where Larry Gagosian and the Gehry family have hung Fish on Fire — the last fish Frank Gehry executed in copper — beside a 2014 bear and a 2023 ColorCore crocodile under ten ink-and-watercolour drawings of fish in motion. Between those two dates sit the Wiggle Chair, the Fish Lamps, the Snake Lamps, the Knoll bentwood collection led by Cross Check, the Alessi Pito kettle, the 2006 Tiffany & Co. jewellery, the 2012 Gagosian fish revival, and the 2023 Louis Vuitton Capucines handbags. The 2026 show, organised six months after Gehry’s death and designed by his own studio, is also the prologue to “O Século de Gehry” at Fundação de Serralves in Porto, opening June 2026 and running until January 2027. ...

Luca de Meo’s first eight months as Kering CEO add up to a Capital Markets Day in Florence on April 16, 2026, five different creative-director appointments inherited or made across the portfolio, a Gucci Times Square takeover that BoF on May 24, 2026 called “back under the microscope,” and a three-phase plan called ReconKering that asks investors to wait until end-2030 to see the payoff. This is a Kering portfolio refresh on a scale the group has not attempted since the disposal of the sport-and-lifestyle assets, and it lands as the Kering AGM convenes May 28, 2026 at 3 PM Paris time at 40 rue de Sèvres. The question every house faces is no longer who runs it. It is what shape it should be by the time the Lead phase opens in 2029. ...

Giambattista Valli’s 20 May 2026 designer buyback from Artémis is the third clean designer reclamation since 2018 — and the first to expose how loud the difference is between a family holding (Pinault’s Artémis) and a listed luxury group (Pinault’s Kering). The three cases that actually qualify — Valli in May 2026, Stella McCartney twice (March 2018 from Kering, January 2025 from LVMH), and Phoebe Philo as a permanent founder-majority structure since October 2023 — do not form a wave. They form a small, specific pattern that gets misread every time a designer leaves a group. ...

Hiroshi Fujiwara’s 3 June 2026 Bang & Olufsen capsule is the 22nd named Fragment Design collaboration in 22 years — and the first to push the double lightning-bolt cabinet from a USD 36 Pikachu keychain and a USD 150 Air Jordan 1 Low all the way to a GBP 53,000 made-to-order Beosystem 9000c. Reading the Fragment Design collaborations as one cabinet, from the 2002 HTM Air Force 1 to a Struer-built stereo cabinet in 2026, is the cleanest way to see how a Tokyo graphic studio has spent two decades acting as the single most prolific co-sign engine in global product culture. ...

Matthieu Blazy’s eighteen-month walk from Bottega Veneta to Chanel produced a USD 19.3 billion house’s first “high single-digit” growth quarter — and three Margiela-Margiela-Simons stops on a single CV that Leena Nair calls “one of the most talented designers in the world.” The Matthieu Blazy career, traced strictly by appointment date, runs through six houses in nineteen years: Raf Simons’s independent label in 2007, Maison Margiela couture from 2010, Celine under Phoebe Philo from 2014, Calvin Klein 205W39NYC under Simons again from 2016, Bottega Veneta from 2020, and Chanel from December 2024. The pattern matters because almost no other working creative director has been inside that many of the houses now defining 2026 womenswear — and none of them sits, today, on Chanel’s revenue. ...

Tadao Ando spent fifteen years turning three of François Pinault’s historic shells — a Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal, a seventeenth-century Dorsoduro customs house and an eighteenth-century Parisian wheat exchange — into the same room. The Tadao Ando Pinault Collection lineage runs from April 2006 to May 2021 and resolves, in all three cases, to a single architectural move: a free-standing concrete volume inside preserved masonry, with light arriving only where Ando lets it. Palazzo Grassi was the rehearsal, Punta della Dogana the proof, and the Bourse de Commerce the closing argument. ...

Italian radical design begins in Pistoia in December 1966, when Archizoom Associati and Superstudio mount Superarchitettura in two rooms of a provincial gallery and publish a founding statement against the modernist project. The movement runs for roughly thirty years from that exhibition to the opening of the Groninger Museum in 1994, passes through three distinct organisational forms — the Florentine collectives of 1966–1974, the Milanese teaching networks of Global Tools and Studio Alchimia in 1973–1980, and Memphis Milano in 1980–1988 — and is carried throughout by three protagonists whose careers overlap and intersect: Andrea Branzi, Ettore Sottsass, and Alessandro Mendini. The shape of the answer is a lineage, not a school. There is no single manifesto and no single object. There is a chain of groups, magazines, exhibitions and pieces of furniture in which each generation re-stages the argument of the previous one with different materials, different cities and different enemies. ...

Jonathan Anderson is the first designer since Christian Dior himself, in 1946, to oversee Dior womenswear, menswear and haute couture from one office. The jonathan anderson lvmh trajectory — from the September 2013 deal that made him Loewe creative director and gave LVMH a minority stake in his independent JW Anderson label, to the April–June 2025 Dior appointments that consolidated three creative directorships under his name — is the most aggressive single-designer bet the group has placed in a generation. It runs across two brands (Loewe and Dior), one foundation prize, one curated museum show, and roughly twelve years. ...