Archive

Loredana Parmesani has filled a 19th-century Pallanza villa with 130 Mendini objects arranged not as museum vitrines but as rooms — the Proust Armchair in one, the Straw Armchair in another, the 100% Make-Up vases lined up like household china, a jacket from the 1997 Furniture for Men series standing in the hallway clad in gold mosaic. The alessandro mendini retrospective at Villa Giulia, Verbania, on the western shore of Lake Maggiore, runs from 16 May to 27 September 2026, was organised by the City of Verbania with the Alessandro Mendini Archive run by Mendini’s daughters Elisa and Fulvia, and stages the Studio Alchimia and Alessi lineages inside a domestic shell rather than the white cube. The exhibition is titled “Alessandro Mendini. Objects. Rooms as worlds.” The design of the show is by Alex Mocika. The thesis, by Parmesani’s own statement, is that the room — “a place of reflection, rest, quietness, and work, but also a place of turbulence” — is the unit of Mendini’s thinking, and that to put his work in vitrines is to mistake the work for its objects. ...

On 22 May 2026, the 29th Compasso d’Oro jury — chaired by Jasper Morrison under ADI president Luciano Galimberti — handed Italy’s design Oscar to 20 projects at the ADI Design Museum in Milan. The compasso d’oro 2026 winners include Philippe Malouin’s Bilboquet table lamp for Flos and Snøhetta’s Array modular sofa for MDF Italia, while Patrizia Moroso of Moroso took the products career award alongside three more lifetime laurels — Alberto Meda and Paola Lenti for design, Aldo Colonetti for research. Thirty-eight honourable mentions and three long-selling products round out a roll call that this year reads less like a national survey and more like a refereed argument about what Italian industrial design currently rewards: mass-market objects with a clear authorial signature, infrastructure and mobility projects with measurable social weight, and historical research that pays its rent. ...

A seven-metre aluminium Savoy vase rises at Copenhagen’s harbour edge: Iittala and Norsk Hydro have built Alvar Aalto’s 1936 icon at monumental scale, walkable inside, for 3 Days of Design 2026. The iittala savoy pavilion 3 days of design commission - officially the Aalto 90 Pavilion - is the centrepiece of Iittala’s contribution to the 17–19 June 2026 edition of the Copenhagen festival, built in low-carbon Hydro REDUXA aluminium and timed to mark ninety years since Aalto designed the original glass vessel for the Savoy restaurant in Helsinki. It is also, read alongside the same supplier’s commissions at Schloss Hollenegg, the clearest sign yet that Norsk Hydro is positioning itself as design-grade aluminium’s go-to producer for 2026. ...

On a basement floor near Milan’s Duomo in 1958, a twenty-eight-year-old painter named Cesare Colombo drew a single perspective in unbroken pen-stroke and quit easel painting for good. The drawing was for the Santa Tecla, a jazz cave a few minutes’ walk from the cathedral; the painter, soon to call himself Joe, had trained in painting at the Accademia di Brera and architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, and the Santa Tecla project pulled those two trainings into a single discipline. The Joe Colombo Milan archive — the corpus held and stewarded by Studio Colombo under Ignazia Favata, with sibling holdings at Triennale Milano and the MoMA collection — has long described that pivot in summary form. In May 2026, two previously unknown perspective drawings of the Santa Tecla surfaced in the archive of Enrico Baj’s former law office, and the Joe Colombo Milan archive widened by one chapter. The rediscovery clarifies rather than rewrites: the arc that runs from Santa Tecla to the Boby Trolley is one continuous line, and the new drawings prove it in pen. ...

Twenty-six summers, twenty-six architects, and one impossible brief — design a London building before you are allowed to design a London building. The Serpentine Pavilion architects, from Zaha Hadid in 2000 to Lanza Atelier in 2026, have together built the most reliable predictor in contemporary architecture of who will define the next decade of museums, biennales and pavilions. Read the commission as a long roster — Hadid, Libeskind, Toyo Ito with Cecil Balmond, Oscar Niemeyer, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, OMA, SANAA, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Peter Zumthor, Herzog & de Meuron with Ai Weiwei, Sou Fujimoto, Smiljan Radić, SelgasCano, BIG, Francis Kéré, Frida Escobedo, Junya Ishigami, Counterspace, Theaster Gates, Lina Ghotmeh, Mass Studies, Marina Tabassum, Lanza Atelier — and the line reads as a forward index to the next twenty Pritzkers, Venice directorships and global museum jobs. The pavilion does not predict the future; it commissions it. ...

Twelve years after Olivier Saillard first handed her an 1810 jacket once worn by Napoleon Bonaparte on the second floor of the Palais de Tokyo, Tilda Swinton’s design projects have become a parallel filmography — a sequence of stagings that treat the archive, the runway and the museum as the same room. The Tilda Swinton design projects assembled between 2012 and 2026 do not look like an actor’s brand portfolio. They look like a curatorial practice: four Saillard performances, two knitwear capsules with the Hawick label HADES, a Gentle Monster eyewear campaign inside HAUS NOWHERE Seoul, and, on 5 and 6 June 2026, House of Gestures in the atrium of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao — co-presented by Dom Pérignon to mark the unveiling of its 2018 vintage. The throughline is not celebrity. It is the object, the garment, and the room they share. ...

Barber Osgerby designs span thirty years and ten manufacturers, and on 20 May 2026 Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby confirmed in interviews to mark the closure of their London studio that the catalogue is now closed. The partnership that began in 1996 with a bent-plywood low table for Isokon Plus ends in the same week that their Triennale Milano retrospective, Alphabet, comes down — a roster that runs through the Loop Table, the Tab Light for Flos, the Iris Table for Established & Sons, the Tip Ton chair for Vitra, and the London 2012 Olympic Torch. The Barber Osgerby designs that defined the last three decades of British industrial design are not being withdrawn; the practice is. The majority of the pieces shown at the Triennale remain in production, which is the answer to most of the questions readers will ask first. ...

Element: Metal at Schloss Hollenegg closes a five-edition castle programme that has, since 2016, turned a 12th-century Styrian fortress into the most material-specific design exhibition outside the museum circuit. The schloss hollenegg metal show runs until 31 May 2026 in a building first documented in 1163, owned by the Liechtenstein family since 1821, and curated by Alice Stori Liechtenstein with works by Max Lamb, Philippe Malouin, Sabine Marcelis and a cast of roughly a dozen others. It is the last in a sequence that has cycled through the classical elements one material at a time. To close on metal - and on extruded aluminium in particular - is a choice with its own logic, and the choice deserves to be read carefully. ...

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 this spring, and the question this piece answers is which palazzo holds which painter — and which of those painter-palazzo pairings carries the weight of the edition. The painters-by-palazzo question is rarely answered properly because the answer is geographic, not alphabetical, and because the heaviest pairing on the list — Marina Abramović staged against Titian’s Pietà of 1575–76 inside the Gallerie dell’Accademia — is the one the alphabetical surveys bury. 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 painter-by-palazzo 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. ...