Archive-Activation

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 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. ...

Toyo Ito’s retrospective of Andrea Branzi opened at Triennale Milano on 19 March 2026 with a 1:1 reconstruction of Archizoom’s No-Stop City and a thesis Branzi spent fifty-seven years arguing — that Italian radical design was never an avant-garde, it was a continuous present. The exhibition, “Andrea Branzi by Toyo Ito. Continuous Present,” runs to 4 October 2026 in the Palazzo dell’Arte at Viale Alemagna 6, gathers more than 400 drawings, models, objects, viewing devices, environments, videos and archival materials across 11 thematic sections, and was developed with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. It is the largest Branzi retrospective ever staged. It is also the keystone of the city’s wider 2026 archive turn — the same week as the Common Archive / Notte Bianca at Salone, the same season as Cassina’s Le Corbusier Inédits, the same calendar as Armani/Archivio — but the only one of those projects whose subject is the operating system, not a single oeuvre. ...

Giorgio Armani died on 4 September 2025; Armani/Archivio is the maison’s first posthumous statement, and it places Armani in the same archive-activation gesture as Demna’s Gucci Memoria, Matthieu Blazy’s Bottega Veneta Casa, and Cassina’s six unbuilt Le Corbusier pieces — three different theories of what a house’s past is for. The Armani Archivio archive activation, launched in 2026 as a reissue programme drawing on the house’s digitised archive, is the cleanest version of the question because it asks the simplest one: when the founder is gone and the archive is the maison, what do you take out of it, and what do you do with it once it is in your hands? ...