Toyo-Ito

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. ...

Toyo Ito picked eight Andrea Branzi works for Continuous Present at Triennale Milano (19 March – 4 October 2026), and the earliest is a 1968 photograph of Branzi himself — not a chair, not a building. The eight picks are the curatorial spine of a show co-produced with Fondation Cartier that holds more than 400 works across eleven thematic sections in Giovanni Muzio’s Palazzo dell’Arte. Ito, working with Triennale’s Michela Alessandrini and Nina Bassoli, did not assemble a greatest-hits list. He assembled a thesis. The companion Continuous Present overview maps the architecture of the exhibition; this article maps the eight objects Ito singled out as the load-bearing argument and reads them as a sequence — Autoritratto (1968) through Voliera (2016), a forty-eight-year arc that the title of the show insists is one continuous moment. ...

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. ...