Architecture & Design

Inside and outside the Show, what not to miss

Daring prototypes, future projects, opportunities to test materials, technologies and construction systems that are difficult to experiment with on a real scale. Installations invade Milan, inside the Fair and among the streets and courtyards of the city. An overview (and some advice) on what would be interesting to visit (in some cases, there is time until 30 April)

by Maria Chiara Voci

24 April 2026

8' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

8' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

The world of architecture and design is intertwined with Salone del Mobile and Design Week with an ever-increasing intensity, breaking out of the usual formats (first and foremost, that of the Milan State University) to give rise to new installations and projects. These are not just direct collaborations for the design of new products. Companies seek in the architect a guarantee of design coherence and cultural positioning; studios find in the relationship with industry an opportunity for applied research - on materials, technologies, environmental systems - that the traditional architecture market alone struggles to offer. This gives rise to virtuous design visions that can blossom into embryos of future projects, increasingly important opportunities for the design world also to test materials, technologies and construction systems that they would not have the chance to experiment with on a real scale. In this article we try to give you some hints (not exhaustive, given the vast number of installations invading Milan) on what might be interesting to visit (in some cases, there is time until 30 April).

Let us start with a premise. Pushing for an acceleration of the architecture-design link is the Salone itself, which has entrusted Rem Koolhaas architecture firm OMA with David Gianotten with the Salone Contract Masterplan: not an installation, not a display, but a multi-year assignment to redesign the very structure of the event in response to the growing complexity of the global contract market. The project, conceived as a long-term research platform rather than a traditional exhibition format, will debut in its full form in 2027: in 2026 some initiatives (among them, the lectio magistralis by Koolhaas) will be the premise. "Since the 19th century, Universal Expositions have functioned as experimental laboratories," said Koolhaas. "Today, Salone Contract represents a contemporary declination of this function: a space to observe how industry and design culture adapt to an increasingly complex geopolitical and market context. It is proof that the architect's role in the fair is no longer confined to the exhibition space: it has become structural.

Inside the Salone del Mobile

The collaboration between architects (more or less well-known even outside the industry) and companies is a leit-motif of the entire edition. The symbol of a product that is also, in truth, an installation is OLTRE, the outdoor kitchen that CRA - Carlo Ratti Associati designed for Veneta Cucine. The project stems from a collaboration initiated at the Venice Architecture Biennial 2025 - curated by Ratti himself on the theme of natural, artificial and collective intelligence - and translates that reflection into an object destined for the market. "With food ingredients, nature enters the home through the kitchen," says Ratti. "With Oltre it is the kitchen that enters nature. The shape follows the contours of the land and surrounding vegetation, adaptable to both open and indoor environments. Also in Rho, the Beko pavilion at Eurocucina was designed by MCA - Mario Cucinella Architects. The challenge: to keep together four distinct brands - Whirlpool, Hotpoint, Beko and Bauknecht - each with its own positioning, within a unified spatial system. The solution is a suspended, undulating textile veil that diffuses a soft light. "A white cloud that holds these very different brands together", as the architect himself called it. The materials are selected according to the logic of reuse and recycling, with a post-event restitution plan already agreed upon: the fabric will be recovered and re-introduced into the production cycle, donated to the company la Fortezza teatrale of Armando Punzo, career lion, who works in the Volterra prison. Also: In the Nardi stand Raffaello Galiotto - designer who signs all the outdoor production of the Vicenza-based company - has built Fuori le mura (Outside the walls): a concept inspired by the walled cities of the Mediterranean that overturns the traditional exhibition logic. The products are discovered from above, looking out from the walls of a Mediterranean city reproduced at the fair, with a central raised part accessible by stairs. The viewpoint changes, and with it the way of reading outdoor furniture. The stand of Acua, the new taps and fittings brand founded by Alberto Cristina, debuts in a space set up by Naomi Hasuike, who has already received the ADI Booth Design Award at Cersaie 2025 for the same exhibition project: a rare case of a stand awarded for sustainability and entirely re-assembled in a different exhibition context. Wood and cork as the prevailing materials, for an immersive and authentically ecofrinedly experience.

At the fuorisalone

The pinnacle of experimentation is reached in the installations of Design Week. The first stop, in an itinerary we have imagined for those interested in architecture and design, is CAMERA - Inside the Lens, the micro-architecture by Progetto CMR, a studio founded by Massimo Roj, realised for MoDesign with Finsa as main partner and iGuzzini, Schüco, AGC and others among the technical partners. Open until Sunday between Corso Vittorio Emanuele II and Piazza San Babila, it is a compact wooden volume inspired by the geometry of a photographic lens: concentric diaphragms, calibrated proportions, a geometry that directs the gaze towards a precise point. The experience is deliberately analogue (no screen, no digital mediation) and offers visitors a space of suspension that frames a unique view of the Duomo, inviting them to rediscover the quality of looking directly at the city. A project initially conceived for outdoor hospitality and glamping, but which also reveals itself as an urban device capable of generating relationships and spatial awareness. In the courtyard of the historic headquarters of the Corriere della Sera, again MCA signs Città delle Idee, commissioned by Corriere della Sera with Living and Abitare for the 150th anniversary of the newspaper. This is the third chapter in Cucinella's ongoing research into this space, after Città Miniera in 2024 and Città Paradiso, and the consistency of the project is itself a design fact: each edition explores the theme of the sustainable city with a different construction system. This time, almost 700 dry-assembled and 3D-printed modules with a cement mortar developed by Heidelberg Materials gradually thin out to define an agora in the centre. After Design Week, the modules will be dismantled and reused.

The Ca' Granda in Via Festa del Perdono 7 is the densest container of architecture of the entire week, with over forty installations distributed among courtyards, porticos and classrooms. The programme - part of an exhibition format that since 2008 has brought together architects on an international scale and avant-garde companies for a widespread exhibition in the university's historic courtyards and promoted by the magazine Interni - is open until 30 April, and can therefore be visited even after the Salone has closed. Some examples of what can be visited: Ceramics Forged in Light, designed by Snøhetta for VitrA: a six by five metre structure evoking the ancient public baths, with oculi in the ceiling filtering light onto basins and ceramic surfaces and a reflecting pool in the centre. The theme is recycling as an aesthetic: VitrA has developed porcelain tiles with 100 per cent recycled content. A few steps and you arrive at 365 by Meneghello Paolelli Associati for Gibus: the Velvet bioclimatic pergola (extruded aluminium, retractable cover with two degrees of freedom) transformed into a reflection on the outdoors as a permanent room. And again: KIRI³ represents perhaps the most radical contribution of the entire week in terms of material research: a four-metre cube built by MM Design and Xlam Dolomiti in SUPERTIMBER, a new material that will be much talked about, patented from the industrial densification of Paulownia wood, the fastest growing tree in the world, with a negative carbon footprint and mechanical resistance comparable to steel. The lattice structure is built without cladding or finishes: the material speaks for itself. "KIRI³ is proof that the future of construction passes through materials that not only respect the environment, but actively regenerate it," says Alex Terzariol, founder of MM Design.

In the centre of the Cortile d'Onore is Mater, by Alessandro Scandurra with Holcim Italia: a circular structure sixteen metres in diameter built from regenerated rubble, born of the architect's direct experience in the reconstruction of schools in Ukraine. The ruins, collected and reassembled on a metal skeleton, generate a ring that is both ruin and architecture, limit and protection, with a circular concrete seat inside and a slightly suspended central platform. "I knew war as a child, in Lebanon. Today I have met it again working on the reconstruction of schools in Ukraine,' Scandurra explains. 'Mater was born from the awareness that even what is destroyed can once again become foundations'. Also in the Cortile d'Onore, Michele De Lucchi with AMDL Circle brings Tracce di cura per Zambon: a small inhabitable architecture with four exhibition hubs, inspired by his Architetture Ideografiche (Ideographic Architectures), which brings into dialogue the precision of composite aluminium with hand-crafted plaster sculptures, where female silhouettes inhabit the niches finished in Burgundy colour.

We then walk through the East Loggiato to encounter Light Knot Progression, a spectacular architectural gesture: 280 metres of light installation signed by BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group for Artemide, crossing eleven spans of the Renaissance colonnade with aluminium knots and LED strips that develop from simple geometries to increasingly complex interlacements, recalling the knots of Chinese tradition. Again: in the 18th-century courtyard, Piero Lissoni creates UN_Material for Sanlorenzo: the full-scale cross sections of the heritage SHE boat, covered with semi-transparent fabric, reconstruct the shape of the hull in a radically different context from the sea. In the Aula Magna, MAD Architects, Ma Yansong's studio, signs for Canva an immersive environment in which light, colour and artificial intelligence intertwine in a space that changes with the visitor's presence. At the Brera Botanical Garden, another venue in the format, also open until 30 April, French-Lebanese architect Annabel Karim Kassar has created Garden of the Hesperides for Rubner Haus and ABS Group: a 16-metre-long porch in PEFC-certified fir wood that runs along the main avenue guiding visitors towards a symbolic sundial, with components designed to be reassembled after disassembly. And again: Ico Migliore, with his Migliore+Servetto studio, signs Busan Echoes in the Cortile d'Onore at the Statale, a resonant landscape created for the city of Busan, on its way to becoming World Design Capital 2028, in which sound elements inspired by the Korean brass tradition create a polyphony activated by the movement and touch of visitors. A commission that has deep roots: the studio has already signed the Blue Line Park in Busan in 2020, five kilometres of public park created by the conversion of a disused railway.

Leaving the setting of the Statale, at Palazzo Visconti in Via Cino del Duca 8, in the Durini Design District, again Migliore+Servetto brings Monochrome Affinity. Chapter 2 for Neutra, a company specialising in the processing of marble and natural stone: an immersive itinerary on the first floor of the 18th-century building in which marble is the real protagonist, investigated through colour and material in a multisensory journey built on the concept of divergence. It can be visited until 27 April. At the ADI Design Museum in Piazza Compasso d'Oro 1 (M5 Monumentale) for GooDesign Cities: architect Massimiliano Mandarini presents with Vaillant and REair the first Italian prototype of a climate shelter, a sustainable and replicable structure as a concrete response to urban heat waves. REair's eCoating photocatalytic technology, applied to the interior and exterior surfaces, has self-cleaning and de-polluting properties. The stated goal is a scalable model of urban regeneration, not a speculative object. In the Cortile d'Onore of Palazzo Litta in Corso Magenta 24, as part of MoscowPartners Variations, Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh, known for the renovation of the British Museum and the Gold Award at the Osaka Expo, signs Metamorphosis in Motion, her outdoor debut in Italia. A living spatial ecosystem in which the visitor's body becomes part of the composition: the courtyard stops being a passage to become what Ghotmeh calls "an intermediate realm designed to intensify the experience". Finally, in Piazza Cordusio, Michele Perlini signs Equilibria for EuroDesign and KIHOM: large certified fir sticks intertwine inspired by the game of shangai, with a single red element on a mirrored cylinder as the conceptual fulcrum. Perlini has presided over this square for several editions: each year a different system, same place, same subtraction as method.

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