From April 20 to 26, Milan Design Week returns for its 64th edition under the Fuorisalone theme "Be the Project." This year, the city's most compelling installations share the conviction that the most meaningful design is something you enter, disturb and change.
The question design has been circling for some time, Milan asks openly this year. What does design do? What does it ask of you? The 2026 edition spreads across palazzos, courtyards, an abandoned military hospital, cloisters and cocktail bars. The theme is “Be the Project.” Not see it, not attend it. Be it. The invitation is participatory, almost demanding, and the most serious work in the city takes it seriously.
In the Cortile d’Onore of Palazzo Litta on Corso Magenta, Lina Ghotmeh has built a labyrinth. Her first outdoor site-specific work in Italy, commissioned by MoscaPartners for their annual Variations programme, occupies the Baroque courtyard entirely. Curved geometric shapes and shifting perspectives form a sequential path, each pocket of space offering a different spatial experience. The work is called Metamorphosis in Motion and the name is exact: the metamorphosis emerges through use, the courtyard converting from formal ceremonial stage into something held in common, activated by whoever moves through it. Ghotmeh works through what she calls an “Archaeology of the Future,” a practice that listens to what a place already carries before deciding what to add. Architecture as choreography. The building watches; the people perform.
Across the city, in the 17th-century colonnade of Portrait Hotel Milano, Zaha Hadid Architects presents The Origin for Audi: a titanium-coloured fibreglass portal set above a reflecting pool. Precise and formally immaculate, its intent is quieter than its form. The installation was designed to address sensory overload, offering a moment to pause and reconnect. Design Week is, among other things, an annual exercise in spectacular overstimulation. An installation whose explicit purpose is to interrupt that registers as a quietly radical position.
Both works are anchored by the experience of moving through rather than looking at. They indicate where design is directing its attention: away from the pristine object on the plinth and toward the person standing in the room.
Brera has long functioned as the week’s prestige corridor, the neighbourhood where the houses arrive in force and the palazzo architecture does half the work. Louis Vuitton takes over the frescoed rooms of Palazzo Serbelloni to present its Objets Nomades alongside new additions to the brand’s Signature collection spanning decorations, tableware and games. Objects made to travel, to be carried, to arrive in rooms and alter them. The premise is romantic and the execution, every year, refuses to be anything less.
At the Chiostro del Cappuccino in the 5VIE district, Byredo presents In Conversation, an immersive installation created with sculptor Jean-Guillaume Mathiaut. A limited edition of sculptural wooden seating pieces, finished in black Japanese ink, forms the physical body of the work. Memory built into wood. Fragrance and form sharing the same grammar.
At Casa degli Artisti, the Homo Faber Fellowship presents the results of six months of collaboration: 22 duos of master artisans paired with emerging talents, working under the art direction of Giampiero Bodino. Final pieces include a textile sculpture from Portuguese master artisan Maria Pratas with Carolina De la Parra Quintana and a straw, glass and aluminium side table by British straw marquetry expert Kim Jordan with Sandra Pinto. Craft as active transmission. The hand teaching the hand.
At the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Kohler and Flamingo Estate founder Richard Christiansen present a brutalist bathhouse. The installation draws its palette from weathered metals and elemental surfaces, anchored by the Kohler Reverie enameled cast iron bath in copper, its warm surface catching sunlight filtered through oversized stained-glass windows, 200 Flamingo Estate candles lining the walls. The body again, but slowed here to ritual rather than choreographed through a labyrinth.
Nina Yashar’s Nilufar Depot becomes, for the week, a hotel that has never existed. Nilufar Grand Hotel transforms the cavernous space into a sequence of rooms: bedrooms by david/nicolas, Filippo Carandini and Allegra Hicks; a penthouse layered with pieces by Bethan Laura Wood; an outside space by Andrea Mancuso. The fiction is entirely the point. Collectible design placed inside a hospitality framework with no obligation to function. Rooms you cannot sleep in, objects you cannot buy, a hotel that exists only for seven days and entirely for the eye. Design freed from usefulness becomes something closer to desire.
Alcova returns this year to two sites. One is a familiar address: the Baggio Military Hospital, which hosted Alcova in 2021 and 2022. The other is an absolute first. Villa Pestarini, the only villa ever designed by Franco Albini, opens to the public for the first time in its 87-year history. Glass-block façades, a low-tread marble staircase, custom-designed furniture, sliding partitions and large windows over the garden: all elements exactly as Albini left them. For one week, over 120 international designers work in dialogue with an inheritance 87 years in the making.
The one that resists category: Massimiliano Locatelli has taken over SiMa Townhouse with Glazed Bar, three floors of ceramic mosaic murals. The ground-floor bar sets a playful interpretation of the drinks menu against a ground of sky and clouds. The first floor renders the red velvet boxes of Teatro alla Scala in minuscule ceramic tile. The upper level opens onto a bucolic farmyard, chickens pecking, trees weighted with fruit. Joyful and specific and entirely its own thing.
Milan contains all of this simultaneously: the solemn labyrinth and the mosaic bar, the brutalist bathhouse and the fictional hotel, the first time anyone has ever walked through a particular door.
Credits:
Brands:
MoscaPartners / @moscapartners
Zaha Hadid Architects / @zahahadidarchitects
Audi / @audi
Louis Vuitton / @louisvuitton
Byredo / @byredo
Homo Faber Fellowship / @homofaber
Kohler / @kohler
Flamingo Estate / @flamingoestate
Nilufar Gallery / @nilufargallery
Alcova / @alcova.milano
Designers:
Lina Ghotmeh / @linaghotmeh
Jean-Guillaume Mathiaut / @jgmathiaut
Giampiero Bodino / @giampierobodino
Richard Christiansen / @richardchristiansen
Nina Yashar / @ninayashar
david/nicolas / @davidnicolas
Filippo Carandini / @filippocarandini
Allegra Hicks / @allegricks
Bethan Laura Wood / @bethanlaurawood
Andrea Mancuso / @andreaworksstudio
Massimiliano Locatelli / @locatellipartners
Words: Viktoriya Georgieva Kacheva / @viktoriya.kacheva
