Promotion: XL Extralight showcased its manufacturing process in an exhibition designed by Italian architect Andrea Caputo as an "immersive museum itinerary" during Milan design week.

Named Industream and put together by Caputo in collaboration with artist duo Invernomuto, the exhibition demonstrated the complex industrial process behind XL Extralight's footwear and foam design technology.

Although the company's core business is soles for footwear, it said its technology is leading it to other categories where lightness, durability and water-resistant properties are valued.

The Industream exhibition was held at the recently opened architecture and design centre Dropcity, founded by Caputo and occupying a previously abandoned network of warehouse tunnels behind Milan Central Station.

"At Fuorisalone 2024 we had the idea to create something completely different from previous editions," said XL Extralight foam design product and brand manager Carlo Vecchiola.

"This is why we have started a conversation with Andrea Caputo and his team to end up at Dropcity, the place to be for those who want to experiment and implement new design codes and visual experiences," he told Dezeen.

"For the first time since we have been exhibiting at the Milan design week way back in 2014, XL Extralight is unveiling its industrial process – from compounding to injection moulding – in an immersive museum itinerary."

XL Extralight, which was founded in the 1990s by Italian industrial group Finproject, designs polyolefin-based expanded and moulded foams that are super lightweight, soft and flexible while also being resistant to bacteria, UV rays, saline and chlorine.

Caputo and Invernomuto's Industream exhibition sought to emphasise the scientific aspects of the sole-making process, as well as the historic link between material innovation and human development.

At the exhibition, XL Extralight team members wore workwear-streetwear hybrid uniforms that were tailor-made by fashion house Lardini.

Recent brand collaborations by the brand include the modular Roku footwear from Camper, which features a removable sole that can be repaired and reused at the end of the shoe's life.

For more information about XL Extralight, contact Maria Elena Barbati and Bianca Maria Bertolissi at hello@barbatibertolissi.contact.

The photography is by Invernomuto for XL Extralight.

Milan design week took place from 15 to 21 April 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

Partnership content

This article was written by Dezeen for XL Extralight as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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In this video, Dezeen previews the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute's latest blockbuster fashion exhibition Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, following last night's Met Gala.

The exhibition explores the concept of rebirth and renewal in fashion, showcasing the archival and restoration processes that take place behind the scenes of the Met's Costume Institute.

The exhibition brings together historical and contemporary pieces from the museum's archive

The show also uses nature as a visual metaphor to explore ideas around the transience of fashion.

In addition to bringing to life the behind-the-scenes work of fashion conservation, the exhibition also explores the sensory aspects of fashion, with visitors being encouraged to smell aromas of floral motifs, feel the textures of different embroideries, and talk to historical figures through the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

The title of the exhibition is derived from the "sleeping beauties" of the institute's archives – pieces that are too fragile to be displayed on mannequins. Instead, the exhibition uses AI, animation and X-rays to bring these historical garments to life for visitors.

Approximately 220 garments and accessories spanning four centuries will be on display as part of the show.

Sleeping Beauties will be open to the public from the 10th of May, following the annual Met Gala fundraiser, which took place yesterday and celebrated the exhibition's debut.

Celebrities interpreted the theme of The Garden of Time on the red carpet, with celebrities like Zendaya, Nicki Minaj and Gigi Hadid sporting floral motifs.

The exhibition was organised by Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of The Costume Institute, with photographer Nick Knight acting as creative consultant for the exhibition.

Exhibition design is by architecture studio Leong Leong in collaboration with The Met's Design Department.

Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion takes place from 10 May to 2 September at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Electronics brand LG OLED is exhibiting works by the late Korean artist Kim Whanki at Frieze art fair in New York, as captured in this exclusive video produced for the brand by Dezeen.

Called We Meet Again in New York, the installation features five animated versions of original works by Whanki, a pioneer of 20th-century Korean abstract art.

LG OLED is exhibiting digitally reimagined works at this year's Frieze New York

LG OLED Art translated Whanki's work into digital form, aiming to accurately reproduce details and colours in the original work by harnessing LG's self-lit OLED technology.

The brand designed the exhibition to showcase the level of detail Whanki put into his work, which involved hand-painting mosaic-like dots on canvas with a thin inkbrush.

The five works shown at Frieze were originally created by Whanki during his time in New York between 1963 and 1974.

Whanki referenced memories of his homeland of Korea in the pieces, as well as the New York art scene that he was surrounded by at the time.

During his stay in New York, Whanki experimented with different materials and techniques, including his signature "all-over dot" style, which can be seen in the works on display at Frieze.

While in New York, Whanki hosted a total of six solo exhibitions, with the last one being presented the year before his passing in 1974.

Exhibited works include a digitally reimagined version of Whanki's final painting, which is composed of hundreds of thousands of blue-black dots.

A separate concurrent exhibition called Whanki in New York is being held at the Korean Cultural Center in New York.

The exhibition will feature the five digital versions of Whanki's work shown at Frieze, alongside twenty-seven original works by the artist on loan from the Whanki Museum in Seoul.

Frieze New York takes place from 1 to 5 May 2024 at The Shed. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

Partnership content

This article was written by Dezeen as part of a partnership with LG OLED. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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Work by Lina Bo Bardi and José Zanine Caldas was on view at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in New York City as part of an exhibition on modernist Brazilian furniture.

Called Turning Tides: Designing a Modern Brazil exhibition, the show highlighted 75 years of design from the South American country.

It was launched to survey the impact of influential objects and furniture on daily life in the country and elsewhere, according to Carpenters Workshop Gallery.

The exhibit included works by post-war designers from Brazil such as Joaquim Tenreiro, Jorge Zalszupin and Sergio Rodrigues but also contemporary talents, such as Studio Campana, who have been influenced by these historical figures' experimental use of colour, texture, material, form and traditional crafts.

"Turning Tides honours a diverse cadre of artists who navigated and shaped their creations in the crucible of Brazil's culturally rich history, reflecting significant social, cultural, and political changes that influenced various aspects of society," said Carpenters Workshop Gallery.

Produced using a single Pequi tree trunk, sourced in the Região Centro-Oeste region, the Dining Table by Caldas demonstrates these designers' interpretation of modernism and contribution to the development of a distinctive Latin American style.

Caldas led the Móveis Denúncia movement which aimed to preserve local forests and often used materials from fallen trees.

"The exhibition presents the fabric for modern living in Brazil," said Maria Cecilia Loschiavo, associate professor of Design at the School of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo.

"The public saw the various trends, the avant-garde and the diversity of materials] used, but also the sovereign presence of wood, which established the designers' link with vernacular culture and the beginnings of Brazilian furniture."

Many of the furniture pieces were designed by architects who also created furniture, such as Italy-born Lina Bo Bardi.

Her 1950s Writing Desk was produced using Caviuna wood and includes Z-shaped legs, which, according to the gallery, was a major part of Brazil's contribution to modernism.

Other European designers who moved to the country during this time period include Carlo Hauner and Martin Eisler, who developed the organic, tubular metal frame Reversible Armchair.

The concave steel-and-glass-topped Side Tables by architect Oscar Niemeyer, who was responsible for the master plan of the country's capital Brasilia, was also on view.

"Turning Tides pays tribute to Brazil's design legacy, highlighting the historical impact of Modernism, local craftsmanship, and innovation," said Carpenters Workshop Gallery co-founder Loic Le Gaillard.

"Every piece – from Joaquim Tenreiro to Sergio Rodrigues and Lina Bo Bardi, tells a story of resilience, ingenuity, and the unwavering pursuit of beauty."

Brazilian design has featured in a number of recent shows in the American city, including a recent solo show by Estúdio Campana, the first since the passing of studio co-founder Fernando Campana.

The Photography is by Matt Harrington.

The Turning Tides: Designing a Modern Brazil exhibition is on view from 7 March to 31 May at Carpenters Workshop Gallery. For more architecture and design exhibitions visit Dezeen Events Guide.

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Blond founder James Melia explains how the Blond Laboratory exhibition at Milan design week drew attention to the processes of industrial design in this video produced by Dezeen for the strategic design agency.

The Blond Laboratory exhibition tasked designers with creating designs in response to a collection of found everyday objects, curated by the Blond team.

The final designs were exhibited alongside the objects that inspired them in a historic carpentry warehouse in Milan's Brera district. Objects and media that illustrated the design process were also on display.

According to Melia, the exhibition was created to illuminate the process of industrial design and encourage designers to find inspiration in the physical rather than digital realm.

"Often in exhibitions you see lots of final polished objects", said Melia in the exclusive video interview, which was shot by Dezeen in Milan.

"Very rarely the process of creating these objects is celebrated," he continued. "In essence, Blond Laboratory is a celebration of process."

Seven designers, including Melia, chose objects from a selection curated by Blond to use as a basis for a new piece.

Other participants included John Tree, Pentagram's Jon Marshall, Julie Richoz, Sony Europe's Hirotaka Tako, Maddalena Casadei, and Form Us With Love.

Melia chose to reinterpret a wooden bag for the exhibition, creating a pendant light. The original object has large visible stitches that hold its elements together, reflected in the way that the lamp's wire has been woven across the top of its casing to hold the light source in place.

"We've created a pendant light that translates the aesthetic of the bag into a very modern piece of lighting," said Melia.

Casadei, a Milan-based designer, created a hangable torch for the exhibition, basing its form on a homemade mallet with a hook at the base of its handle.

Swiss-French designer Richoz contributed a lighter that magnetically attaches to a spherical base. When attached, the piece can be wobbled back and forth on its base but is eventually restored by gravity to an upright position. She based her design on a plastic bird toy that balances on a surface at the point of its beak.

Tako, who is creative director and head of Design Centre Europe at Sony Europe, designed a lamp with a wooden base, long plastic arms and colourful circular controls, taking as its cue a wooden marking gauge with a headstock that slides up and down the implement.

British designer John Tree based the design of his aluminium turntable with an infrared needle on the form of a wooden Japanese ladle with a long handle that bisects its scoop.

Stockholm-based design studio Form Us With Love chose a corkscrew made of a single bent wire as the basis for the design of a minimal bottle opener made from a crushed pipe.

Pentagram's Jon Marshall contributed a candle holder with a base made of a golden spring wound into a conical form, closely mimicking the form of an old whisk.

Reflecting on the aims of the exhibition, Melia emphasised the importance of physical experimentation in the process of industrial design.

"I would like people to come away from the exhibition with a sense of joy for the industrial design process," he said.

"You're hammering, twisting, bending, cutting, and understanding how materials react. And it's within those moments that you can really fine-tune details and learn about the design that you're creating."

Blond Laboratory took place during Milan design week from 15 to 21 April 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

Partnership content

This video was produced by Dezeen as part of a partnership with Blond. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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An exhibition at Hamburg's MK&G museum examines the global water crisis and what architects and designers can do to help. Here, curator Jane Withers selects five highlights from the show and explains the stories behind them.

Water Pressure: Designing for the Future is the result of several years of research by Jane Withers Studio, which involved compiling a broad range of ideas on how to confront water scarcity from the fields of design, science and activism.

"The current water crisis is largely the result of mismanagement and overconsumption, so there is potential to rethink the systems," Withers told Dezeen. "A multidisciplinary approach is required and architecture and design are strong components within this."

The exhibition, on show at MK&G until 13 October, is organised around five themes: Water Stories, Bodily Waters, Invisible Water – Agriculture and Industry, Thirsty Cities, and Ecosystems – Land and Ocean.

Each theme explores water as a life force and a common medium that unites humans, plants, animals and the landscape.

"We take water for granted in every way and we need to rekindle our psychological, physiological and spiritual understanding of it," Withers said.

The projects on show range from the CloudFisher system, which harvests water from fog or clouds, to a proposal for low-cost floating schools by architecture studio NLÉ and a mural by Slovenian architect Marjetica Potrč calling for the recognition of water as a living being.

While some reflect on water's poetic and mythical associations, others offer more scientifically-led solutions to specific problems associated with water scarcity, human-induced climate change and water justice.

Withers said she hopes visitors to the exhibition will leave with a better understanding of water and the challenges we face, as well as recognising that there are things we can all do to help shape a different future.

"We need policy change but also individual changes of mindset and a new water consciousness," she added. "We're very keen that the exhibition is a starting point for conversations and for campaigning about water culture."

Below, Withers outlines five key projects featured in Water Pressure:

Time on the Lachlan River by Marjetica Potrč

"The first room in the exhibition is framed by two wonderful works by artist and activist Marjetica Potrč. The mural Time on The Lachlan River illustrates the campaign by Australia's Aboriginal Wijaduri people to prevent the enlargement of a damn that could have deprived the land downriver of water.

"On the other side, the visual essay The Rights of a River tells the story of a water referendum in Slovenia in 2021, when an overwhelming majority of people voted against a law that would have allowed private businesses to exploit the country's rivers for profit.

"This shift in thinking about rivers and how we view them not as objects to be exploited but as subjects with their own rights is fundamental to creating a more equitable water culture and sets the tone for the exhibition."

Makoko Floating System by NLÉ

"Architectural practice NLÉ has been researching the potential for floating architecture in African cities affected by rising sea levels for over a decade. Their prototype floating building was a low-cost school for the Makoko community in Lagos inspired by their vernacular floating structures.

"The Makoko School became something of a poster project for floating architecture through photographer Iwan Baan's alluring images of kids clambering over an ark-like wooden building. It could have stopped there but NLÉ has gone on to develop a scalable prefabricated floating building system for the development of waterfronts amid the challenges of climate resilience.

"The studio is currently working on a regeneration plan for the Makoko area based on this technology, and recently published the book African Water Cities that examines the potential for waterborne living in other African cities."

Death to the Flushing Toilet by The Dry Collective

"Death to the Flushing Toilet is a campaign by The Dry Collective that provokes a rethink of the waterborne sewage systems we take for granted. It's madness that wealthier regions of the world use vast quantities of freshwater to flush away human waste, while two billion people still lack basic sanitation.

"In urban areas, as much as 30 per cent of freshwater is used to flush toilets and often this is drinking quality water. The Dry Collective aims to persuade architects and designers to use alternative systems.

"Taking the traditional Finnish huussi – a composting dry toilet used in rural areas – as a model, they produced a film set in 2043 that imagines a global shift where water is no longer wasted on flushing and human waste is recycled as fertiliser. The technology for circular sanitation systems already exists so the real issue is overcoming prejudices and the 'yuck factor'."

Eden in Iraq

"Eden in Iraq is an incredibly inspiring project that has gotten off the ground against the odds in Iraq's Mesopotamian Marshes, where the discharge of untreated sewage has polluted the fragile marsh ecosystem and led to disease.

"The wetland garden is designed to use plants to clean the local community's wastewater. The garden's ornate symmetrical design takes inspiration from the embroidered wedding blankets of Marsh Arab tribes and their tradition of reed construction for buildings.

"The first construction phase, completed in 2023, demonstrates the potential for nature-based wastewater systems to work at a community level."

Re-imagine Water Flows by Ooze Architects

"Re-imagine Water Flows is a special commission for the Water Pressure exhibition using the MK&G Museum as a case study to understand the water challenges Hamburg faces and how the building's water ecosystem could be made more resilient.

"A mural by Ooze Architects shows two versions of the museum – one with its current situation marooned between massive roads and Hamburg's main railway station and the other illustrating how it could be transformed into a shady green oasis.

"In the studio's proposal, rainwater and wastewater are recycled to be reused for non-drinking water use inside the building, as well as for irrigating the landscape and recharging the Hamburg aquifer.

"The mural expands to show how Hamburg is threatened by drought and increased risk of flooding that could also affect the river Elbe watershed. It invites us to think about the importance of these common water flows linking countries and cities."

The top image is by Henning Rogge and the image of the Newlands municipal swimming pool in Cape Town is by Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Water Pressure is on show at MK&G Hamburg from 15 March to 13 October 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for all the latest architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Dutch studio OMA has designed Loewe's Crafted World exhibition, currently on show in Shanghai, which aims to celebrate the brand's craftsmanship.

Crafted World, the Spanish fashion brand's first public exhibition, has launched at the Shanghai Exhibition Centre where it is taking over an entire wing of the 1950s building.

Designed by Ellen van Loon and Giulio Margheri from OMA, the exhibition is organised into a series of thematic spaces that aim to highlight the brand's history of craftsmanship.

This is the first time OMA has worked with Loewe, and van Loon believes the outsider view it brought helped uncover elements for the exhibition that the brand hadn't thought of.

"When we start working with a brand, we always start research first, we do interviews and archive research, we look at the history of the company and what they are doing now," van Loon told Dezeen.

"This is the first brand that we do an exhibition with on day one, so in this case, the research became the exhibition. It's sometimes easier for someone from outside to define who you are," she continued.

The exhibition was curated by Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson as "a homage to all the craftspeople around the world that have dedicated their lives to the handmade."

It features pieces from Loewe's archive and catwalk collections, as well as objects made by finalists for the Loewe Foundation's Craft Prize and works by artists who have inspired the brand's designs.

A room called Born from the Hand greets visitors at the start of the exhibition, presenting key leather pieces from the brand's history. This is followed by Welcome to Spain, which aims to transport visitors to Loewe's home country.

A "pronunciation tunnel" connects the two rooms through a stairway, which was directly inspired by OMA's research.

It features a series of video screens on the ocean-blue walls showing how people from around the world pronounce the brand's name.

"When we started doing the research, we found a lot of videos on YouTube about how people pronounce the name of the brand, this is something that the brand has embraced," Margheri told Dezeen.

"We decided to transform one space to push the concept further and make it fun."

As architects, van Loon and Margheri felt the urge to incorporate the venue – a historic example of Sino-Soviet architecture – into the exhibition, while avoiding a drastic contrast.

"The building has a strong character and we somehow have to deal with that. But we don't want to make the exhibition without revealing the building," said Margheri.

In the first room, two rectangular openings were carved out of the higher walls of the exhibition space, revealing the building's original columns and metal details.

A similar approach was applied to the room United in Craft, where a square opening in the ceiling showcases an original chandelier.

Showcasing the existing space helps create new design opportunities, according to Van Loon.

"We are interested in bringing in the context of where it's gonna be and transform some of the limitations and possibilities that might become design opportunities to give another angle or character to the exhibition," she said.

The architect believes designing beyond a physical building is "a normal evolution of being an architect".

"In our mind, architecture is quite rich, it's unlimited. You can design a building for a fixed configuration, but people start using it over time, it's an ever-changing thing," van Loon said.

"It feels very strange when someone asks you to design a building, then in the contract, it says the building needs to be designed for 50 years," she added.

"Imagine how society changes in 50 years. Architecture sometimes makes space less defined, in order to allow for ever-changing adaptation."

Another of the exhibition spaces, Unexpected Dialogues, features artworks that have inspired Loewe's collaborations from the past decade.

These include a suspended garden set within a mirrored room informed by the work of English architect, furniture and textile designer CFA Voysey, as well as a recreation of Studio Ghibli's dreamworld.

A series of knee-high playful mini exhibits for children to interact with can be found at various locations of the exhibition, which Loewe and OMA hope will be enjoyed by different age groups.

Van Loon has recently led the completion of OMA's first major public building in the UK Aviva Studios, and also previously created a pop-up shop for Tiffany & Co in Paris.

The photography is by Marco Cappelletti unless stated otherwise.

Crafted World runs from 22 March to 5 May 2024 before travelling worldwide. The exhibition is open to the public, and entrance is free. For more events, talks and exhibitions in architecture and design visit Dezeen Events Guide.

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Fashion house Loewe unveiled lamps created by 24 international artists during Milan design week in an exhibition that featured materials ranging from birch twigs and horse hair to leather and Japanese washi paper.

The Loewe Lamps presentation took place within a single room at the historic Palazzo Citterio in Milan's Brera district.

Loewe, which was originally established as a leather-making craft collective in the 19th century, invited 24 artists from around the world to design a diverse offering of lamps for the exhibition.

"The artists push the properties of each material to create unexpected interactions with light," said the fashion house, headed by JW Anderson founder Jonathan Anderson.

South African ceramicist Andile Dyalvane used glass and clay to make bulbous lighting characterised by yellow- and amber-hued tentacles, which reference acacia trees.

"The two materials have so much in common, yet by exposing them to various temperature treatments and processes, they end up with quite different and interesting qualities that manifest in their final products," Dyalvane told Dezeen.

Contrasting with Dyalvane's amorphous piece, Scottish artist Jennifer Lee created a geometric lamp using salvaged washi paper Shoji screens from Lee's studio at the Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art.

"When I thought about a lamp, Japan immediately came to mind," said Lee, who has taken part in artist residences in Japan for the last decade and took cues from a Japanese doll's cabinet when creating her piece.

The delicate paper lighting bears subtle pencil marks drawn by Lee, who used walnut to construct the boxy design.

"I liked the way the paper had aged," explained the artist. "The existing traces told a story."

Japanese design also influenced British artist Anthea Hamilton, who contributed a kimono-shaped, stained-glass lamp scaled to human proportions.

"I was curious to know if light could take the form of a garment," Hamilton told Dezeen.

Similarly, Italian artist Enrico David designed his piece made of resin and sliced Turkish onyx to resemble a curved human profile.

"The lamp was originally going to be a finger with a glowing nail," David told Dezeen. "Then the finger curved on itself and it assumed a different nature."

Elsewhere in the exhibition, visitors could find more unusual materials such as the birch twigs used by Irish basketmaker Joe Hogan for his bird's nest-style pendant and the horse hair that clads a towering floor lamp by South Korean artist Dahye Jeong, who won the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2022.

Other materials featured in the exhibition range from the folded leather and brass used to create spiky pendant lights by Kenyan artist Magdalene Odundo, to delicate clay pots by Japanese artist Kazunori Hamana that are illuminated by a central bulb.

At last year's Milan design week, Loewe worked with global artisans to turn classic stick chairs into "sculptural objects". The brand's annual craft prize, which is now in its seventh year, was awarded to Japanese ceramicist Eriko Inazaki in 2023.

This year's winner is yet to be announced.

The photography is courtesy of Loewe.

Milan design week took place from 15 to 21 April 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Artist Patrick Carroll has used recycled yarn to create hand-knitted painting-style pieces for the Days textile exhibition at JW Anderson's Milan store during Milan design week.

Carroll presented translucent artworks that look "as if they are paintings", which were made using a 1970s flatbed domestic knitting machine and displayed on wooden stretcher bars – the skeleton of a traditional art canvas – in the store.

"My stuff is a little bit transparent – you can see the architecture of it all," Carroll told Dezeen at the JW Anderson flagship store in Milan, where the work is exhibited in a show called Days.

"I was making clothing initially," he explained, donning one of his own pink creations.

Carroll decided to apply his practice to artworks, designing pieces made from yarn salvaged from remainder shops that liquidate the fashion industry's leftover textiles rather than sourcing new materials.

Recycled wool, linen, mohair, silk and cashmere all feature in the rectilinear works, which are finished in colours ranging from coral to aqua to ochre.

Like Carroll's clothing, each piece was characterised by one or a handful of words lifted from sources including literature, existing artworks or the artist's own writing.

The smallest pieces in the collection were displayed on gridded shelving while larger pieces can be found on various walls throughout the store.

When viewed together, the works were positioned to create a "modular chorus", explained the artist, who encouraged viewers to form their own relationships with the words weaved into the textiles.

Days follows Carroll's first collaboration with JW Anderson in 2022 when the artist designed seven knitted outfits for the brand. The clothes were worn by models posing on chunky blue plinths positioned outside the venue of JW Anderson's Spring Summer 2023 menswear show in Milan.

"I think what makes the works a little bit unique is that they have legs in all these disciplines – fashion, design and art," added Carroll.

Founded by Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson, JW Anderson previously created hoodies and tailored shorts moulded from plasticine for its Spring Summer 2024 womenswear show at London Fashion Week.

Various other fashion brands have a presence at this year's Milan design week. Hermès has created an installation that uses reclaimed bricks, slate, marble and terracotta to draw attention to the brand's artisan roots while Marimekko has transformed a traditional Milanese bar into a flower-clad day-to-night cafe.

The photography is courtesy of Patrick Carroll and JW Anderson. 

Days is on display from 17 to 21 April 2024 at the JW Anderson store, Via Sant'Andrea 16, Milan. See our Milan design week 2024 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the week.

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Dezeen has teamed up with Hydro to make a video documenting its exhibition at this year's Milan design week, in which seven designers have created objects made from aluminium scrap.

Titled 100R, the exhibition takes place at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan and features designs made from the Norwegian brand's Hydro Circal 100R recycled aluminium product.

Hydro unveiled objects at this year's Milan design week

According to the brand, Hydro Circal 100R is the first aluminium product made entirely from post-consumer scrap that can be mass-produced on an industrial scale.

The product was designed to have a carbon footprint that is 97 per cent lower than the global average for primary-grade aluminium.

Hydro enlisted the artistic direction of Norwegian designer Lars Beller Fjetland to lead concept development and strategy for the exhibition.

Designed in collaboration with Shapes by Hydro – a knowledge hub created by Hydro – the challenge assigned to the seven designers was to create a product made purely from extruded aluminium that can be mass-produced on demand.

Amongst the designs featured in the exhibition are the Grotte Lamp by Inga Sempé and the Billet Chair by product designer John Tree.

Other designs include the Prøve Light by Max Lamb, a coat hanger called Tsuba by Andreas Engesvik, a series of containers named Nave 1, 2, & 3 by Shane Schneck, a partition called Serial by Rachel Griffin and a system used for constructing shelving called T-Slot Board by Philippe Malouin. 

Hydro claims that Circal 100R can be endlessly recycled without any loss of quality, with hopes that the material will still be used a hundred years from now.

The 100R exhibition takes place at Spazio Maiocchi during Milan Design Week from 15-21 April 2024.

The photography is by Einar Aslaksen.

Milan design week takes place from 16 April to 21 April 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

Partnership content

This video was produced by Dezeen as part of a partnership with Hydro. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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Arab Design Now and Enzo Mari are among the current design exhibitions taking place across the world featured in Dezeen Events Guide.

Other design-related events taking place at the moment include Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design, Christien Meindertsma: Re-forming Waste and I Will Follow the Ship.

Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design
2 September 2023 to 7 July 2024, USA

Objects intended to illustrate the circularity of materials feature in the Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design exhibition by New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Pioneering methods for using overlooked materials such as fungi and manure are on display.

Each piece encourages visitors to rethink the ways in which naturally occurring and waste materials are utilised in design.

Christien Meindertsma: Re-forming Waste
22 November 2023 to 19 October 2024, UK

The work of Dutch designer and artist Christien Meindertsma is celebrated in this exhibition at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in London.

Meindertsma's work utilises wool and linoleum, among other materials, and every piece aims to demonstrate innovation and well-honed craft techniques.

The exhibition follows the designer's research into the materials, exploring how they can be used in creative ways.

Arab Design Now
24 February to 5 August 2024, Qatar

Middle Eastern, Asian and North African design is spotlighted in Arab Design Now, the headline exhibition at Design Doha 2024.

Pieces on display include furniture, accessories and textiles, all of which are informed by local regional and cultural crafts.

As well as spotlighting both contemporary and conventional techniques, the pieces aim to address climate-related concerns and themes of sustainability.

Enzo Mari
29 March to 8 September 2024, UK

London's Design Museum is running a retrospective exhibition on the work of Italian artist and furniture designer Enzo Mari.

The eponymous show displays Mari's wide-ranging body of work, from furniture and installations to books and graphic design projects.

Curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Francesca Giacomelli aimed to encapsulate Mari's 60 years of practice, combining existing works with purpose-commissioned projects.

I Will Follow the Ship
20 April to 24 November 2024, Italy

The 2024 edition of the Venice Art Biennale includes an exhibition by Maltese artist Matthew Attard.

The installation is the basis for Malta's designated pavilion during the biennale and blurs the line between artificial intelligence and time-honoured cultural heritage.

Physical and virtual settings are layered into a complex experience that explores the ways in which humans and digital forces interact.

About Dezeen Events Guide

Dezeen Events Guide is our guide to the best architecture and design events taking place across the world each year. The guide is updated weekly and includes virtual events, conferences, trade fairs, major exhibitions and design weeks.

Inclusion in the guide is free for basic listings, with events selected at Dezeen's discretion. Organisers can get standard, enhanced or featured listings for their events, including images, additional text and links, by paying a modest fee.

In addition, events can ensure inclusion by partnering with Dezeen. For more details on inclusion in Dezeen Events Guide and media partnerships with Dezeen, email eventsguide@dezeen.com.

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Cultural institutions Triennale Milano and Fondation Cartier are hosting a retrospective show of Italian designer Alessandro Mendini at this year's Milan design week, showcased in this video produced by Dezeen for Triennale.

The exhibition takes place at Trienalle Milano

Triennale Milano partnered with the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain to host the exhibition, which explores Mendini's work across the fields of architecture, art, design and theory.

Titled Io Sono Un Drago (I am a dragon), the show brings together over 400 different works and intends to explore Mendini's philosophical approach to the world around him.

Mendini was an Italian architect and designer known for his role as a key figure in the radical design and postmodernist movements of the 1960s and '70s.

Through his 60-year career he created some of the most iconic design pieces of the 20th century, such as the Proust armchair, which combined baroque references with pointillist patterns. Mendini passed away at the age of 87 in February 2019.

Split into six thematic sections, the show looks back on Mendini's life and work, with the first section, titled Identikit, showcasing a series of self-portraits Mendini created over the course of his life.

The following sections explore aspects of his work including his firm Atelier Mendini, which designed buildings such as the Groninger Museum and the Arts metro stations in Naples, as well as exploring his research in radical design theory.

The last section of the exhibition consists of three immersive installations that Mendini created towards the end of his life, which play with the concepts of dreams and nightmares.

As part of the wider exhibition, French designer Phillipe Starck will also debut an immersive installation created in homage to Mendini during the run of the design week.

Titled What? A homage to Alessandro Mendini, the installation aims to take visitors into a sensory journey through Mendini's subconscious.

Speaking on the installation, Starck said "before being a human, [Mendini] was an idea, a sensation, an osmotic vibration that I wanted to recapture through the installation, conceived as an immersive experience in Alessandro Mendini's brain".

Starck's installation will be located in Triennale Milano's Impluvium space.

Io Sono Un Drago is open to the public at the Trienalle Milano 13 April to 13 October. What? A homage to Alessandro Mendini runs from the 16 April- 13 October. See our Milan design week 2024 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the week.

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This video was produced by Dezeen for Triennale as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen's partnership content here. 

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Swedish retailer IKEA is focussing on the experience of leaving home for the first time in its Milan design week exhibition called 1st, which was designed by architect Midori Hasuike and spatial designer Emerzon.

Milan's Padiglione Visconti venue has been "transformed into an IKEA playground" showcasing products and experiences that address leaving home for the first time.

"With the current social and economic climate it's maybe harder than ever to make that move," said the brand's creative director Marcus Engman.

"For 1st, we wanted to more deeply explore the challenges and emotions that come with this special time in life," he told Dezeen.

Visitors enter the exhibition through a large-scale illuminated maze designed by Hasuike to symbolise the disorientating feelings that can come with new experiences.

The architect chose rentable and recyclable materials for the installation, which were selected for their accessibility, she explained.

"The materials reflect the reality of having to adapt and adjust to what you have and can afford when moving into your first home," said Hasuike.

Deliberately disorientating paths make up the maze, decorated with objects such as photo frames and packing boxes.

"This represents the shared hope we all feel when facing new adventures – it's a reminder of the mixed emotions that come with first experiences," added Hasuike.

Visitors eventually make their way to a "welcoming" central space anchored by a large geometric stage featuring different furniture-filled "rooms" on each of its open levels. The stage's lighting was designed by Anders Heberling.

The rest of the exhibition is separated into individual spaces, showing old and new IKEA pieces.

Among the displays is the Brännboll collection of gaming furniture, which features the brand's first successful attempt at an inflatable chair.

Klippan – IKEA's first flat-packed sofa by the late product designer Noburu Nakamuru – has also been redesigned for the exhibition.

"It's one product that exemplifies 'first' more than anything else," said Engman.

"There's an excitement in testing the beds and sofas, imagining your life in one of our kitchens – and that's what we have tried to emulate in our space."

IKEA is also hosting a "hotdog extravaganza" as part of the exhibition. The food stall is serving playful takes on the brand's recognisable hot dog, including one made from ice cream.

At last year's Milan design week, IKEA marked its 80th anniversary with an exhibition charting the brand's history. IKEA recently launched a collaboration with Dutch studio Raw Color in which no item features less than two colours to explore how our perception of a hue can change based on its context.

The photography and video are courtesy of IKEA.

1st is on show from 15 to 21 April 2024 at Padiglione Visconti, Via Tortona 58, Milan. See our Milan design week 2024 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the week.

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People of colour and women working as architects are often actively discouraged from following their design instincts, FAME Collective founder Tumpa Husna-Yasmin Fellows tells Dezeen in this interview.

Fellows, an educator at London's Central Saint Martins university and co-founder of Our Building Design, argued that some architects in senior positions limit design responsibility to themselves and undervalue the skills of people from diverse backgrounds.

"It's very much about ego and who represents the design or the brand," Fellows said. "Women are usually not given that experience or responsibility and even if they are, they're not given the right kind of recognition."

"It's really good for business to have a diversity of skills and talents, otherwise you just get one kind of design. That's where architects can have conflicting opinions because those in power want to hold on to their one way of designing."

Fellows is the founder of architecture community organisation Female Architects of Minority Ethnic (FAME) Collective. The group recently launched an exhibition that aims to present the experiences of minority ethnic women in architecture academia and professional practice.

Hosted in the library of the Royal Institute of British Architects' (RIBA) London headquarters, the exhibition draws upon lived experiences and data collected by FAME Collective as part of a research project titled "Exposing the barriers in architecture from a FAME perspective".

The RIBA-funded research aimed to highlight the adversities faced by minority ethnic women in architecture and hold institutions accountable.

Fellows explained that there are "barriers" people face along the path to becoming an architect in the UK that are common to many, but have a greater impact on women and minorities.

As part of the FAME Collective research, multiple minority-ethnic women came forward to say they are withheld from designing in practice, according to Fellows.

"We've heard from women who are really established practitioners in big practices talking about this idea of who gets to design, because it's very much dominated by people at the top and they're usually men," she explained. "The act of designing is a privilege and power that is political in the context of architecture."

"Even if some women are allowed to design, they're not allowed to have the recognition because the design is taken and presented by a male director."

"If they design with lots of colours, or design representing their cultural heritage, they are told that that isn't the way architects should be or the language is not acceptable," Fellows said.

She believes this is detrimental to architecture studios and that they should embrace the wide range of design talents and styles that come from employing people from diverse backgrounds.

"We're not celebrating the diversity of the skills within the practice of architecture," she said.

Fellows believes this discouragement is also present in architecture education, as multiple minority-ethnic architecture students came forward to say they were advised against incorporating parts of their heritage in their projects.

She claimed that students often lack academic support to engage in topics related to their cultural heritage.

"One of the barriers that we keep hearing about is architecture education needing to be decolonised, transformed or expanded, and there should be alternatives to the way it's been taught," said Fellows.

"For example, some of our participants have described that when they tried to do a design project that was responding to their cultural heritage or a discourse they're interested in that reflects their identity, they were discouraged or the tutors and academic staff were not knowledgeable or interested enough to support them with it."

FAME Collective's research found that the number of Black and Asian students falls between each qualification stage, with white men forming the large majority of registered architects.

"One of the most striking data we found was that between Part One and Two, and Two and Three, Black and Asian students completely drop out in huge numbers," said Fellows.

"For Part Three, we looked at the registered architects – 83 per cent are white and 71 per cent are men, so it's very much dominated by white men."

FAME Collective contributed to the Architects Registration Board (ARB)'s plans to introduce an alternate route to the current three-part structure to becoming an architect, aiming to minimise the financial burden on students.

It would involve scrapping the current requirement of an ARB-accredited bachelor's degree (Part One) and permitting students with relevant degrees or professional experience to continue on the path to becoming registered architects in the UK.

Fellows believes this more flexible structure, which the ARB plans to fully carry out by September 2027, will help diversify the profession and allow people to earn in practice while completing their training.

"The work that we've done with the ARB has informed the recent policy change of how to become an architect," said Fellows.

"It reduces the financial burden for some students because that is also another huge barrier for people we spoke to – it's not just gender and race, it's also class and your financial situation."

Fellows argued that while institutional discrimination towards ethnic minority women is experienced across many professions, architecture has a particularly strong culture of white men being respected as figureheads over people from different backgrounds.

"As a society, we've gone a bit backwards," she said. "We still respect and celebrate the white man figure as the architect."

"It's a societal change as well as an attitude and cultural change that is needed for things to happen."

In order to enact change in the industry, people in leading positions in architecture firms should attend diversity events and learn from those affected by discrimination, said Fellows.

She suggested that institutions like the RIBA could do more to ensure equality and diversity in architecture.

"RIBA would be an excellent organisation to enforce at least one managerial member of a practice to attend this type of event at least once a year and pledge to come back to tell us what changes you have made to remove the barriers for underrepresented architects," said Fellows.

"There's lots of ways RIBA could help with this and I guess they are trying to, but I don't think the right people are in the room to engage in the conversations."

"There should be an exchange and a dialogue between people who are being affected and people who are able to make changes," she added.

While she emphasised that FAME Collective's work needs to reach people in power in order to have a significant impact on the architecture profession, Fellows also hopes the group's exhibition is a space where minority ethnic women feel welcomed and represented.

FAME Collective plans to tour the exhibition and is seeking venues outside of London to reach as many people as possible.

"Although we finished our research project formally, our work unfortunately keeps going on," said Fellows. "We have to continue until things change."

"[The exhibition] is about encouraging a diverse group of women, people like myself, and making a welcoming space where they can see themselves represented in the work and also see some of their barriers being amplified and heard in a platform such as the RIBA."

"We want to raise awareness of the situation that we are still facing in architecture, of the lack of diversity and absence of women and people of colour."

The photography is by Sarah Daoudi and Jim Stephenson unless otherwise stated.

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Curator Lotte Johnson discusses the transformative power of textiles in this video produced by Dezeen for the Barbican's latest exhibition.

Titled Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, the exhibition examines how textiles have been employed to explore themes spanning power, oppression, gender and belonging.

It features over 100 works that make use of textile, fibre and thread from over 50 artists from across the globe, spanning from the 1960s to the present day.

The exhibition is designed to challenge the perception of textiles being solely domestic or craft practices and instead features textile works that relate a story of resistance and rebellion as well as pieces that present narratives of emancipation and joy.

Johnson explained that textiles offer a meaningful medium to express personal and political issues due to their tactile nature and intimate connection to daily life.

"Textiles are one of the most under-examined mediums in art history and in fact history itself," Johnson said. "They are an intrinsic part of our everyday lives. When we're born, we're shrouded in a piece of fabric. Everyday we wrap ourselves in textiles," she continued.

"They're really this very intimate, tactile part of our lives and therefore perhaps the most intrinsic, meaningful way to express ourselves."

The exhibition is structured into six thematic sections. The first, called Subversive Stitch, presents works that challenge binary conceptions of gender and sexuality.

The section includes feminist artist Judy Chicago's Birth Project, which vividly depicts the glory, pain and mysticism of giving birth, as well as a piece from South African artist Nicholas Hlobo, which, despite initially appearing as a painting, is made using ribbon and leather stitched into a canvas.

Another section of the exhibition is titled Bearing Witness, which brings together artists who employ textiles to confront and protest political injustices and systems of violent oppression.

Included in this section are tapestries by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles that commemorate the lives of individuals including Eric Garner and Jadeth Rosano López.

Garner was an African-American man killed in 2014 by NYPD police officer Daniel Pantaleo, who put Garner into a chokehold during arrest. López was a seventeen-year old-girl assassinated in Panama City.

Margolles used fabric that had been placed in contact with the victims' deceased bodies and collaborated with embroiderers from their respective local communities to create the tapestries.

The Wound and Repair sections includes work from American artist and activist Harmony Hammond's Bandaged Grid series, in which layered fabric is used to evoke imagery reminiscent of an injured body.

While violence and brutality are key themes examined in the exhibition, it also showcases how textiles can be used to create narratives of hope. The final, most expansive section of the exhibition is titled Ancestral Threads, which encompasses works created to inspire a sense of optimism and reconnect with ancestral practices.

"This section not only explores artists processing exploitative and violent colonial and imperialist histories, but also celebrates the artists who are re-summoning and relearning ancient knowledge systems to imagine a different kind of future," Johnson explained.

Canadian multimedia artist Tau Lewis's work titled The Coral Reef Preservation Society is a patchwork assemblage of recycled fabrics and seashells including fragments of textured denim.

The work pays homage to the enslaved women and children thrown overboard in the Middle Passage, the historical transportation route used during the Atlantic slave trade. These women and children have been reimagined as underwater sea creatures to transform the narrative into one of regeneration.

A large installation by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña titled Quipu Austral is situated towards the end of the exhibition. The installation takes the form of billowing ribbons hanging from the ceiling.

Vicuña references quipu, a form of recording used by a number cultures in Andean South America. Quipu was a ancient writing system which used knotted textile cords to communicate information.

Other sections in the exhibition include Fabric of Everyday, which explores the daily uses of textiles, as well as Borderlands, which examines how textiles have been used to challenge ideas around belonging.

These sections feature works such as Shelia Hicks' colourful woven bundles and Margarita Cabrera's soft sculpture cacti crafted from reclaimed US border patrol uniforms.

"We hope that people might come out of this exhibition feeling invigorated and moved by the stories of resilience and rebellion embedded in the work but also hope and emancipation," Johnson said.

"I hope that the show might inspire people to pick up a needle and thread themselves and use it to express their own lived experience."

The show is a partnership between the Barbican and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and was co-curated by Barbican curators Johnson, Wells Fray-Smith and Diego Chocano, in collaboration with Amanda Pinatih from the Stedelijk.

Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art is at the Barbican Centre until 26 May 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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This video was produced by Dezeen for the Barbican Centre as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen's partnership content here.

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An exhibition at Galerie Patrick Seguin in Paris allows visitors to experience the Jean Prouvé-designed Maison Les Jours Meilleurs in both real life and virtual reality.

The gallery is exhibiting the most significant element of the demountable prefabricated house, its load-bearing service core, in a full-scale installation that doubles as a virtual reality (VR) experience.

Prouvé, the French architect best known for applying mass-production principles to both buildings and furniture, developed the design for the 57-square-metre house in 1956.

Known as Maison Les Jours Meilleurs, or "better days house", the house was designed to tackle a homelessness crisis in the French capital.

In the winter of 1954, temperatures dropped so low that a woman and child died from the cold.

After being denied a request for funding to provide emergency housing, Abbé Pierre – a Catholic priest who was the founder of the Emmaüs movement against poverty – put out a plea on the radio for aid.

Prouvé responded immediately and, in a few weeks, had developed a design he felt could offer the solution.

The design centres around the service core, a steel cylinder painted olive green. This provides all the kitchen and bathroom services and carries the weight of the building's roof.

Prouvé first exhibited a prototype of the Maison Les Jours Meilleurs on Quai Alexandre-III in February 1956.

This was described by fellow architect Le Corbusier as "the handsomest house I know of, the most perfect object for living in, the most sparkling thing ever constructed".

However, the model never made it to production and only a handful were ever built.

Galerie Patrick Seguin owns the world's largest collection of Prouvé houses, which it has installed in exhibitions around the world. In 2015, it commissioned architect Richard Rogers to put a new spin on one.

This exhibition marks the first time the gallery has allowed a Prouvé house to be experienced in virtual reality, with a virtual experience designed by VR studio Double Geste.

The installation places the service core inside a full-scale sketch floor plan that reveals the house's layout.

A VR headset transforms the scene into a visualisation of the house, placing it back on the spot where it was installed in 1956, on the banks of the Seine.

The photography is courtesy of Galerie Patrick Seguin.

Jean Prouvé, Maison Les Jours Meilleurs is on show at Galerie Patrick Seguin from 14 March to 20 April 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

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Gallery Collectional, a collectible design gallery in Dubai, has presented its inaugural exhibition featuring furniture and lighting crafted by seven Asian designers.

For Urban Fabric Series 001, Gallery Collectional invited seven designers to create designs informed by the urban settings from which they hail, including Tokyo, Seoul and Hangzhou.

Curated by Yoko Choy, the collectible design exhibition features 28 pieces that showcase the diverse range of crafts honed by the designers.

It includes 3D-printed chairs, woven sculptures, metal light sculptures and furniture made from reclaimed architectural elements.

"Since the inception of Gallery Collectional, its desire has always been to create a multicultural, cross-functional platform that fosters disruptive and worldly conversations across design and art," the gallery said.

"The 28 artworks commissioned and created for this inaugural series epitomise the juxtaposition between industrial precision and artisanal finesse, the nuanced interplay between vulnerability and resilience, and the seamless fusion of rationality and emotion," Gallery Collectional continued.

"They delve into the dynamic interplay of light and shadow, the relentless passage of time, and the subtle balance between ruggedness and sophistication, encapsulating the essence of contemporary urban life and inspiring our collective vision for the future."

Korean designer Teo Yang used remnants of traditional Korean houses known as hanoks – including glass, rubble, marble and veneer – to create a series of furniture pieces.

The collection, named Remaining Things, includes a room divider made from hanok panels and a table made from a repurposed column with a metal base and glass tabletop.

Koren design studio Kuo Duo, founded by Hwachan Lee and Yoomin Maeng, is showcasing a pair of chairs with a matching ottoman made from recycled plastic.

The Kerf Plastic seats were designed to showcase the "untapped potential" of the material to form three-dimensional objects, according to the duo.

The exhibition also featured the 3D-printed Cutting Lines chair by Korean designer Kwangho Lee, with textured surfaces inspired by the act of tying knots.

Sparks is a pendant light created by Chinese designer Mario Tsai, comprising brass chimes that sway and collide.

"Within this kinetic light installation, the transformative power of collision becomes palpable," said Gallery Collectional. "It is as if the energy from each collision is harnessed and channelled, manifesting as both visible light and audible sound."

Also in the Urban Fabric series were tables made from white, green and pink onyx by Japanese designer Kensaku Oshiro, neon light artworks by Tokyo-based Studio Swine and a pair of woven silk and cotton sculptures by Singaporean artist Tiffany Loy.

Other furniture showcases that have recently been featured on Dezeen include a furniture exhibition in a converted Bogotá townhouse and StudioTwentySeven's newly opened flagship gallery in Tribeca.

The photography is courtesy of Gallery Collectional.

Urban Fabric is on show at Gallery Collectional in Dubai from 2 to 31 March 2024. For more events, talks and exhibitions in architecture and design visit Dezeen Events Guide.

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With a major retrospective of his work on show in Madrid, Catalan designer Miguel Milá talks Dezeen through the most personally significant pieces from his eight-decade career.

Aged 93, Milá is one of the most influential Spanish designers of his generation, with a vast back catalogue of furniture and lighting works for iconic mid-century brands including Polinax and Gres, and more recently, Santa & Cole.

The largest exhibition of his work to date is currently on show at Fernán Gómez Centro Cultural de la Villa in Madrid, featuring over 200 objects and drawings, from completed works to sketches and prototypes.

The show, which opened as part of Madrid Design Festival, was curated by husband-and-wife team, Gonzalo Milá, who is the designer's son, and Claudia Oliva.

It highlights the extent of Milá's impact on design history, with many of the works now synonymous with the modern Spanish home interior.

"Milá has known the recipe for naturalness in objects ever since he picked up a pencil, as instinctively as a good cook is able to combine ingredients to make more out of their flavours," wrote Jasper Morrison in a tribute published in 2021.

Born in Barcelona in 1931, Milá worked as an interior designer before setting up his own furniture company, Tramo, in 1957. Here, he developed an approach grounded in simplicity and craft.

The designer often refers to himself as "a pre-industrial designer".

"To design is to pursue order," Milá wrote, in a memoir translated from his native Spanish.

"Anything that finds a solution through beauty is good design. But achieving beauty without functionality is something else. In design, both things have to come together at the same time."

In a Dezeen exclusive, Milá tells the stories behind nine of his favourite designs:

TMM Floor Lamp, 1962

Milan designed a series of adjustable-height floor lamps between 1956 and 1981. While the TMC has been the most commercially popular, the TMM is Milá's personal favourite.

"It is the adjustable lamp model that I feel most represents my design principles," he said. "It is light and it can be easily adjusted and assembled in three pieces."

Cesta Lamp, 1962

"I found a beautiful milky glass globe outside a parts shop that had been recently closed and made a simple rattan structure to embrace the shade and make it transportable," explained Milá. "Eventually, the structure was made in wood to be sturdier."

"This lamp has always been part of my home and many homes," he added. "It is a piece that people connect with in a special way."

Maria Table, 1962

This minimal coffee table combines a chromed and painted metal frame with a glass tabletop.

"My eldest brother had bought a new carpet for his living room (pictured) and asked that I design a table that would not conceal it," said Milá. "It was one of the first design commissions I received ."

"The table sits in his living room over his carpet. It has a way of blending in elegantly with its surroundings."

MM/Correas Shelves, 1962

Milá's close partnership with retailer Gres led them to jointly enter the Economic Home award in 1962, a competition that required entrants to furnish a whole apartment (pictured). This shelving system, made from wood and leather, was one of several designs from their winning scheme.

"I designed one wooden shelf element that had a longer and a shorter panel in the back so that, depending on how you installed it, it could accommodate taller or shorter books," said Milá.

Altar Table, 1964

"In 1964 I married Maria Valcarcel, who to this day has been my rock," said Milá.

"I designed this table with geometric, structured legs and it served as our wedding altar. This piece has recently been re-edited; every time I see it, it takes me back to the start of my family."

Salvador Chair, 1965

"As a recently married couple, we had very little money to furnish our home," said Milá.

"I designed this chair for our dining room. At the time, rattan was not seen as a noble material. When friends visited us, they found it very modern that we would have rattan chairs in our dining room," he continued.

"To this day, we have the same chairs. They have been comfortably seating our family for 58 years. They are easy to move, light and also very resistant. I find the patina that time has graced them with very beautiful."

Manila Clothes Stand, 1965

Milá created many more works from rattan, after meeting a master craftsman who specialised in this material. Since 2019, design brand Trenat has been reissuing many of these designs. The designer favours the clothes stand because it is a piece he uses every day.

"It's light and I can easily move it about my room," he said. "It provides all I need to keep my pants, jacket, shirt and shoes tidy for a second use."

NeoRomántico Liviano Bench, 2000

Milá came up with the concept for the Neo bench series around the time of the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. Produced by Urbidermis, the street furniture arm of Santa & Cole, the series launched in 1995 and continued evolving up to 2021.

"I was walking one day when I saw an old man trying to stand from the street bench he was sitting on and noticed how difficult it was for him," said Milá. "The seating position was too reclined and low."

"All benches in Barcelona at the time were this same type," he continued. "It made me think about how I could design a bench that would allow older people to stand gracefully."

"This bench is now the most common in Barcelona and many other places. I am proud to have been able to serve the community, adding comfort to outdoor living."

Constanza Chair, 2024

The Constanza (pictured far left) is a new lounge chair that Milá is set to launch this year.

"It is made of a light rattan structure with a comfortable leather seat and back," he said. "I am very happy with the result."

Miguel Milá is on show at Fernán Gómez Centro Cultural de la Villa in Madrid from 8 February to 31 March 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

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Collectible design gallery Objects with Narratives has opened its first permanent brick-and-mortar outpost inside a historic 1920s fur atelier in Brussels.

The gallery occupies 2,000 square metres over three floors of a landmark beaux-arts building on the Place du Grand Sablon, originally constructed as the sales room and workshop of Belgian furrier Raymond Mallien.

Over the following century, Grand Sablon 40 went on to house a museum and the auction house of Yves Saint Laurent co-founder Pierre Bergé before Objects with Narratives (OWN) took over the building.

"When we figured out that the space was available, we couldn't say no," said Nik Vandewyngaerde, who founded OWN with his brother Robbe and longtime friend Oskar Eryatmaz.

Most of the ground level still features the original beaux-art interiors of Mallien's fur boutique from 1921. The former shop floor with its gilded mouldings, wall frescoes and giant chandeliers now serves as the gallery's front room.

Next door, a wood-panelled boardroom houses OWN's library of material samples and catalogues and is used for meetings with clients and designers.

"The light bulbs have been changed but all the rest is original," Vandewyngaerde said of the interior.

In the back and on the upper two storeys, OWN worked with the existing whitewashed industrial spaces that once housed Mallien's workshops.

Offering a dramatic contrast with the gilded splendour of the boutique, these now house a classic "white cube" gallery space, an open floor for exhibitions and a showroom styled to evoke a modern residence.

For the front room, OWN selected freestanding furniture that would leave the protected interior untouched and have the visual gravitas necessary to not be dwarfed by its surroundings.

"The room itself is so powerful, so it needs pieces that are very, very strong," Robbe Vandewyngaerde told Dezeen. "If you just put a nice vase there, it's going to be lost."

Mirroring black-and-white photos of the original interior, OWN arranged the furniture into loose seating areas with standout pieces including a marble coffee table shaped like a giant pillow by Belgian designer Ben Storms and Mircea Anghel's Lose Control sideboard, formed by exploding dynamite in a copper frame.

To complement the blue skies painted across the room's frescoes and ceiling vaults, OWN introduced a translucent resin console table by Austrian designer Laurids Gallée and the flowing fibreglass Wave chaise by former surfboard maker Lukas Cober.

The furrier's boardroom has largely maintained its former layout and is now centred on a circular charred-timber table surrounded by sculptural seating by German designer Lisa Ertel and British artist Alun Heslop.

The other gallery spaces will host a rotating roster of exhibitions and events with a particular focus on championing homegrown design talent.

For the gallery's opening, which coincided with the Collectible design fair at the beginning of March, there were dedicated solo shows by Belgian designers Ben Storms and Lionel Jadot.

"We used to work more with international artists – and we still do," Nik Vandewyngaerde said.

"But we've started to focus more on Belgian artists because we're now here, to support the local economy. But also because it's easier in a way to be closer, to give more direction, to visit their studios."

OWN started life in 2022 as a nomadic gallery for collectible design, highlighting work from a small roster of friends and acquaintances of the Vandewyngaerde brothers – both trained architects who cut their teeth at studios Herzog & de Meuron and OMA respectively.

Grand Sablon 40 marks OWN's first investment in a brick-and-mortar gallery and will offer a more permanent home for its designers outside of fairs like Collectible, PAD or Art Brussels.

"It's a lot of money but we had a very good last year and we believe in the space," Robbe Vandewyngaerde said.

Despite only one of the founders being based in Brussels, the trio says the capital of the European Union was an obvious choice for the gallery's first outpost.

With the rebirth of the industrial area around the Brussels Canal – soon set to house various maker studios and an outpost of the Centre Pompidou inside a former Citroën factory – OWN believes the city is on track to be Europe's next cultural capital.

"It doesn't have the allure yet of Paris or London," Robbe Vandewyngaerde said. "But a lot of artists are coming here to live because they cannot afford Paris, they cannot afford Amsterdam, they cannot afford London."

"Brussels is still a capital city that has a city feeling but it's much more accessible," he added. "It's going to take five to 10 to 15 years. But I do feel like Brussels is a place that's going to be competing with London or Paris."

The city's Collectible design fair hosted its seventh edition this month, with standout projects including a games room curated by OWN, a daybed upholstered in wet clay and a homeware collection that wears traces of its CNC fabrication as decoration.

This year will also mark the fair's expansion into the US with the launch of its inaugural New York edition in September.

The photography is by Tijs Vervecken.

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London's Victoria and Albert Museum has launched its Tropical Modernism exhibition, which highlights the architectural movement's evolution from colonial import to a "tool of nation building".

According to the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), the exhibition aims to examine the complex context, power dynamics and post-colonial legacy of tropical modernism – an architectural style that developed in South Asia and West Africa in the late 1940s – while also centralising and celebrating its hidden figures.

"Tropical modernism is experiencing something of a modish revival as an exotic and escapist style popular in verdant luxury hotels, bars and concrete jungle houses," the exhibition's lead curator Christopher Turner told Dezeen.

"But it has a problematic history and, through an examination of the context of British imperialism and the de-colonial struggle, the exhibition seeks to look at the history of tropical modernism before and after Independence, and show something of the politics behind the concrete," he continued.

The exhibition follows the V&A's Tropical Modernism exhibition at the 2023 Venice Biennale, which revealed the team's precursory research on tropical modernism in a West African setting.

For the in-house iteration of the exhibition, additional architectural models, drawings and archival imagery have been introduced to interrogate tropical modernism in India alongside the African perspective.

Exhibition materials line a series of rooms within the V&A's Porter Gallery, divided by brightly coloured partitions and louvred walls referencing tropical modernist motifs.

The exhibition begins by tracing tropical modernism back to its early development by British architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry. Stationed together in Ghana from 1944, Drew and Fry adapted international modernism to the African climate, proposing functional over ornamental design.

Drew and Fry would also become part of the Department of Tropical Studies at the Architectural Association (AA), which exported British architects to the colonies from 1954 in a bid to neutralise calls for independence.

The exhibition continues by spotlighting local Ghanaian figures who worked with Fry and Drew, noting the power shifts that were taking place behind the scenes to reappropriate the architectural style for an emerging era of colonial freedom.

Influential political leaders Jawaharlal Nehru in India and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana are the exhibition's key personas, framing the evolution of tropical modernism from conception to regionalisation.

"The heroes of our exhibition are Nehru and Nkrumah, the first prime ministers of India and Ghana," Turner explained. "Tropical modernism, a colonial invention, survived the transition to Independence and was appropriated and adapted by Nehru and Nkrumah as a tool of nation building."

"Nkrumah, who sometimes sketched designs for the buildings he wanted on napkins, created the first architecture school in sub-Saharan Africa to train a new generation of African architects, and this institution has partnered with us on a five-year research project into tropical modernism."

Through a host of physical models and artefacts, the city of Chandigarh becomes the exhibition's narrative focal point for tropical modernism in India.

Under prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Chandigarh was the first large-scale modernist project, recruiting Drew and Fry along with French architect Le Corbusier to plan the ideal utopian urban centre.

As with Nkrumah – who saw how the Africanisation of architecture could become a symbol of progress and change – the exhibition also aims to highlight Nehru's ambitions for a localised modernism drawing from the Indian vernacular, rather than the Western Bauhaus style.

The display culminates in a video featuring 16 key tropical modernist structures, interspersed with interviews and footage explaining the social and political context behind each building's realisation.

"We made a three-screen 28-minute film, shot in Ghana and featuring panoramic portraits of over a dozen buildings, cut with archive footage from the time and interviews with architects like John Owusu Addo and Henry Wellington, and Nkrumah's daughter, the politician Samia Nkrumah," said Turner.

According to Turner, the exhibition begins to address gaps in the V&A's collections and archives pertaining to architecture and design in the global south.

"Archives are themselves instruments of power, and West African and Indian architects are not as prominent in established archives, which many institutions have now realised and are working to address," Turner explained.

"Tropical modernism was very much a co-creation with local architects who we have sought to name – all of whom should be much better known, but are excluded from established canons."

Bringing tropical modernism back into contemporary discourse was also important to the V&A as a timely investigation of low-tech and passive design strategies.

"Tropical modernism was a climate responsive architecture – it sought to work with rather than against climate," Turner said.

"As we face an era of climate change, it is important that tropical modernism's scientifically informed principles of passive cooling are reexamined and reinvented for our age," he added.

"I hope that people will be interested to learn more about these moments of post-colonial excitement and opportunity, and the struggle by which these hard-earned freedoms were won."

The V&A museum in South Kensington houses permanent national collections alongside a series of temporary activations and exhibitions.

As part of London Design Festival 2023, the museum hosted a furniture display crafted from an Alfa Romeo car by Andu Masebo and earlier in the year, architect Shahed Saleem created a pavilion in the shape of a mosque at the V&A as part of 2023's Ramadan Festival.

The photography is courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence will run from 2 March to 22 September 2024 at the V&A Museum in London. For more events, exhibitions and talks in architecture and design visit the Dezeen Events Guide.

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Dezeen has teamed up with Design Doha to make a video reel documenting Arab Design Now, the central exhibition of the Qatari capital's newly launched biennial.

The exhibition takes place at creative hub M7, and gathers a range of work from 74 designers and collectives from around the Middle East and North Africa.

Design Doha was launched by art and culture institution Qatar Museums in February

Its main exhibition Arab Design Now features works that draw from the region's arts heritage and natural resources, spanning installations at an architectural scale, furniture, ornaments and graphic design.

Amongst the designs highlighted in the reel is a prototype for pendant lighting wrapped in natural luffa sponge by Palestinian designer Samer Selbak.

Also spotlighted is a meditative installation by Jordanian architect Hiba Shahzada that frames a reflective pool with four wood columns down which water trickles, all topped with a geometric canopy.

The reel also documents an installation by Paris-based architecture practice New South, which designed a set of stools that can be arranged and adapted by users to form a sacred space anywhere.

The exhibition was curated by Rana Beiruti, who is based in Jordan and previously co-founded and directed Amman Design Week.

Arab Design Now takes place from 24 February to 5 August 2024 at M7, Doha, Qatar.

Partnership content

This video was produced by Dezeen for Design Doha as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen's partnership content here.

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Electronics brand LG OLED has collaborated with American street artist Shepard Fairey to exhibit digital versions of his artworks in this exclusive video produced by Dezeen.

Called Peace and Justice, the installation is being presented at Frieze art fair in Los Angeles and features select works by Fairey that address global issues while advocating for positive change.

 

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Dezeen has produced an exclusive video for LG OLED

Fairey was directly involved in the design of the installation space, which features a reimagined version of his 2018 piece Damaged Wrong Path Mural.

Other works presented at the exhibition include Fairey's 2023 Swan Song print, a reflection on the state of the environment, as well as a piece titled Make Art Not War, echoing the 1960s anti-war slogan "make love, not war."

Fairey is the founder of OBEY Clothing and is widely known for his Hope portrait of Barack Obama – which was widely circulated during the 2008 US presidential election campaign – as well as a series of posters called We the People that were released the day before the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017.

The LG OLED Art initiative invites artists to exhibit digital versions of their works using LG OLED TVs.

Each pixel in the OLED TVs emits its own light and can be controlled individually, creating an emissive display that was designed to produce accurate colour reproduction.

The LG OLED TVs currently on show at Frieze Los Angeles aim to accurately express the prominent red tones in Fairey's artwork.

LG OLED Art has collaborated with over 27 artists from around the world, including Anish Kapoor, Barry X Ball, Damien Hirst, the late Kim Whanki and Kevin McCoy.

The photography is by LG Electronics.

Frieze Los Angeles takes place from 29 February to 3 March 2024 at Santa Monica Airport. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

Partnership content

This article was written by Dezeen as part of a partnership with LG OLED. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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A disaster-proof chandelier from Lebanon and a towering sand dune-style stone installation feature in Arab Design Now, the main exhibition at the inaugural Design Doha biennial.

Arab Design Now was curated by Rana Beiruti to capture the spirit of contemporary design across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the curator told Dezeen ahead of the opening of the first Design Doha.

Set within the Qatari capital's M7 building, the design biennial draws together a range of collectible design and installations.

Selected works from 74 participants paid homage to the MENA region's "extremely harsh and unique geography" and investigated the "use of materials as a guiding principle," explained Beiruti.

Here are 10 of Dezeen's highlights from Arab Design Now, which is on display in Doha until early August.

Sites – New Sites by Studio Anne Holtrop

Bahrain- and Amsterdam-based architect Anne Holtrop has designed a cluster of large-scale mobiles made from vast slabs of lumpy resin.

Holtrop took casts of a series of manmade and natural sites that he found across Qatar to create the textured pieces, which hang from bearing mechanisms and can be manually rotated by visitors to produce continuously moving formations.

Constellations 2.0: Object. Light. Consciousness by Abeer Seikaly

Over 5,000 pieces of Murano glass were woven together by Jordanian-Palestinian designer Abeer Seikaly to create this chandelier, which combines Bedouin weaving practices from Jordan with traditional Venetian glassmaking techniques.

Brass and stainless steel were also integrated into the lighting, made flexible by the glass mesh.

Once illuminated, the sculptural piece creates dramatic light patterns that nod to a starry night sky seen from the Badia desert, according to Seikaly.

House Between a Jujube Tree and a Palm Tree by Civil Architecture

Kuwait and Bahrain-based office Civil Architecture has designed a looming fibreglass roof proposal for a majlis – the traditional term for an Arabic gathering space.

"It's a 1:1 model of a roof of an actual house that we designed in Bahrain," studio co-founder Hamed Bukhamseen told Deezen.

Supported by steel and suspended from tension cables, the majlis features openings designed to accommodate tall trees and was created to explore the "symbiotic but blurred" relationship between indoor and outdoor settings.

Nubia, Hathor and Gros Guillaume Stool by Omar Chakil

French-Egyptian-Lebanese designer Omar Chakil was informed by his father's homeland of Egypt when he chose alabaster onyx to create this monolithic shelving, a bulbous coffee table and a stool that glides across the floor on wheels.

Taking cues from ancient practices, Chakil carved the rounded furniture from raw blocks of the material, which was sanded down over time using water rather than covered in varnish – something that the designer said had became common in Egypt, especially when making "cheap" souvenirs.

"The whole idea of the collection was to use Egyptian alabaster, which was a healing stone," Chakil told Dezeen.

"The pharaohs used [the material], then it transformed it over time. It lost its soul. So I tried to put it in the contemporary context by using the shapes that healing emotions would take – so they are round and soft, even though they are very heavy," he added.

"I see that people are afraid to, but I want them to touch the furniture."

Tiamat by AAU Anastas

Palestinian architecture office AAU Anastas is presenting Tiamat, a dune-shaped installation that forms part of the studio's ongoing project, Stone Matters, which explores the potential of combining historical stone building techniques with modern technologies to encourage the use of structural stone.

Positioned for visitors to walk through, the installation is a towering structure made of stone sourced from Bethlehem and informed by the Gothic-style architecture found across Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.

According to AAU Anastas, the light, sound reverberations and climate control within Tiamat's internal space is unique to stone construction.

Clay in Context by Sama El Saket

Jordan-born architect and ceramicist Sama El Saket took cues from her native landscape when creating this "taxonomy of Jordanian clays".

The result is a set of spindle bottle-style vessels, each made of a different natural clay found across Jordan. This gives the pieces their distinctive colours, textures and character.

"These are all natural clays with no pigments added," El Saket told Dezeen. "The colours are attributed to the different minerals that are found within the region. Some are sandier, some are rockier."

The designer noted that while Jordan features an abundance of clay deposits and a rich history of ceramic production, today most Jordanian clay is imported.

Light Impact by Fabraca Studios

Lebanese industrial design brand Fabraca Studios has created Light Impact, a solid aluminium lighting fixture that was designed as an alternative chandelier, resembling durable ropes.

The piece was made to replace a glass chandelier that shattered in the aftermath of the 2020 Beiruit explosion, which destroyed a large part of Lebanon's capital city.

Light Impact is defined by "flexible characteristics designed to withstand another disaster," studio founder Samer Saadeh told Dezeen. He added that the piece, which includes internal brass components, was designed as an ode to Beirut's adaptability and resilience.

Eleven by Sahel Alhiyari

Eleven is a cluster of tall fluted terracotta columns by Jordanian architect Sahel Alhiyari that were made through moulding and forming rather than traditional cutting and carving.

The architect handcrafted the segments, which are vertically stacked, using a similar technique to pottery-making,

"As you twist and turn the material, it creates all of this stuff," Alhiyari told Dezeen. The designer explained that the columns were deliberately created to celebrate imperfections, despite referencing classical architecture.

Sediments by Talin Hazbar

UAE-based Syrian designer Talin Hazbar is featuring her Sediments project, which previously gained recognition at Dubai Design Week.

The work consists of blocky seating made from fishing ropes and fishing cage ropes extracted from the Persian Gulf with the assistance of the Dubai Voluntary Diving Team.

Also made up of recycled rubber grains, the heavily textured seating was created to serve as a reminder of how we might attempt to clean up damaged coastlines, according to Hazbar.

Whispers from the Deep by T Sakhi

Lebanese-Polish sisters Tessa and Tara El Sakhi of the studio T Sakhi combined discarded metal salvaged from factories in Veneto, Italy, with Murano glass to create amorphous glassware that takes cues from underwater sea creatures.

These pieces were arranged atop dramatic shelving inside the elevator connecting the first and second floors of the Arab Design Now exhibition.

The result is a playful installation that draws together the Venetian lagoon and Lebanese glassblowing traditions.

The main photo is by Julián Velásquez and the rest of the photography is by Edmund Sumner unless stated otherwise.

Arab Design Now takes place at Design Doha from 24 February to 5 August 2024 at M7 in Doha, Qatar. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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American design studio Sized has arranged black cars around furniture for an exhibition in Los Angeles that aims to embody the city's "intrinsic" relationship with automobiles.

Part of a series of mobile exhibitions by Sized called Sized Selects, the show featured a series of cars displayed as "sculptures" in a Hollywood building that was once used as the headquarters of American business magnate Howard Hughes.

It is based around a collaboration between Sized founder Alexander May and American furniture company USM. May told Dezeen that the chrome used in USM's industrial-style modular furniture was the main material prompt for the greater exhibition.

"We wanted to bring the chrome of USM to life through the curation cars," he said.

"We selected black cars so you could just focus on the shape, as well as the chrome components of the car, connecting them with this classic USM element."

USM created a series of chrome-and-glass shelving units displayed in the entryway and collaborated with Canadian designer Willo Perron on a long table in the same style with small, wheeled chairs.

The long table was flanked on either side by more cars, arranged along the walls of a long passageway inside the building, which has been stripped down to its concrete foundations.

"[The exhibition] is a conceptual exploration of the city's intrinsic and storied relationship with motor vehicles and the significance of their sculptural and material interconnectedness," said the Sized team.

"It is a celebration of collaborative culture, automotive ingenuity, and the power of black."

Automobiles in the exhibition were curated in partnership with engineering consultancy Damon Jones, and several dealerships and private individuals were called upon to lend their cars for the show.

At the front of the line of vehicles was a 1993 Vector, a rare vehicle produced in the United States. The low-lying sportscar belonged to Vector chief designer Gerald Wiegert.

Also on show was a 1982 Rolls-Royce Corniche Convertible and a 1993 Mercedes 500SEC AMG commissioned by American basketball player Shaquille O'Neal.

"The black, chrome and glass palette, an intentional extraction of color, allows shape, line, and frame to emerge in sharp relief, elevating form to a value on par with power and precision that defines automotive design excellence," said the Sized team.

May said he wanted to showcase the design alongside the vehicles to show the "sculptural" quality of the cars.

"It's a meditation on the shape and materiality of the vehicles," he said.

The show is an exercise in unifying different aspects of the design world that are not often showcased simultaneously.

"It pushes the boundaries, putting these things in the same room together," said May.

"Because, at the end of the day, people are living with all these things together but not experiencing that in shows."

Sized Selects is a quarterly showcase put on by May, who opened a brick-and-mortar location for his creative studio in 2022.

Other design exhibitions that featured automobiles include a show in Bilbao where British architect Norman Foster showcased several of his own classic cars.

The photography is by Carter Williams unless otherwise stated.

Sized Selects Los Angeles is on show from 27 February to 3 March in Hollywood. For more events, exhibitions and talks in architecture and design visit the Dezeen Events Guide. 

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The late works of American artist and designer Wendell Castle have gone on display at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in London, showing the evolution of his signature stack-lamination technique.

Castle, who passed away in 2018 at the age of 85, is known as one of the pioneers of American art furniture, combining his training in both industrial design and sculpture to make one-off functional pieces.

The Carpenters Workshop Gallery solo exhibition Suspended Disbelief displays works the designer created between 2011 and 2015.

The period saw Castle return to the biomorphic style and stack-lamination technique that had characterised his most famous works of the 1960s and 70s, augmented with new ideas and technologies.

Stack lamination involves glueing planks of wood together to make a large block, which Castle would then carve into. The artist built the blocks with an idea of the work he was going to carve in mind, so he could build up the approximate shape in cross sections.

With his later series of works, he added another element: digital technologies such as 3D modelling, scanning and laser cutting. These allowed him to achieve ever more elaborate creations because he could obtain accurate cross-sections of 3D models in a way that he couldn't from 2D drawings, and cut them equally precisely.

"Scale and form could be pushed even further and with more complexity than ever before, resulting in the spectacular, large-scale works on show in the exhibition," Carpenters Workshop Gallery co-founder Loïc Le Gaillard told Dezeen.

The works on show as part of Suspended Disbelief are elongated and multi-limbed, sometimes monumental. They emerge from the floor like creatures from the bowels of the earth.

Stained in a black finish, the organic forms have an enigmatic appearance and push the boundaries of what we understand as timber.

Works made in steel, bronze and nickel are also on display. But laminated wood is the material he most often returned to, appreciating the way it allowed him to sculpt complex forms while ensuring structural integrity.

Castle explained that digital tools had allowed him unprecedented freedom in a video filmed by his daughter Alison Castle and gallery Friedman Benda before his death.

"Even though you think that you're not designing with your abilities very much in mind, you are," he said.

"Something just keeps you from designing things that you just could not possibly make, or you couldn't possibly make in any reasonable way. You can kind of throw that out the window now."

Carpenters Workshop Gallery has exhibited Castle's work since the early 2000s – including solo shows in both London and Paris – and has continued to work with the artist's estate since his death.

Le Gaillard said that it had been "a dream come true and a humbling experience" to work with Castle in his lifetime.

"Wendell emanated a sense of wisdom and humility," said Le Gaillard. "He had limited opportunities to travel outside of his home in Kansas during his childhood, so he always said how incredible it was for him to be able to travel and show his work in places like London or Paris later in his career."

Le Gaillard founded the Carpenters Workshop Gallery with his childhood friend Julien Lombrail in 2006, starting in a literal carpenter's workshop in London's Mayfair.

The gallery specialises in functional art and collectible design and now has five galleries worldwide, including a new London space in Ladbroke Hall, Notting Hill.

Castle was interviewed by Dezeen in 2017, where he spoke about the "organic" vocabulary of his work. "Sometimes I think of it as actually growing from a seed/idea," he said.

The photography is by Benjamin Baccarani unless otherwise stated.

Wendell Castle: Suspended Disbelief is on at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery in London, UK, from 9 February to 27 April 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Belgian design collective Zaventem Ateliers has recreated a full furniture show in cardboard after the majority of the pieces it was to show at a Mexico City exhibition were stalled in transit from Europe.

Zaventem Ateliers, a collection of design studios that operates out of a 19th-century paper mill outside of Brussels, recreated a full exhibition after it learned that the 35 pieces it had brought for the Unique Design X exhibition taking place during Mexico City art week were not going to be released from customs.

The works by eight design studios, including members Krjst Studio and Serban Ionescu Studio, were replicated at a one-to-one scale using three square metres of cardboard gathered locally in Mexico City. The original pieces were made in a variety of materials, including metal.

Reproduction took 17 hours

To meet the deadline for the fair's opening, the studios worked for 17 gruelling hours to create their reproductions.

"We worked, barely speaking or drinking, and then we set up everything and created the same scenography that we planned," Zaventem Ateliers founder Lionel Jadot told Dezeen.

"The result was quite satisfying. The funny thing was that people passing by didn't understand what we were doing until the next day when we opened."

"We had nothing to sell. We were just there to show models of our pieces, to show the volume, and in the end, the absence of our pieces rounded the public's astonishing curiosity."

The pieces on show ranged from chandeliers to sofas and tables and included a large woven wall hanging. They were displayed in a cloth-lined booth alongside the other exhibitors.

Jadot also told Dezeen that the impromptu nature of the solution resonated specifically with the Mexican visitors to the exhibition, leading to "honest and profound" exchanges with the public.

"We also had some extremely emotional reactions from the Mexicans," he said.

"[They] were very touched to see how we had solved a problem that is very much in line with their daily lives in Mexico: resourcefulness, disruption and a certain resilience."

Pieces to stay in Mexico

Jadot noted that the pieces were collected by architect and Design Week Mexico founder Andrea Cesarman, who will showcase the impromptu works in her home.

Other designers in the exhibition included Dim Atelier, Pierre Coddens, Grond Studio, Studio Élémentaires and Pascale Risbourg, along with works by Jadot himself.

Unique Design X was founded by Megan Morris Sans and has promoted Mexican design across the world through a series of exhibitions. This was its first Mexico City exhibition as part of the Material Art Fair.

Other exhibitors during the exhibition included local designer Manu Bañó.

The photography is by Moises Bautista. 

Unique Design X Mexico City was on show from 8 to 11 February 2024. For more events, exhibitions and talks in architecture and design visit Dezeen Events Guide. 

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Designer Fernando Laposse has created a 40-metre-long tapestry in avocado dye and a cabinet with avocado skin to raise awareness of the social and ecological impacts global avocado consumption has in Mexico.

Named Conflict Avocados, the pair of pieces are on display as part of the NGV Triennial at National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.

The handmade tapestry was made from fabrics dyed with avocado-seed pigment and marigold flowers.

It illustrates the entangled stories of the Monarch butterfly, the global avocado trade and the struggles of the people of Cheran, an indigenous community in Michoacan, Mexico, who were trying to prevent illegal loggers from clearing land for avocado plantations.

Laposse started the project as a way of drawing attention to the impact deforestation has on butterflies after speaking to a local environmentalist Homero Gómez González, who takes care of the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary.

The project took a dramatic turn when González disappeared on 13th January 2020 – it is assumed that he was murdered. This motivated Laposse to focus on the human impact of the avocado trade, as well as its existing impact on nature, which eventually led him to Michoacan, where the majority of the world's avocados are grown and exported.

"Textile art has always been linked to protest art, they can be very strong in terms of communication," Laposse told Dezeen.

"All the colours in the tapestry are done by avocado dye, it's really important for me to encrust the material itself into the process. That's another super powerful thing about material design – that you can start to sink a curiosity that can be very superficial at the beginning, but once you have the curiosity and sense of wonder, you open people to be more receptive to the stories," he continued.

An illustration of consumers eating avocados at the end of the tapestry serves as a reminder of how the conflict around avocados is not an isolated problem in Mexico.

"I don't want this project to be perceived as this crazy thing happened in Mexico and it's a Mexico problem," said Laposse. "In fact, every bullet that is fired there, every chainsaw that cut down those trees is done with the money and consumers from abroad."

"No one was eating avocado 15 years ago, nowhere near the rate as we are eating today. It was actually an engineered and manufactured need by marketing, by social media," he added.

"At the end of the day, it's not about telling people never to touch avocado again. It's complicated because the avocado trade is also the main source of employment in Mexico, you can't just ban it totally. But we can start to ask these questions, do we really need to eat avocados all day every day, on the other side of the world, in the middle of the winter, what are the costs of that?"

At the centre of the exhibition is a daybed called "resting place", which was created as a homage to González. Trimmings from the tapestry were used to create the patchwork surface informed by Japanese Boro, a technique to repair broken textile by patching, and stitched with images of guns and chainsaws.

"My thinking behind this piece was to create a kind of Boro, a Mexican avocado Boro, that would perhaps be viewed as a possibility of repairing a broken system," said Laposse.

Laposse also turned waste avocado skins, collected from a guacamole vendor near his studio in Mexico City, into marquetry for a cabinet, with a texture somewhere between leather and wood.

According to Laposse, it took almost eight months to finish the piece, as he and his team developed a new technique to dry, stretch and flatten avocado skins and fashioned them into a repeated tile, with a fine walnut timber frame to protect the edges of each tile.

Laposse has consistently collaborated with local communities in his native Mexico to confront the challenges they face in a globalised world throughout his practice.

In 2018, he developed Totomoxtle, a marquetry material made from discarded corn husks, in collaboration with a community of indigenous farmers growing corn in Santo Domingo Tonahuixtla, Mexico.

In addition to being a renewable and natural material, Totomoxtle has the added benefit of re-popularising an endangered species of maize.

The photography is by Sean Fennessy.

Conflict Avocados is on show from 3 December 2023 to 7 April 2024 at National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Bijoy Jain, founder of Indian architecture practice Studio Mumbai, has created a series of structures and furniture made from natural materials for the Breath of an Architect exhibition at Paris's Fondation Cartier gallery.

Most of the pieces on display in the Jean Nouvel-designed building were designed by Jain specifically for the exhibition and made in his studio in Mumbai.

Uniting them is a use of natural materials, including graphite, basalt, lime, sandstone, bamboo and fired clay.

"No material was bought," Jain told Dezeen. "It's all been harvested from whatever was needed to be available."

On display until 21 April, Breath of an Architect was spread across two exhibition spaces at ground floor level – with views of the Fondation Cartier gardens through the building's glass facade – and two rooms in the basement.

A bamboo hut with silk thread woven into the walls forms the centrepiece of one of the ground floor spaces.

Architectural models and furniture made from stone, asphalt and tar surround the hut. Inside, more furniture was displayed with a bamboo sphere coated in cow dung, string and turmeric.

A large chalk floor slab decorated with stripes of cadmium pigment was placed at the centre of the adjacent ground floor space.

On the level below, stone animal sculptures were lined up in the middle of the room, and decorative woven bamboo mats coated with cow dung, lime, and pigments were displayed on the walls.

Turkish-Danish ceramicist Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye created ceramic bowls for the exhibition, displayed on brick tables by Studio Mumbai.

In the other basement room were graphite drawings by artist Hu Liu, and small stone sculptures by Jain were placed around the room's edges.

Jain told Dezeen that he expects different visitors to come to the exhibition with different perspectives, ultimately leading to different interpretations of the work.

"[The purpose] is to evoke different viewpoints, so everyone will have a different response to the work," Jain said.

"There's no singularity here. This is not about being exclusive to an idea, it's about being inclusive to the possibility of many viewpoints, many different ideas."

Many of the pieces in the Breath of an Architect exhibition were designed to evoke Jain's memories or hold a personal connection for him.

"I have a relationship with every piece in the exhibition," he said. "My creations are about transmitting ideas. Architecture has the capacity to embed sentiment."

Previous exhibitions at Fondation Cartier include a collection of architectural models by Japanese architect Junya Ishigami and an installation on the impact of climate change on nature by Dutch artist Thijs Biersteker and scientist Stefano Mancuso.

The photography is by Marc Domage.

The Breath of an Architect exhibition is on display at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris, France, from 9 December 2023 to 21 April 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Swedish furniture brand IKEA has released two images from a series of photographs taken by Annie Leibovitz, its first-ever artist-in-residence, showing people in their homes across the world.

The American photographer, who is best known for her portraits, travelled to twenty-five homes around the globe to take photos of people in their residences. She visited houses and apartments in Sweden, India, Italy, Japan, Germany, England and the US.

"The home has always been important in my work," Leibovitz said when appointed artist-in-residence in 2023.

"I've been photographing people in their homes since I began," she added. "It's a way to understand who a person is. The advice I give to young photographers is to photograph their families. It's one of the best ways to start."

Leibovitz's photos for IKEA show a variety of different interiors in seven different countries.

"The result is a powerful photographic document that illuminates the nuances of life at home – across borders, ethnicities and professions," the furniture brand said of the project.

The series, which comprises 25 photos in total, was commissioned by IKEA after its IKEA Life at Home Report showed that 48 per cent of people globally don't feel the media represents their home.

The first two images released by IKEA, show the homes of Yusuke Onimaru in Japan and Maria Arrechea in Germany – specifically Onimaru's ceramic workshop and Arrechea's living space filled with friends.

Leibovitz's photos will be shown as part of the IKEA+ exhibition in Paris, which will take place during Paris Fashion Week.

It will also feature a collaboration with online radio station Rinse and showcase the Tesammans collection made by IKEA together with Eindhoven-basd design duo Raw Color.

Six emerging designers from the Casa93 fashion education program are also taking part in the IKEA+ showcase. They worked with "home furnishing mentors" from IKEA to create designs that focus on upcycling and sustainable design.

The photography is by Annie Leibovitz for IKEA.

IKEA+ will take place on 28 Rue de Lappe, Paris, from 29 February to 3 March. For more worldwide events, exhibitions and talks in architecture and design, visit Dezeen Events Guide. 

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Swedish design duo Folkform has presented a series of furniture pieces made using Masonite hardboard sourced from a factory that closed down over a decade ago.

On show at Stockholm Furniture Fair, The Museum of Masonite centres around a patented type of engineered wood board that is made by steam-cooking and pressure-moulding wood fibres.

Folkform founders Anna Holmquist and Chandra Ahlsell first started experimenting with this material 15 years ago, in collaboration with Sweden's last remaining Masonite producer in Rundvik.

When the factory closed in 2011, the pair took all the remaining stock.

"I felt a responsibility to tell the story of what happened to this material," explained Holmquist, who has since completed a PHD exploring the cultural significance of Masonite.

"It created the Swedish welfare state in the 1930s, 40s and 50s," she told Dezeen.

"It was made from leftover wood from the Swedish sawmills so it became bigger here than anywhere else. Everyone was using it, for everything from boats and caravans to houses."

The Museum of Masonite follows the release of the Production Novellas, a book published by Folkform detailing the results of Holmquist's PHD research.

Folkform is showcasing this book alongside some of their favourite Masonite designs created over the years.

Works on display include the Masonite Chair, a 2021 collaboration with Åke Axelsson based on an experimental design the Swedish interior architect produced in 1978.

Older pieces include a chest of drawers and a bedside cabinet, both created in 2012, which feature different material samples arranged in geometric collages.

"We combined materials with different ages, with this idea that the furniture becomes an archive," said Holmquist.

The most recent designs in the show explore a more minimalist approach, suggesting how the material can create the suggestion of solid blocks.

"I feel like the compositions will be never-ending because we still have more of this board," added Holmquist.

The works are presented alongside photographs, illustrations and artefacts that tell the story of the factory.

Later in the year, the exhibition will move to the Laurel Museum of Art in Mississippi, the city where Masonite was patented in 1924 by William H Mason.

Masonite is distinct from other engineered wood fibre boards, such as MDF, because it is made without glue. Holmquist believes the material could have a future in manufacturing.

"It's a beautiful material and it's very sustainable," she concluded.

"We are already seeing a shift in food, where people increasingly care where the things they eat come from, so maybe it will also happen for furniture and objects."

At Stockholm Furniture Fair this year, visitors could also enjoy the Wekino With exhibition by South Korean furniture designers and British designer Faye Toogood's collaboration with Finnish company Vaarnii.

The photography is by Erik Lefvander unless otherwise stated.

The Museum of Masonite is on show at Stockholm Furniture Fair, which is open to the public from 7 to 11 February 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for more Stockholm Dezeen Week exhibitions in our dedicated event guide.

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A chunky rough-hewn coffee table made from discarded quarry sandstone is among a selection of furniture pieces by designer Carsten in der Elst, currently on display at Stockholm Design Week.

Called Greywacke Offcut Collection, the furniture by In der Elst is on show at the Stockholm Furniture Fair as part of the city's design week.

In der Elst sources materials that are industrial byproducts, which he handcrafts into amorphous furniture.

For his most recent collection, the Cologne-based designer visited a quarry in Lindlar in western Germany, where he salvaged large slabs of Lindlar Greywacke – a variety of hard and dark sandstone – that would've otherwise been waste material.

"It's a very hands-on approach, so I went to the quarries myself and selected these things," he told Dezeen at the fair.

One piece is a modular coffee table made up of three jagged hunks of dark-hued stone. These were left largely untouched except for a flat tabletop, which was sanded down.

"You can see that the elements of the objects are completely unchanged in their dimensions," said In der Elst, who explained that the furniture was created to evoke the texture and materiality of large rocks.

"The key is to patiently search for the right one among the accumulated offcuts," continued the designer. "Nothing is processed after finding it – so it's a bit like [building with] Lego!"

Among the other pieces in the collection is a chunky floor lamp crafted from the discarded sandstone, which was fitted with a large, orb-like bulb.

In der Elst also created another coarse coffee table and a bench, as well as a squat vase and an angular chair that was made to playfully resemble a dark-coloured tombstone.

The designer is showcasing reworked versions of older products from his Soft Works collection alongside his stone-based creations.

His 2022 "pasta chair" – geometric seating with protruding latex tubes that look like jumbo tubes of bucatini – was recreated in black, rather than its original blue.

In der Elst's Aluskin Sofa was also present at the fair – a revised version of a previous foam armchair. The sofa was created from polyurethane foam, an industrial byproduct salvaged from a mattress factory.

The work is part of the design week's annual group exhibition Älvsjö Gård, a platform created to showcase experimental pieces that straddle one-off pieces and industrial design.

Elsewhere in Stockholm, Dezeen's deputy editor Cajsa Carlson spoke to Iittala's creative director Janni Vepsäläinen about her vision for the renowned Finnish brand, while design studio Form Us With Love invited architects and interior designers to test out an experimental pop-up workspace called Testing Grounds.

Stockholm Design Week takes place in Stockholm from 5-11 February. See Dezeen Events Guide's Stockholm Design Week 2024 guide for information about exhibitions and events taking place throughout the week.

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Interior Design Show Toronto director Will Sorrell has curated an exhibition of speculative spaces, including a model for transitional housing by architecture studio SvN for sites in mid-development.

Future Neighbourhood was an exhibition in the centre of the design trade fair Interior Design Show Toronto 2024 (IDS Toronto), which featured six different installations showcasing design's "ability to shape our future".

Each booth addressed a solution to an urban problem, with nearly half of the booths addressing different aspects of the housing crisis, which Sorrell pinpointed as the most pressing concern in today's urban environment.

"We looked at the applications and realised that housing was going to be one of the main conversations," Sorrell told Dezeen.

"It reflects what everyone is worrying about right now and one of the big problems that designers are preoccupied with solving," he said.

He also said that the exhibition tried to address the fair's two audiences – the design industry and the public.

The exhibition took place in an enclosed miniature "neighbourhood" in the middle of the fair, with a large sign with the name of the exhibition bridging the entryway and central thoroughfare, towards which the booths were oriented.

One of the booths, called Housing the Unhoused, was put together by SvN in collaboration with the non-profit Two Steps Home and technology company Cabn.

The project includes a model for temporary housing made from cross-laminated timber meant to be placed on building sites in transition and provide a step of housing between encampments and more permanent housing.

Designed with energy efficiency and low-cost materials in mind, the "cabins" are meant to "to break the cycle of homelessness".

"The Two Steps Home project directly ties to SvN's work across the full spectrum of housing and the firm's vision for planning and designing, resilient, inclusive, and complete communities," SvN chief growth officer Laura Sellors told Dezeen.

"Presenting a project of this typology within the context of IDS was, we hope, a bit provocative and a reminder that communities and the future of our neighbourhoods can be designed equitably and inclusively, where everyone has access to good design."

Another project, Transform, by design studios SDI and Q4 was geared towards housing the elderly in new, more inclusive ways.

The booth included a cardboard structure decorated with graphics depicting features of micro infrastructure and further graphics on the ground and walls showed how these features could integrate with infrastructure and zoning more conducive to ageing people.

Also in the vein of the housing crisis, local designer Noam Hazan showcased a modular accessory dwelling unit called Blokk that works on a "Tesla-like" model where buyers can purchase models online, customise them and have them delivered in a flat pack.

Technology was another consideration for the neighbourhood of the future.

Local studio IA Interior Architects created a booth that integrated both biomaterials and virtual reality, with a breezeblock wall made from bio-bricks and a wrap-around screen that created a scenic backdrop for meeting rooms or relaxing spaces in offices.

Design firm Syllable took a similar approach with its project Melo, creating an installation showing a space that combined "binaural" lighting, scents, sound and textures.

Finally, architect Safoura Zahedi created a sculpture made of reflective material based on her study of Islamic architecture. Called Journey Through Geometry, the installation was created as an experiment in new models of "spiritual design tools" to engage people with the built environment.

Other projects that address homelessness include a portable battery developed by Luke Talbot that allows phones to be charged by rental bikes and a housing block in California for families experiencing homelessness.

The photography is by Arash Moallemi unless otherwise noted.

IDS Toronto 2024 took place from 23-26 January in Downtown Toronto. For more worldwide events, exhibitions and talks in architecture and design, visit Dezeen Events Guide. 

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The Transhumances III exhibition will see designers Andres Monnier, Morghen Studio, Elsa Foulon and Laura Pasquino present a selection of works they created in ancient cave dwellings in Cappadocia, Turkey.

The works on show, from a chandelier made out of a tree to candleholders crafted from local stone, will be showcased in a series of caves where the designers undertook their residency.

Organised by design gallery Philia, formerly known as Galerie Philia, the residency encouraged the designers to craft works inspired by the UNESCO World Heritage site in collaboration with local artisans.

Titled Transhumances III, the residency took place across 10 days in November, and was the third in a series organised by Philia that takes designers to destinations with a rich craft heritage.

"I've loved Cappadocia for a long time – it's really a region of pottery and ceramics," said Ygaël Attali, director and co-founder of Philia.

He chose the Taşkonaklar hotel in Uçhisar as the location, which operates a series of studios for artist residencies within ancient caves carved into the cliffside.

Mexican designer Monnier, known for his monumental candle holders and fire pits crafted from slabs of raw stone, worked in collaboration with local stonemasons in Cappadocia.

He made new sculptural candle holders from red onyx offcuts quarried in the region, alongside a travertine side table and black stone candelabra.

Monnier's works took inspiration from the surrounding landscape, including the unique vertical rock formations known as "fairy chimneys", and one of the mountains he passed regularly during his residency. "Cappadocia has beautiful, beautiful stones," he said.

Installed in the dark caves and topped with burning candles and incense, Monnier's works – with titles including Spiritus and Laberinto – were designed to have a ritualistic presence.

Ceramic designers Pasquino and Foulon crafted vessels and sculptural lighting respectively. As such, they both engaged in the pottery traditions of the region, working with a local potter and regional clay to translate Cappadocia's craft techniques into their own works.

Named Landforms of the Red River, Pasquino's large, spherical, hand-built vases in warm terracotta hues were made using red clay and crushed stones from a local river.

"I'm really into textures," Pasquino said, adding that she wanted the surface of her vessels to be rough, recalling both the river bed and the roughly hewn stone walls of the caves she undertook her residency in.

The Dutch designer researched the techniques and tools of local potters to learn from and apply in her work. She had never worked with terracotta before – preferring porcelain and stoneware – but since her residency, she has grown to appreciate the "powerful" effect of the material, she said.

Foulon worked with a local white clay to create a series of pebble-like table lamps, named Troglodyte Glows, that emit a warm glow from within.

The French designer was drawn to the way that light in Cappadocia "changes constantly" and impacts the colours and details of the landscape, as well as the unique quality of sunlight spilling into caves. She added a yellow underglaze in her lights to create the effect of a golden glow.

Both Foulon and Pasquino helped another of the residency's designers, Rodolfo Viola of Milan-based Morghen Studio, to work with ceramic for the first time.

The Milan-based studio creates statement sculptural lighting, mostly using brass. But to make a large-scale lighting piece in 10 days, Viola had to use a different material.

"I wanted to make a chandelier but didn't know how to go big in only a few days," he told Dezeen. "I thought it would be nice to source something from nature."

He found a tree on a local walk, charred it, and added fired ceramic "petals" covered in black ink around LED lights on its branches, attached with twine.

After creating the dramatic black chandelier in one of the caves, he installed it by hanging the tree upside-down from the cave ceiling; there, it appears almost like exposed subterranean roots.

"Having just a week to come up with something is a perfect exercise for designers," Viola said. "You don't have time to overthink. I had to learn a new material in a few days."

Together, the collection of objects are both made from and presented in the unique landscape of Cappadocia. Exhibiting them locally was vital for Attali, who wanted to avoid the carbon-heavy shipping so prevalent in the collectible design market.

Instead of importing materials and exporting works, the designers on the nomadic residency work with local materials, exhibit locally, and sell locally. "It shows that we can do things differently," said Attali.

The photography is courtesy of Maison Mouton Noir and Philia.

Transhumances III will run from 15 February to 16 March 2024 at A.R.C Taskonaklar. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Stools from local designer Caleb Ferris and design firm Prowl Studio were among the works displayed at a San Francisco exhibition centred around contemporary Bay Area design.

The Works in Progress show displayed stools, chairs and other furniture from local designers to highlight the diversity in methods and backgrounds of an evolving Bay Area design scene.

"As the Bay Area creative scene evolves in real-time, there are boundless possibilities for how it might bloom," said curators and designers Kate Greenberg, Kelley Perumbeti, and Sahra Jajarmikhayat in a statement. 

"For now, we are here to acknowledge its depth and say: it's a work in progress."

The team distributed the exhibition's pieces across metallic platforms supported by foundations of bricks.

Pieces ranged from a curvacious, duck-footed poplar wood stool marked with paint and silver leaf by Caleb Ferris, to Prowl Studio's cubic stainless steel stool wrapped in a 3D knit cover.

"Across a range of materials, forms, and functions, the participants have found a groove in the original, the introspective, and the off-center," said the team. 

Designer Ido Yoshimoto displayed a sculptural side table made of old-growth redwood and finished in a dark red textured hue. The table consists of a geometric, curved corner that runs into a darkened raw edge.

Studio Ahead created a fuzzy Merino wool stool informed by northern California rock formations, which contrasted with the smooth surface of a glass stool by curators Jajarmikhayat and Greenberg.

Other works included a baltic plywood side table with grooved sides and small, chunky sky blue legs by NJ Roseti and a white oak chair topped with a wild fleece and suede cushion by Rafi Ajl of studio Long Confidence.

Office of Tangible Space showed a flat-legged chair designed in collaboration with CNC design studio Thirdkind Studio, while Duncan Oja of Oja Design displayed a charred white oak stool with an organic, rough-sawn profile.

Fyrn Studio showed a charcoal-black hardwood stool with aluminium hardware created with replaceable parts and studio Medium Small and designer Yvonne Mouser both displayed chairs made of ash, one blackened and the other not, supported by bases of elegant, simple lines.

"As simple as it sounds, the soul of this exhibition is in the representation of physical craft and the people behind it. It's important to shine a light on this vibrant slice of the Bay Area that is not always as visible amidst a city focused on the digital realm," said Perumbeti.

"There's something really exciting brewing in this community that is just beginning to get teased out," said Greenberg.

Works in Progress was part of the wider San Francisco Art Week, which highlights art and design from the city and took place from 13-21 January.

Other recent furniture exhibitions that highlighted California designers include INTRO/LA with pieces by Adi Goodrich and Sam Klemick and the first Miami edition from Milan-based design exhibition Alcova held in a motel during Miami's art week.

Works in Progress took place at the American Industrial Center in San Francisco from 18 to 23 January 2023. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

The photography is by Sahra Jajarmikhayat unless otherwise stated. 

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Taiwanese designer Pao Hui Kao has unveiled her first solo exhibition, featuring colourful furniture made out of rolls of tracing paper.

On show at Spazio Nobile Gallery in Brussels, the show – called 25 Seasons, Landscapes of Paper and Lacquer – brings together 50 objects and paintings produced by Kao.

These include new versions of her Paper Pleats furniture, which she makes by combining rolls of tracing paper into honeycomb structures and soaking them in rice glue.

Once hardened, these pieces – which include benches, sideboards, stools and tables – are surprisingly strong.

Kao recently developed a technique of coating her paper structures with colour pigments and Urushi, a type of Japanese lacquer, to highlight the crinkled surfaces.

In contrast with earlier works in the Paper Pleats series, which have a more ethereal quality, the coloured Paper Pleats pieces are highly graphic in appearance.

Kao's choice of colours includes rich shades of red and blue, as well as black, which she applies with a self-made tool.

"Alongside school, I also studied Chinese ink drawing from the age of 10, mixing it with other materials like oil in a very creative way," the designer said.

"Urushi lacquer is similar to Chinese ink; it allows for creating thickness in successive lines like an imaginary calligraphy," she continued.

"I don't use a brush like in Chinese ink drawing but a paper tool that I specially created to trace the colour lines or paint my pieces," she added.

Kao's first experimented with paper constructions while she was studying at Design Academy Eindhoven. Still based in the Dutch city, she has continued working with the material since graduating in 2016.

She was first drawn to plant-based materials after discovering she was allergic to some of the chemical ingredients typically used to manufacture other types of materials.

In time, she learned to appreciate the sustainability and health benefits of working with natural, non-toxic materials.

Speaking to Dezeen in 2020, at her first exhibition with Spazio Nobile, she told Dezeen: "From my personal experiences of collaborating with eco-friendly industries, I was aware how a small decision made by designers could affect not only the manufacturing process but a whole recycling system."

For this exhibition, Kao has also unveiled new versions of her Lacquer Leafs.

Similar to the Paper Pleats works, these curved paintings are made by soaking crepe paper in rice glue to create the shape, then building alternate layers of Urushi lacquer and colour pigments on top.

One installation features 25 of these paintings, displaying different colours that relate to different times of the year.

They reference the lunisolar calendar used in Asian countries, with one extra season added to the standard 24.

"The gestation time for the work is very long, especially for the Lacquer Leafs, which require weeks or even months for the 25 successive layers of Urushi lacquer and natural pigment to solidify before being spontaneously sanded and left to dry," said Kao.

"Depending on the climate, the result will always be different and unpredictable."

Other recent paper installations include the Takeo packaging exhibition, which aimed to highlight the "unique sensory properties" of Japanese paper.

25 Seasons, Landscapes of Paper and Lacquer is on show at Spazio Nobile Gallery in Brussels from 24 November 2023 to 17 March 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

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Creative team Luna Luna has re-installed a "forgotten" art theme park in a Los Angeles production studio that includes a Ferris wheel by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a carousel by Keith Haring and work by artists David Hockney, Kenny Scharf and more.

Created by artist André Heller, the original fair took place in 1987 in a Hamburg park. Today's Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy iteration displays the rides and attractions as an exhibit, with some interactive elements and performers dispersed throughout.

Located at production studio Ace Mission Studios, today's Luna Luna adopts the moniker of its successor and is organized by a collective of the same name.

To enter the exhibition, guests pass by a recreation of a spikey red inflatable dome by Heller – which previously housed a cafe – into a corridor that displays the original fair on video.

Visitors then pass into two large warehouse spaces divided by an archway by artist Sonia Delaunay that reads "Luna Luna" in lights.

"The team's concept for the exhibition layout was to reference and celebrate the key characteristics, dynamic atmosphere, and formal relationships, between the artworks within Luna Luna's 1987 debut in Hamburg, while acknowledging that its new home within a Los Angeles soundstage is starkly different from the grass and mud of a tree-lined German park," director of spatial design Charles Dorrance-King told Dezeen.

"[The exhibition] required a modified approach that still spoke to the spirit of '87, such as utilizing Sonia Delaunay's archway not as an entrance to the park, but instead as a gateway between two adjacent warehouses. The first space highlights the spectacle, and the second focuses on the story of Luna Luna."

The first space contains a colourful swing ride by Kenny Scharf, which is spray-painted with cartoon figures, patterns and shapes reminiscent of the television the artist watched as a child.

Surrounding works also include a carousel by Keith Haring, painted with the artist's characteristic line drawings, including a self-portrait.

Seats made of the dancing figures were created for visitors to ride during the 1987 fair. Today, the rides operate and run during the exhibit, but are not ride-able for visitors.

Another carousel by artist Arik Brauer sits nearby, which features seats of fantastical creatures "straight out of one his mystical dreams", including a butterfly, a wolf, a mermaid and an anthropomorphic hand. A song written, produced and performed by Brauer's daughter, Timna was also integrated into the ride.

David Hockney's Enchanted Tree was also installed in the space, a circular pavilion with geometric trees painted on its exterior panels.

Visitors then pass into the next room, which contains a painted Ferris wheel by Jean-Michael Basquiat, accompanied by a custom music composition by musician Miles Davis, called Tutu, a pavilion by Salvador Dalí, and a glass labyrinth covered in Roy Lichtenstein-painted panels.

"We took into account the reflection of the Lichtenstein facade and glowing wheel of the illuminated Basquiat arrayed along the mirrored facade of the Dali, and the placement of the GilSing flags, which were wrapped around the perimeter of the exhibition as in the original park," said Dorrance-King.

Basquiat's Ferris wheel was painted in a cream colour and adorned with his recurrent illustrations and writing that speak to race, music and anatomy.

A wedding chapel by André Heller is also included nearby. Created by two abstract figures holding a heart between them, the chapel was a place where visitors of today's exhibition and the 1987 fair can marry "whatever or whomever" they please.

"Heller imagined Luna Luna as a 'total artwork' that combined visual art, music, theatre, design, circus arts and performance, and explained that the park aimed to recover public space for art and imagination," said the team.

Following its successful 1987 debut in Germany, the fair and its subsequent works fell into legal battles and were stored away in shipping containers in Texas.

In 2022, reports broke that Drake and his creative business venture DreamCrew invested an estimated $100 million for the entire fair, with plans to restore the rides for access to the public.

Today's Luna Luna exhibition took over a year to restore and reassemble.

"They've spent over a year caring for these works, rebuilding each ride and attraction bolt by bolt after they came out of the shipping containers in pieces – they know every inch of these works,"  said curatorial director Lumi Tan of the assembly team.

"Each attraction takes a small army to install: because of this, the installation and placement of the works were not just a curatorial choice, but one made in close collaboration with our spatial design and studio team. There is no such thing as a small tweak with works at this scale!"

Other recent design-related exhibitions throughout the US include an Alcova show displayed in a Miami motel and an exploration of Es Devlin's career in New York.

The photography is by Jeff McLane and Joshua and Charles White.

Luna Luna: A Forgotton Fantasy will take place at Ace Mission Studios in Los Angeles through Spring 2024.  See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Mexican architect Javier Guzmán Cervantes has collected urban waste materials including cinderblocks and rebar to create a series of furniture for a show in Mexico City.

Working with his research project Ex Soup, Cervantes gathered materials from construction sites and waste deposits throughout the city to create an exhibition at design gallery Utíl.

Curated in collaboration with the arts organisation Lugar Vivo, the Construcciones Domésticas exhibition (Household Constructions) includes objects ranging from tables and chairs to lighting and day beds.

Cervantes told Dezeen that the project was exercised to shed light on the ecological effects of waste in construction, the lack of options in affordable, durable furniture and the need for architects to free themselves from the "mental realm of design" and focus on making.

"I think these times that we are living in require us to explore new lifestyles and new ways of configuring our domestic interiors, more attuned with the present global economic and environmental reality," said Cervantes.

He added that new values must be garnered from industrial landscapes and ecological ruin.

"This is exactly the spirit of Ex Soup, to take discarded materials and transform them into something beautiful and useful to life in a process that prioritizes energy efficiency and practical thinking."

Cervantes said that he has been working on creating furniture from salvaged materials since his teens, but only recently began formalising the practice, founding Ex Soup in 2022.

Much of the material comes from the architect's daily life, while driving or walking, as well as from materials discarded from construction sites and given to him by friends.

The name, Ex Soup, is a reference to his preferred materials: industrial products like metal and glass that "were heated liquids in their production processes and were given shapes".

Projects included in Household Constructions consist of mixes of different materials stacked to create recognisable forms, and many were created without the use of glue to create "ergonomic shapes" held together by tension.

Among the works is a coffee table constructed using steel beams with surfaces created from a discarded mirror and glass.

The work of tension is most obvious in some of the taller pieces, such as a desk. Cervantes stacked pieces of paving stone and PVC piping in two pillars and used strapping to hold up the desktop, which was created from a reused headboard.

Many of the pieces are simple and have a brutalist effect, given the steel and concrete used in their construction, while others are more colourful, such as a divan covered with an expressive weave of scrap clothing.

Rolls of electrowelded mesh also feature heavily in the collection, at times serving as supports for a console and at others serving as lamp shades.

Cervantes said that the pieces were meant to show the large number of combinations possible in using these materials.

"There are some pieces that are easily replicable since many times trash comes in patterns, but I would say I see Ex Soup more as an endless search for new shapes and ways of perceiving materials, so the focus is in constantly adapting to change and variation," he said.

Other furniture made using scrap materials includes a chair made from old musical instruments by Jay Sae Jung and a series of Knoll chairs refashioned with used car parts by Noel Mercado.

The photography is by Javier Guzman.

Household Constructions is on view at Utïl in Mexico City from 8 November to January 2024. For more events and exhibitions in architecture and design visit the Dezeen Events Guide. 

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Examples of practical and playful paper packaging were presented at this exhibition curated by designer Makoto Umebara as part of the Takeo Paper Show in Tokyo, Japan.

The exhibition was organised by Takeo Co, a specialist paper trading company established in 1899.

Since 1965, Takeo has presented an annual showcase of paper that explores the material's meaning and value through collaborations with leading designers.

This 49th edition of the Takeo Paper Show occupied two floors of the Kanda Square Hall exhibition venue near the company's Mihoncho Honten store.

Titled 'Packaging: Function and Laughter', the exhibition was divided into two main sections, with simple scenography by graphic designer Kenya Hara helping to differentiate each part.

The first section focused on the functional possibilities of paper, as well as examining how its use is evolving in response to technological advancements in areas such as printing and transportation.

"In today's world, in which new light is being directed to paper as a material, not only as a substitute for plastic, this exhibition asks that we pay attention to, what forms will emerge from these organic fibres, and what new value is created," said Takeo Co.

Curator Umebara selected projects by 13 designers and studios that highlighted innovative uses for paper in packaging, including a series of mechanical paper sculptures by graphic designer Masaya Ishikawa and artist and engineer Hiroaki Nakaji.

"These individuals understand the true value of paper and appreciate its unique sensory properties," the organisers added.

"Their proposals for packaging, both containers and wrapping, have been thoroughly considered on a practical level."

Other projects featured in the 'Function' section included graphic designer Agata Yamaguchi's piece resembling a bunch of flowers made using simple cardboard tubes set on paper straw stems.

Satoshi Yoshiizumi's studio Takt Project created a series of objects that transform from flat templates to three-dimensional forms when the paper is dampened.

One side of the paper is coated using a UV silk screen process that doesn't react to humidity, while the uncoated side causes the paper to bend and form predetermined shapes.

Nomena's playful food packaging features faceted forms that nest together to create simple orthogonal shapes. Each constituent element contains its own item, such as tea bags, chocolates or bags of juice.

The exhibition's second section, called 'Laughter', examined the emotional appeal of paper and how it can be used to produce creative and engaging containers and packaging.

Umebara selected 100 projects to feature in this part of the show, such as a set of novelty tea bags featuring paper holders printed with pictures of the British royal family.

Alongside the exhibition, Takeo Paper Show also presented a display focusing on paper as a sustainable material, including details of circular manufacturing processes and the importance of forest management.

The company also produced a book containing images of all the packaging examples displayed in the exhibition, along with input from Hara and Umebara and discussions about the relationship between people and paper.

Japanese designers are behind some of the most innovative examples of paper-based products in recent years, including a range of recyclable soap dispensers by Nendo that look like milk cartons and Kai's plastic-free disposable razor informed by origami.

Packaging: Function and Laughter was on show from 13 to 22 October 2023 as part of the Takeo Paper Show. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

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California gallery Blunk Space has opened the exhibition 100 Hooks, featuring new works by designers including Jasper Morrison, Ilse Crawford, Anna Karlin and Bethan Laura Wood.

The show features hooks designed by over 100 designers and studios, with other participants including Rio Kobayashi, Max Lamb, Minjae Kim, David Wiseman and Normal Studio.

It comes more than 40 years after American sculptor JB Blunk presented the seminal solo exhibition of his career, 100 Plates Plus, which saw him produce an array of both functional and sculptural works.

Exhibition curator Mariah Nielson, who is Blunk's daughter, was interested in how this format allowed scope for a wide range of possible design outcomes.

"My father enjoyed how the parameters of the plate format provided opportunities to push and pull at the constraints," she said, writing in the show's catalogue.

"100 Hooks continues this exhibition concept, but brings together the work of a multitude of artists and designers all responding to the same brief in very different ways."

100 Hooks is the most ambitious show that Blunk Space has staged since opening in 2021, as part of the JB Blunk Estate in Point Reyes Station.

The idea to focus on hooks was prompted by a house-warming gift Nielson received from London-based couple designer Martino Gamper and artist Francis Upritchard.

"When I moved into my new home in East London a few years ago, my friends Martino Gamper and Francis Upritchard stopped by with a bottle of champagne and a brass hook Martino made," she recalled.

"Their handwritten card said, 'Every house needs a hook'. It's true."

"Hooks are a commonplace, typically understated and often overlooked design object, which is why we decided to invite 100 artists to make one (or three) and see what happened," she added.

The results include a wide variety of responses, made from all kinds of different materials.

British duo Wilkinson & Rivera crafted an irregular wooden hook from offcuts of British ash, while California-based Ava Woo Kaufman made hers using cotton paper and watercolour paint.

Brazilian sculptor Nadia Yaron used raspberry alabaster, walnut, copper and brass for her flower-like hook, while a simple peg hook by Los Angeles-based Commune Studio is made from bronze plated with 24K gold.

Some designs are highly functional in form, like the steel hooks of Jon Harrison or the colourful circles of Fabien Cappello.

The more abstract works include a moulded clay piece by Keita Matsunaga and a womb-like design by Kentaro Kawabata.

Body parts were a common theme. Artist Jessia Thornton Murphy based her design on a hand, while ceramicist Woody De Othello incorporated an ear.

Noses feature too, in a coloured borosilicate design by London-based glassmaker Jochen Holz and a Pinocchio-esque work by California-based artist John Gnorski.

Other recognisable shapes and objects include a ceramic plate by designer Michael Marriott, a hanging coat by fashion designer Erica Toogood, cookies by chef Nellie Stark and an eggplant by sculptor Grace Sachi Troxell.

The show is completed by two JB Blunk designs from the 1970s, including a phallic hook made from a redwood branch.

Other recent design exhibitions include Le Salon de Septembre at Paris' GSL Gallery and Chair of Virtue, a London Design Festival exhibition that focused on experimental seating.

100 Hooks is on show at Blunk Space from 16 December 2023 to 11 February 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

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London-based pop-up museum The Museum of Architecture has installed a city of gingerbread buildings, bridges and boats by local architecture studios at an exhibit in New York's Seaport district.

Called the Gingerbread City, the exhibit showcases a variety of gingerbread housing typologies and infrastructure based on the architecture of five distinct regions, including a desert landscape, an urban floodplain, and an underwater environment.

A handful of New York architecture offices and institutions including Archi-tectonics, Nina Rappaport, Robert A.M. Stern Architects and the New York City Housing Authority baked and created models for the exhibit, which asked participants "to think about how we can design and build water-sensitive cities and protect this vital resource".

London-based office Madeline Kessler Architecture and Tibbalds Planning and Urban Design created a master plan for the landscape, which included a program for each plot, as well as height restrictions.

Highlights included the Cloudtopida Stadium by MeierPartners, which features a central "stadium" made of a mass of glowing orbs.

Gummy bear guests filter into its doors, while others sit around campfires outside or sledge down small, sugary hills.

"MeierPartners' prompt is a stadium for sporting events and concerts situated within an urban floodplain," said the office.

"Embracing the site conditions, the building is formed out of a cloud as a means to embody the water cycle within the realm of architecture."

After periods of heavy torrential rain, rainbow bridges are formed, creating paths that bring visitors through a misty landscape and into the luminous, expansive stadium."

Design studio Marvel created a curving bridge for its plot, made of pavers of gingerbread lined with marshmallows.

A marshland made of gummy bears, icing, candy canes and pretzel trees surrounds the bridge, which connects two wetland sites that neighbour the plot.

"Our office has architects and landscape architects," Marvel associate Sharon Kim told Dezeen. "We wanted something everyone could contribute to, so with the bridge, it has structure, it has landscape. "

"We wanted to make sure everyone felt like we were all equally providing input. Even though it's gingerbread."

Of the process, Kim and Marvel associate Ishita Gaur explained they used the studio's office to bake the gingerbread and construct the model over a period of six evenings.

"Gingerbread is not forgiving," said Kim of working with the material.

The Gingerbread City was conceptualised by museum founder Melissa Woolford. The museum focuses on creating events for the public to engage with architecture.

Other gingerbread structures include a checkered gingerbread house built in a California modernist style by Kelly Wearstler in 2021.

The Gingerbread City is on view at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City from 17 Nov to 7 Jan, 2023. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

The photography is by Leandro Justen

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Chairs adorned with "spiritual" crystals and lamps made with McDonald's packaging were among the collectible design objects displayed at Design Miami 2023, held during Miami art week.

Founded in 2005, the annual fair also held in Basel, Shanghai and Paris brings together global design studios to display collectible historic and contemporary furniture, lighting and other objects, along with additional programming.

Design Miami 2023 presented over 40 galleries, housed in booths and other installations throughout a tent located along Convention Centre Drive.

Presented with HAADA gallery, sculptural wooden chairs previously debuted in 2012 at the Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea (PAC) in Milan by artist Marina Abramović marked the artist's "foray into the world of collectible design", according to the gallery.

The pieces included two small chairs with crystals affixed to their feet and others with tall wooden backs that extend over the user's head, from which larger crystals are suspended. The chairs are meant to create space for meditation.

"The idea that physical objects might be created only to serve spiritual purposes is a powerful provocation in today’s ravenous consumer society," said HAADA. "Abramović’s chair is the icon that galvanizes this discussion, and will prove itself as a future reliquary that crystallizes this contemporary debate on the twin crises of consumption and spirituality."

For digital marketplace Basic.Space tattoo artist Dr Woo partnered with Seoul-based studio Niceworkshop to create a cubic set of aluminium tables and chairs.

For the furniture collection, Dr Woo created a wood-grain pattern that was later engraved onto aluminium chairs and a table by a team of designers, exploring the dichotomy between the intimate experience of tattooing skin versus translating a pattern onto a metallic surface.

"Tattooing on skin is typically a moment of close connection between myself and my clients, yet working across time zones to have my work tattooed onto metal has been a gratifying process in an exciting way," said Woo. "Like a tattoo, quality furniture is meant to be cherished and held onto for a lifetime."

Presented by Los Angeles gallery Marta Gallery, Lagos-based designer Nifemi Marcus-Bell showcased a series of functional sculptures that pay homage to Nigeria's history of craft.

Marcus-Bell made the small collection of benches and sculptures from sand-cast aluminium, a material commonly used by Lagos auto parts manufacturers, whom he connected with while repairing his own vehicle.

Some booths showcased concept-heavy designs, such as Side Gallery, which presented work by Seoul-based designer Gyuhan Lee and British designer Mac Collins.

Collin's created a second iteration of his oak wood table, stools and dominoes set for this year's Design Miami, having previously shown the first collection as a "corrective act of representation" at Harewood House, an English country house with ties to the slave trade.

Lee's work continued his investigation of consumerism by repurposing McDonald's paper bags into a material which he used to construct a series of geometric lamps covered with the brand's logo. The designer also layered the traditional Korean paper "Hanji" into the lighting, creating a new material that breaks "away from the mass production of the usual object in which we can find the symbol".

Also among the designers who took a conceptual approach was New York and Paris-based designer Harry Nuriev, who presented Tapestry Sofa, a recliner covered in custom textile reminiscent of a worn-out French tapestry integrated with modern motifs.

Some of the booths included all-encompassing installations.

These included Kohler, which partnered with British designer Dr Samuel Ross and his industrial design studio SR_A to display a bright orange, twisted faucet in a large-scale exhibit. The faucet was integrated into oversized, blocky pedestals of the same colour, where the running water fell down channels and into their bases.

Villa Albertine and the Mobilier National presented a range of sculptures, lighting and textiles by Atelier George, Atelier d’Offard, Chloé Bensahel, Gala Espel and Dimitri Hlinka in a stark white set curated by Alban Roger.

Other works included "furry" 3D-printed light fixtures by designer Virginia San Fratello with New York-based Cristina Grajales Gallery that are intended to "inspire intense happiness", according to the designer, while The Future Perfect displayed a collection of sculptures amongst a towering nine-foot-tall USM modular shelving system.

Belgium gallery Atelier Ecru Gallery presented a series of brutalist furniture and organic sculptures by local designers, while New York-based gallery Superhouse presented a collection of textural tapestries, furniture and sculptures that highlight the fibre arts.

Inspired in Barcelona and Il·lacions presented A New Decorum, which showcased furniture in a variety of forms and materials against an ombré lamp by Antoni Arola, created to evoke the Barcelona sky.

London-based Gallery Fumi won best gallery presentation with its presentation of wooden scale-covered furniture by German designer Lukas Wegwerth, wall art made of nested plywood chips by British sculptor Rowan Mersh and colourful, patterned lighting by US-American designer Jeremy Anderson.

This year's Where We Stand theme, organized by curatorial director Anna Carnick, focused on "the importance of honouring and nurturing human connection".

Other recent design shows that include collectible design include Mueble Escultura in Argentina and INTRO/LA in Los Angeles.

Design Miami took place from 5-10 December 2023 in Miami Beach, US. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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With a major retrospective now on show at MAD Brussels, Spanish designer Jaime Hayon tells Dezeen how his "serious fun" style has helped him jump between fine art and industrial design in this interview.

Hayon presents over 350 works in the Nuevo Nouveau exhibition, with paintings and sculptures on display as well as the design objects and installations he is famous for.

Hayon started his career as an artist trying to prove he could also work as a designer, but said it is now often the other way around.

He believes the key to doing both is developing a uniquely recognisable style.

"I believe that if you have a concept and a style, you can do anything you want," he told Dezeen.

"If I'm making an oil painting or I'm making an object, I don't make a division in my brain. The world makes a division for my work, not me."

Hayon's signature style is set in a world of fantasy characters and creatures. These are expressed in free-flowing lines and vivid colours.

Examples of this in Nuevo Nouveau include the now-familiar Green Chicken rocking horse, the yeti-like Happy Susto vases and a series of huge tapestries that look like decorated masks.

"I'm building characters from out of my imagination," Hayon said.

"The forms, the organic elements, the colour – that has all become a language that people now recognise."

Despite the playful aesthetic, Hayon said there is meaning or function in everything he produces.

"I play with serious fun," he said. "It's serious because it's made by the best artisans and manufacturers, but it's also trying to be nice to you."

He points to a recent design for Danish brand &Tradition, the stainless-steel Momento Jug, as an example.

"To me, it's a character," he said. "It looks like a pelican."

"But it's also a very serious industrial design object," he continued. "We made so many prototypes to get the right balance, so it never spills a drop of water."

Nuevo Nouveau marks the first time Hayon's work has been shown in Belgium.

The exhibition forms part of a city-wide programme of events marking the 130th anniversary of the art nouveau movement, which is believed to have been founded in Brussels.

MAD Brussels' creative director Dieter Van Den Storm said that Hayon's approach, particularly its combination of art and design, is akin to the spirit of art nouveau.

"We were looking for somebody who would embody the essence of the art nouveau movement today," Van Den Storm told Dezeen.

"Jaime Hayon is that kind of designer. From sketches and paintings to furniture and accessories, but also unique pieces, interior design and installations, it is hard to imagine everything in this exhibition comes from one designer/artist."

Hayon set up his studio in 2001. One of his most successful early projects was Mediterranean Digital Baroque, a limited-edition series of characterful cactus-inspired totems created for David Gill Galleries.

He said that, back then, he was struggling to be taken seriously as a designer.

"I was getting featured in art magazines, but I was frustrated because I wanted to create products," he said.

A turning point came when he began collaborating with Spanish brand BD Barcelona. In 2006, they unveiled the Showtime furniture collection, with pieces including the popular Multileg tables and cabinets.

"People said I was a clown," Hayon reflected. "But I made a serious point. The collection was a success and after that, big companies wanted to work with me."

"There were always two sides to me," he added. "I dressed up and did a lot of crazy shit. I wanted to have fun but, at the same time, there was a discipline."

This discipline, according to Hayon, is an obsession with detail and craft.

Despite working across all kinds of materials – the list includes glass, ceramics, wood, textiles, metal and plastic – his ambition is always to be as inventive as possible.

"I try to use classic materials but give them a twist," he suggested.

Hayon hopes the exhibition will help people understand him better.

His favourite room in the show is a small gallery between two larger rooms. It contains 20 glass objects, including the animal-inspired Faunacrystopolis crystal vases, displayed opposite a painting that features the same colours and characters.

"In that moment, you understand who I am," Hayon said.

"I am someone who sees everything as an opportunity to make something unique and special," he explained.

"In every space I create, whether it's The Standard Hotel in Bangkok or a little house in the Mediterranean, every detail is an excuse to experiment and go crazy."

The photography is by Sam Gilbert.

Nuevo Nouveau is on show at MAD Brussels in Belgium from 22 September 2023 until 27 January 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

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Student drawings, scale models, and a life-size recreation of set designer Es Devlin's London studio are on display at an exhibition exploring the designer's 30-year archive at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Presented in conjunction with her debut monograph, An Atlas of Es Devlin, both exhibition and publication showcased sketches, paintings, small-scale work and more behind 120 projects spanning Devlin's career in set design.

"My craft is to imagine worlds that don't yet exist, to invite audiences to practice 'interbeing' within psychological architectures they have not previously inhabited, to remind viewers that they are not separate but connected to one another and to the biosphere," said Devlin.

"For this exhibition, I have gathered the drawings, fragile paper sculptures and small-scale revolving cardboard models that I and my studio team have been making over the past three decades, a miniature parallel practice at the root of the large-scale public performance and installation works."

Visitors entered the exhibit via a recreation of Devlin's London office, where they could sit at a central table scattered with paper and art tools representative of works in progress.

Devlin's voice narrated thoughts about early school days, belonging, and the intersection of creative disciplines as projections animate the space, with scribbles and writings appearing on the table's pages and along the walls.

"The first thing I wanted to do was to invite visitors into my studio," said Devlin. "Many of the people coming into this exhibition will not have a clue what it is I do or what are the processes that go into it at all."

"You come into the studio and already I hope you get the sense I had when I first walked into a room full of people making work like this."

A projection of Devlin's hands pulled an entryway open to the adjoining room, where Devlin's Iris installation displayed the names of her many collaborators on a series of rings, a motif the designer often uses to "express the overlaid perspectives of creative partners and audiences".

The next installation displayed a wall covered in early sketches, paintings, collages, and diaries Devlin produced during her years at a music school and in her early career, which she noted were delivered to her later in life in "four big black beanbags" by an old boyfriend who had kept them.

White, scale models of set and production designs made by Es Devlin Studio were displayed throughout succeeding rooms, accompanied by process sketches, documents and notes that include mark-ups on song lyrics by musicians Miley Cyrus, U2, The Weeknd, Beyoncé and more.

Devlin noted that her work often begins with analyzing a "primary text" like pop-song lyrics or play before delving into further research.

"I have spent 30 years translating words into images and spaces – transforming texts on a page into kinetic sculptures that encompass viewers with light and song and use magic to alter their perspective," Devlin said.

Another room contained a model theatre with a screen on its stage that displayed films of previous performances, while another displayed short films from Devlin's various installations.

The last had a large table in which a number of Devlin's monographs were displayed for visitors to thumb through, with pages of the recent book pinned along the walls.

"The biggest challenge was to make the book," Devlin told Dezeen "The book and the exhibit are kind of continuous of one another. Normally, my practice is a small group of people in my studio, resonating out to wider groups."

"But this was the opposite centripetal force of drawing everything into a really small series of rooms, and a small object, the book. It's the inverse of what I normally do."

According to the designer, the book-making process took nearly seven years and was edited by Cooper Hewitt associate curator of contemporary design Andrea Lipps, who also curated Devlin's exhibit.

Dezeen recently spoke with Es Devlin on her career, her work on the Sphere and more in an exclusive interview.

The photography is courtesy Es Devlin Studio unless otherwise noted.

An Atlas of Es Devlin will take place at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York from 18 Nov to 11 August 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

Project credits:
Exhibition design: Es Devlin Studio
Curator: Andrea Lipps
Curatorial assistant: Julie Pasto
Curatorial interns and fellows: Madelyn Colonna, Bailey de Vries, Barbara Kasomenakis and Sophie Scott
Designers of record and fabrication: Pink Sparrow
Graphic design: Morcos Key
Projection and video design: Luke Halls Studio
Composition and sound design: Polyphonia
Lighting design: Bruno Poet and John Viesta
Audiovisual production and integration: AV&C

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Firewood logs were used as modular stackable elements for the scenography of the BIO27 Super Vernaculars design biennial in Ljubljana, Slovenia, which has been shortlisted for a 2023 Dezeen Award.

Curated by Jane Withers, the 27th edition of the city's design biennial took place at the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in the summer of 2022.

The four-month presentation explored how designers and architects are adapting vernacular traditions and value systems to respond to contemporary challenges like water scarcity, waste and declining biodiversity.

Similarly, the brief for the exhibition design was to rethink classic parameters and consider sustainability in the context of a temporary show.

Slovenian architecture studio Medprostor chose to create the scenography from a readily available, locally sourced material that could be entirely reused at the end of the show.

"Walls, planes, piles and lines of firewood are a part of the Slovenian visual landscape, as almost 59 per cent of the country is forested," said Medprostor.

"By only using the standard logs and non-invasive stacking and binding methods, all the material was returned to the supplier for further resale and use."

Pre-cut to standard lengths, the logs were oriented vertically and bound together to create tables and platforms of varying heights and sizes throughout the exhibit areas.

Some of the logs were notched in their tops to hold photographs and texts mounted on honeycomb cardboard sheets, which also formed flat horizontal surfaces for displaying items by participating designers.

Bundles were also laid on their sides to act as low-lying display podiums for larger pieces.

"The aim was to explore ways of stacking wood that are based in traditional techniques but can at the same time support new shapes and methods that evoke a sense of contemporaneity," Medprostor said.

The grey and orange straps used to bind the wood and to hang cardboard panels from the ceiling were reused from the shipping industry.

A few panels also incorporated video screens or served as a backdrop for projections, adding another medium through which the curated projects could be articulated.

Medprostor collaborated with graphic designers Studio Kruh and AA to continue the low-impact approach to the exhibition graphics and signage, which were primarily printed on-site at the museum.

Additionally, the firewood was able to extend its drying process for the duration of the biennial, making it more energy-efficient when finally used as fuel, according to the studio.

"The drier the wood, the higher heating value and better environmental footprint it has," Medprostor said. "While in the museum, logs can dry additionally and be returned to the supplier for further resale with a better ecological footprint."

"The museum becomes a part of the process of curing the wood."

The BIO27 Super Vernaculars scenography has been shortlisted in the exhibition design category of the 2023 Dezeen Awards, along with a shrink-wrapped exhibition design by Didier Faustino and a showcase of recycled steel chairs by Daisuke Yamamoto.

The awards will be presented during a ceremony and party in London on Tuesday 28 November 2023, with creative direction by The Unlimited Dream Company.

The photography is by Ana Skobe and Klemen Ilovar.

BIO27 Super Vernaculars took place at the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), Ljubljana, Slovenia from 26 May to 29 September 2022. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

Project credits:

Location: Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO), Ljubljana, Slovenia
Exhibition design: Medprostor: Rok Žnidaršič, Jerneja Fischer Knap, Katarina Čakš, Teja Gorjup
Graphic design: Studio Kruh + AA
Curator: Jane Withers
Assistant curator: Ria Hawthorn
BIO27 director: Anja Radović

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London gallery Themes & Variations has opened an exhibition of furniture, lighting and sculpture by designer Tom Dixon that spans his over 40-year career, which he says is "like having a visual psychotherapy session".

The Tom Dixon: Metalhead exhibition features 52 pieces, including the designer's 1986 welded metal chairs that were exhibited at Themes & Variations in 1987 in the early stages of his design career.

"Having a retrospective exhibition dating back to the 1980s feels kind of like having a visual psychotherapy session," Dixon told Dezeen.

"Everything is out and aired, and nothing is hidden. One bonus is that it frees me to let go and move on."

Alongside the welded metal chairs in the exhibition are some of Dixon's other notable archival designs, including the cantilevered 1987 Rafia chair, the sculptural wire frame Pylon chair from 1991 and the 2007 Extruded chair made from free-formed extruded plastic.

More recent works on display include the curved tubular Hydro chair and a series of mask-like sculptures and chairs evocative of Dixon's early work, which were made during the 2021 coronavirus lockdown when Dixon was experimenting with welded salvage metal.

To Dixon, each piece in the exhibition holds significance to him, whether for sentimental reasons, for signifying a change in material use or for what they represent in his career.

"Some works are more emotional, some have greater historical weight, some were born of more interesting production processes," he said.

Tom Dixon: Metalhead marks Themes & Variations' final exhibition in its Notting Hill location. Since opening in 1984, the gallery has specialised in exhibiting post-war and contemporary design and aimed to spotlight up-and-coming designers, including Dixon.

"Dixon has lived many design lives," Themes & Variations stated. "Beginning in 1983 as an untrained designer welding chairs from metal scavenged in scrap yards, his emergence as a singular talent in a select group of dynamic subversives saw him ascend to the helm of British design."

"Whether employing ancient handmaking traditions or high-tech processes, there is an essential attitude concurrent across Dixon's extensive catalogue – one that, despite his indelible contribution to industrial design, has retained the renegade spirit of his early metal works," the gallery added.

"The works presented contemplate Dixon through the lens of the designer as a restless and industrious maker in perpetual exploration of the potential of materials and techniques."

Dixon worked as creative director of furniture companies Habitat and later Artek before founding his eponymous brand Tom Dixon in 2002.

Last year, the brand celebrated its 20th anniversary with an exhibition of its designs at Milan design week and in 2021, amid coronavirus restrictions, Dixon launched a range of accessories at Stockholm Design Week via a hologram of himself.

The photography is courtesy of Themes & Variations unless stated.

Tom Dixon: Metalhead is on display at Themes & Variations in London, UK, from 22 November 2023 to 13 January 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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If you're visiting London for the Dezeen Awards 2023 party taking place on 28 November, here are 10 architecture and design exhibitions also taking place in the city this month.

Diva, AI: Who's Looking After Me?, and Makerversity: Designing for the Real World and Skateboard are among the exhibitions open to visit in London during November.

Cut + Paste
11 February to 2 December 2023

Biomedical research organisation the Francis Crick Institute hosts an exhibition designed by multidisciplinary design studio The Liminal Space.

Through interactive games, the exhibition explores a new form of genetic engineering – known as genome editing – including the tools used for it and the ethics surrounding it.

Cut + Paste takes place at the Francis Crick Institute in the King's Cross district of London from Wednesdays to Sundays. On Wednesday 29 November, the exhibition is open from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm and 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm.

AI: Who's Looking After Me?
21 June 2023 to 20 January 2024

The exhibition questions human reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) through its uses within society, including public healthcare and the judicial system.

Taking place at the Science Gallery London, located at King's College London's Campus, the exhibition features 13 projects.

AI: Who's Looking After Me? is a collaborative project between the gallery and cultural organisation FutureEverything.

Diva
24 June 2023 to 7 April 2024

The V&A Museum hosts the Diva exhibition, which explores the designs behind 'divas' and how the role has changed throughout time.

Alongside the modern interpretation of the term, the exhibition also explores traditional examples of divas in opera and theatre through sketches, portraiture, clothing, audio and film.

The event aims to explore how the term 'diva' has been subverted over time, with the display featuring a reproduced portrait from the 19th century.

Small Spaces in the City: Rethinking Inside the Box
8 September 2023 to 27 January 2024

Small Spaces in the City: Rethinking Inside the Box takes place at bathroom manufacturer Roca's London showroom and spotlights small homes around the world.

Projects by universities King's College London and The Bartlett School of Architecture, as well as architects and studios Proctor & Shaw, Takeshi Hosaka, Gary Chang, JCPCDR Architecture, Paola Bagna and White Arkitekter are on display at the showroom.

The exhibition is designed by industrial product and furniture designer Tom Robinson and curated by Clare Farrow Studio. It opened during the 2023 edition of London Design Festival and is on display until January 2024.

Wide-Angle View
13 September 2023 to 24 February 2024

The Royal Institute of Architects (RIBA) hosts Wide-Angle View to celebrate architecture through photography.

The exhibition presents work by photographers Tony Ray-Jones, Patrick Ward and Ian Berry, exploring relationships between people and urban environments throughout Britain in the 1960s.

More than 70 photographs are on display at RIBA's London headquarters.

Gucci Cosmos
11 October to 31 December 2023

Italian fashion house Gucci spotlights a retrospective of its clothing and accessories in a travelling exhibition that takes place in London from October to December.

Gucci Cosmos takes place at 180 Studios in the city's Temple region and presents Gucci's designs, spanning the last 100 years following the brand's founding in 1921.

The exhibition was curated by fashion critic Maria Luisa Frisa and designed by artist Es Devlin.

Skateboard
20 October 2023 to 2 June 2024

The Design Museum in London presents Skateboard, displaying skateboards and accessories that highlight design changes between the present day and the 1950s.

Designer and skater Jonathan Olivares curated the exhibition, which includes over 90 boards and more than 100 objects, such as wheels, magazines, VHS tapes and safety equipment.

Alongside the display, the exhibition features a skate ramp, enabling visitors to skate inside the museum.

Makerversity: Designing for the Real World
1 November 2023 to 4 Febraury 2024

Makerversity: Designing for the Real World takes place at Somerset House, showcasing examples of designers' processes, including prototypes and final designs, alongside live workshop displays.

The interactive exhibition explores traditional and modern design techniques, examining initial concepts, production, completed products and implementation, with a focus on sustainability, accessibility and technology.

Makerversity is a business support community led by Somerset House. The exhibition is curated by Makerversity's director and co-founder Paul Smyth in collaboration with art studio Something & Son.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Boundless
15 November 2023 to 22 January 2024

The Saatchi Gallery presents installations and sculptures by artistic duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude between the 1960s to the 2010s, thought to explore themes of connection and a rejection of tradition.

Featured work includes Wrapped Coast in Australia, Surrounded Islands, The Pont Neuf Wrapped, The Umbrellas (1991), The Gates in Central Park and The Floating Piers.

The exhibition forms part of the gallery's Season of Sculpture series.

Christien Meindertsma: Re-forming Waste
22 November 2023 to 19 October 2024

Designer Christien Meindertsma hosts the Re-forming Waste exhibition at the V&A Museum, which presents projects made from linoleum and wool.

The exhibition follows Meindertsma's research into the materials, sourcing environmentally conscious resources for a circular economy.

The display collection was made utilising both traditional craft and modern technology.

About Dezeen Events Guide

Dezeen Events Guide is our guide to the best architecture and design events taking place across the world each year. The guide is updated weekly and includes virtual events, conferences, trade fairs, major exhibitions and design weeks.

Inclusion in the guide is free for basic listings, with events selected at Dezeen's discretion. Organisers can get standard, enhanced or featured listings for their events, including images, additional text and links, by paying a modest fee.

In addition, events can ensure inclusion by partnering with Dezeen. For more details on inclusion in Dezeen Events Guide and media partnerships with Dezeen, email eventsguide@dezeen.com.

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Old and new blurred together in this exhibition at Paris' GSL Gallery, which celebrated contemporary creatives who observe design traditions of the past.

Le Salon de Septembre was the inaugural exhibition to be held at GSL Gallery, a factory-turned-arts space in Paris' Patin neighbourhood run by creative collective The Guild of Saint Luke.

Guided by the motto "Remastering The Past", the collective thought it fitting for the show to highlight the fact that traditional design techniques are "very much alive and well".

"These techniques are being adopted by young avant-garde artists and designers around the world to create new forms that can also be read in the context of decorative art history," the collective's founder, John Whelan, told Dezeen.

"This is a subjective opinion but I think that artworks and design pieces that reference the past are drawing upon our roots, the very foundation and life force of our culture – works that attempt to break free from the past can often look 'deracinated' and meaningless despite their valiant effort to create a new language."

A mix of established and emerging creatives contributed pieces to the exhibition, which was curated by Whelan and interior architect Edgar Jayet.

On the gallery's ground floor, an ebonised blackwood and stainless steel daybed by Australian designer Olivia Bossy sat beside a lustrous aluminium lamp from designer Max Copolov.

This drew on the work style of Weiner Werkstätte – a modernist Austrian design studio established in 1903 by painter Koloman Moser, the architect Josef Hoffmann and patron Fritz Waerndorfer.

A glass vitrine in the same room contained an ornate bento box from 19th-century Japan and a raw aluminium stool by co-curator Jayet.

This offered a reinterpretation of the curule seat, used in Ancient Rome by powerful magistrates.

Upstairs on the gallery's mezzanine, a chair by Seoul-based designer Kim Byungsub was on display.

While its seat was made from hairline-finish steel, its backrest featured najeonchilgi: a historic Korean handicraft technique in which mother-of-pearl motifs are inlaid into lacquered surfaces.

Other items on this level included a walnut-veneer lounger by London-based artist EJR Barnes, designed to emulate "turn-of-the-century European grandeur".

There was also a blackened ash, steel, and felt-laminate suspension light by London-based designer Joe Armitage, which took its cues from a floor lamp created in 1952 by his grandfather, architect Edward Armitage.

An array of paintings, prints and reliefs served as a backdrop to the pieces in the gallery. These nodded to the exhibition design of the 1903 edition of Salon d'Automne, an art show that takes place in Paris every year.

"My co-curator Edgar Jayet and I were particularly interested by the avant-garde spirit of the original Salon d'Automne, which was controversial in its day, showing the Fauvists, Cubists and Futurists, as well as Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier in design," explained Whelan.

"Archival images of the original exhibition in 1903 heavily influenced our scenography, with an ebonised oak vitrine and shelf above which artworks are hung in a ramshackle, fin-de-siecle style."

Like Salon d'Automne, Le Salon de Septembre will now become an annual event at GSL Gallery.

"We hope to provide an annual snapshot of the zeitgeist in art and design, showing artists and designers that explore heritage as a means of contemporary inspiration," concluded Whelan.

Prior to opening GSL Gallery at the beginning of 2023, The Guild of Saint Luke specialised in reviving historic interiors and designing new ones.

Previous projects include Nolinski, an art deco-style eatery in the French capital, and Maison Francois, a chic brasserie in London that riffs on Ricardo Bofill's architecture.

The photography is by Celia Spenard-Ko. 

Le Salon de Septembre took place at 27 Rue Jacques Cottin, Pantin, Paris, from 15 September to 6 October. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Japanese designer Daisuke Yamamoto presented recycled steel chairs on podiums of the same material as part of an exhibition in Milan, which has been shortlisted for a 2023 Dezeen Award.

Yamamoto's Flow project explores ways to minimise industrial waste by focusing on a single material – light-gauge steel (LGS).

Commonly used in construction as a strong, lightweight framing option, LGS is also one of the industry's largest waste products, Yamamoto claims, as it is rarely recycled after demolition.

The designer therefore chose to create a second life for the steel sheets and components as a series of sculptural chairs.

He also used LGS to form platforms for showcasing the seating designs as part of an exhibition at Milan design week 2023 that has been shortlisted in the exhibition design category of this year's Dezeen Awards.

"This project began with the awareness that everyday recycled construction materials are disposed of, then new construction begins – a so-called 'scrap and build'," Yamamoto said.

"Using the iconic LGS material – one of the most popular materials normally used in framing systems throughout the interior wall structure – we transformed it into beautifully redesigned furniture, giving the materials a second chance," he added.

The exhibition formed part of the Dropcity showcase, which took place inside the Magazzini Raccordati spaces at Milan Central Station during the design week in April.

These empty railway arches have a dilapidated, industrial aesthetic with peeling floors, stained tilework and exposed utilities.

Yamamoto chose to leave the vaulted room largely as he found it but placed a series of platforms in two rows, upon which he presented the series of chairs.

Track lighting was installed overhead to spotlight the elevated designs, each of which has a slightly different shape.

In the centre of the exhibition, a workshop bench also built from lightweight gauge steel was used to fabricate more chairs during live demonstrations between Yamamoto and craft artist Takeo Masui.

"This is a landfill, a place where a volume of used LGS is collected," Yamamoto said. "A place where the designer and craftsmen work hand in hand to recreate what was bound to be disposed into something new, a process of disassembling to re-assemble."

The intention was to not only showcase the material's capabilities for reuse but also to allow visitors to engage with the process and ask wider questions about how society deals with waste.

Using waste materials produced by other industries was a key trend that Dezeen spotted during this year's Milan Design Week, with designers and studios including Formafantasma, Prowl Studio, Atelier Luma and Subin Seol all looking to reduce the environmental impact of their products.

The photography is by Takumi Ota.

Future Landfill took place at Magazzini Raccordati from 15 to 23 April 2023 as part of Milan Design Week. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Creative studio D/Dock has transformed a hall inside Amsterdam's former Westergasfabriek gasworks into Fabrique des Lumières – billed as the largest immersive art centre in the Netherlands.

Commissioned by Parisian company Culturespaces, D/Dock's design and build team transformed the double-height 3,800-square-metre hall into an exhibition space where bright, colourful artworks are projected across the floor and walls.

The space can be adapted through the use of movable seating and adjustable sound and light systems to suit the needs of various exhibitions on everything from space travel to the work of architect Antoni Gaudí.

"[The space] serves as a versatile canvas set against an industrial backdrop, where over 100 projectors and speakers transform the venue into dynamic worlds, from a lively jungle to an interstellar journey or an evocative art gallery, offering a spectrum of cultural and sensory experiences adaptable to various exhibitions," lead architect Sven Butteling told Dezeen.

To achieve a continuous space suitable for light projections, any openings of the 1885 building were closed up with cladding and painted to blend in with the existing brick interior.

Taking advantage of the building's height and scale, an internal staircase wraps around the rear facade and leads to a raised platform providing views of the main space.

Two newly built pavilions provide more enclosed immersive experiences within the main exhibition space while also operating as projection surfaces in the main hall.

Among them is the mirror pavilion, which D/Dock clad in mirrored panels and shiny flooring tiles to create "an infinite projection space".

During construction, the building's interior was carefully restored to maintain its industrial character, with the addition of newly built and digital elements creating a contemporary arts centre that blends the old and new.

The addition of lightweight insulation on the roof and windows, as well as acoustic and fire-rated doors, helped to enhance the energy performance of the hall.

D/Dock is a creative studio of architects, artists, designers and engineers based in Amsterdam.

Fabrique des Lumières has been shortlisted in the architectural lighting design category of the Dezeen Awards 2023. Also in the running is the glowing facade that Aranda\Lasch created for a Dior store outside of Doha, Qatar.

The photography is by Ossip van Duivenbode, Marijn van Laerhoven and Eric Spiller.

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A divider informed by the Microsoft logo and a sculpture made of a single cord of iron in the shape of a chair were among the objects featured at the Mueble Escultura exhibition in Buenos Aires.

Curated by Lucila Garcia de Onrubia and Cinthia Kazez, the Mueble Escultura Vol 2 exhibition featured "sculptures that resemble furniture and furniture that resembles sculptures" created by a host of designers living throughout Argentina in response to an open call.

"We work with the concept of 'mueble escultura', which serves more as a prompt than a theme, and prefer to think of each show as a panorama of contemporary production," curators Rubi and Kazaz told Dezeen.

"We were looking for work that interpreted our prompt in different ways, whether utilitarian, poetic, or conceptual, balancing that blurred line between art and design piece. This selection resulted in a more varied representation of hybrid works by both artists and designers that go beyond sculpture and collectable design."

Displayed in a gallery space at Espinosa Studios in Buenos Aires, the exhibit showcased a variety of different mediums including sculpture, painting and furniture design.

A sculpture by artist Mariano Ullua consisted of the outline of an armchair made with a single cord of wavy iron.

The Al Momento de Sentarse piece was Ullua's attempt to "transcend a medium", as the artist usually works as a painter.

Designer Oke Gomez Llambi (Grupo Bondi) displayed a stocky bench and jagged table made of hollow brick, cement and sand spliced together to form multi-coloured, textured surfaces.

These pieces, called The Relleno Sanitario, try to show how "function follows form", according to Rubi and Kazaz.

Product and furniture designer Franco Chimento created a textured, black shelving system with lines that extend outwards to end in dull points.

Made of wood and covered in coal, the piece nods to the traditional sheath of the Japanese katana sword, an object Chimento's father and grandfather collected as merchant seamen.

Other works include a spider-like aluminium chair with pronounced, mechanical joints created in 2003 by designer Fernando Poggio, ceramic shelves shaped like bows by Catalina Oz and a red, curved aluminium screen by Item informed by the Microsoft Windows logo.

The pieces were displayed along a long, flowing rug, which Rubi and Kazaz designed for the exhibit.

"We aimed, through the exhibition design, to appeal to a design language, using clean lines and a single color, to present both design and art pieces without distinction," said the curators.

"Because this mixing of practices is rarely seen here, we felt it was necessary to present a solid and serious show to legitimize this concept."

Elsewhere, the recent INTRO/LA exhibit brought together work from Los Angeles furniture designers.

The photography is by Felix Niikado.

Mueble Escultura Vol 2. was on show at Espinosa Studios in Buenos Aires from 28 October to 11 November. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

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