Andrea Branzi’s design belongs to a world we can no longer imagine

There is a paradox at the heart of Andrea Branzi by Toyo Ito. Continuous Present (March 19–October 4, 2026), the major exhibition that Triennale Milano and the Fondation Cartier have devoted to Andrea Branzi (1938–2023), one of the central figures of Italian design in the second half of the twentieth century. To recover the contemporary relevance of an author who always exceeded the object, one now seems to have to pass through the staging of another author. Toyo Ito (b. 1941), the Japanese Pritzker Prize–winning architect and longtime companion of Branzi, does not merely design the exhibition of this exceptionally rich monograph — bringing together drawings, models, viewing devices, environments, installations, objects, and documents across eleven sections — but also builds, in space, the very key through which it can be read.

The result is an exceptional exhibition. Its power lies not only in the quality of the exhibition design, but in the fact that it makes legible once again something that belongs less and less to the present: the idea of a design practice that does not always, or necessarily, coincide with the production of things.

The exhibition opens with Superarchitettura, the 1966 show in which Archizoom and Superstudio turned design into a pop and polemical gesture. The tone then shifts abruptly as visitors enter No-Stop City (1967–1972), the theoretical project of a continuous, homogeneous city without architecture or center, reconstructed at the Triennale at 1:1 scale as an immersive, futuristic, almost abstract interior. From that moment on, the exhibition no longer moves through chronological stages, but through thematic clusters and echoes. Branzi stops appearing as the author of isolated pieces and instead reveals himself as a designer-thinker, for whom the object was never the ultimate end of the work.

One sees it clearly in Central Plan Houses, where tables, rugs, fireplaces, and sofas matter less for their function than as symbolic cores of dwelling — “founders of the home,” in the catalogue’s words. One sees it in the viewers of Theoretical Metropolises, where urban design becomes an optical and mental device. One sees it in Gazebo and Ellipse, which Ito restores to the center of the exhibition, where the environment becomes at once exhibition structure, architecture, and a narrative woven from objects and materials. And one sees it in Hybrid Object, where things no longer solve a problem of use but stage a tension between nature and artifice, fragility and construction. In Branzi, the object matters for the thought it condenses, the relations it activates, and the world it lets us glimpse around it.

It is at this point that Ito’s exhibition design stops being merely brilliant and becomes necessary. Rather than bringing Branzi back onto the terrain most familiar to us today — that of the iconic object or the memorable collectible piece — it tries to hold together the different layers of his work: urban models, environments, exhibition systems, objects, publications, and to restore the internal logic that binds them.

And this is no small challenge. The fact that Branzi today needs an exhibition like this in order to be made legible does not depend on museography alone. It depends on the distance that separates us from the moment in which that work emerged — a moment when design did not necessarily coincide with the object, nor allow itself to be measured solely in terms of function, performance, or production. It could also be manifesto, theory, polemic, pedagogy. It could be driven by its own vision of the home, the city, and the making of an imaginary.

In the years between the mid-1960s and the 1970s, Branzi is in his early thirties. He comes of age in a climate of protest, criticism of institutions, the crisis of modernist certainties, and the simultaneously seductive and violent expansion of consumer society. This is the moment when the status of design also shifts in Italy. It no longer coincides comfortably with the idea of the well-made industrial product. The house, the city, the landscape, the domestic interior, and the object itself are no longer simply things to be designed better, but terrains to be critically navigated. This is the context in which Superarchitettura, Archizoom, Superstudio are born — not as sporadic or marginal episodes, but as symptoms of a moment when design could still act as a posture toward the world, a position taken on the present.

Of the many designers shaped by that sensibility and now part of the history of the discipline, Branzi is perhaps the one who did the most to prolong its effects. He turned excess in relation to the object into the defining trait of an entire career, rather than a passing feature of a particular moment. He kept alive the possibility of the architect-thinker, capable of speculative and theoretical ambition. He consistently refused to be boxed into specific fields or practices. And he remained, throughout, open and attentive.

He was the most critical, but also the most positive in relation to change. One of the last for whom the momentum of the twentieth century never congealed into nostalgia. This is also why the exhibition avoids the trap of celebration. Ito does not really try to bring Branzi back into the present, and therein lies one of his best intuitions. He does not force him into a convenient form of contemporaneity. Instead, he lets the distance that separates us from the world that made Branzi possible come into view, and it is precisely in this way that his work is able to raise a concrete question once more: what are we still willing to recognize as design today?

Opening image: Andrea Branzi, Nicoletta Morozzi, Animali vestiti, 1973. Photo Studio Branzi. Courtesy private collection