Competing with design is an opportunity for architects to read themselves and their practice through a different scale: to interrogate matter with a new filter, to discover where their vision endures and where it is transformed. This is why, since time immemorial, architects have been among the protagonists of Milan Design Week.
Alongside the object and the furniture, they are often entrusted with the task of measuring themselves against yet another subject: installation. To all intents and purposes an area of architecture, but one that with its most frequent products does not share its purpose. They are habitable but temporary spaces, open to all, grafted into places they occupy on an occasional basis, usually beaten by other habits and other social needs.
Thus are built architectures born to happen and with them happen ever new and unexpected dynamics: generative machines of ideas that feed a continuous dialogue between architecture and design, between project and world, each time opening new areas to question.
Even Fuorisalone 2026 thus meets the work of the most important architects of the international scene, who meet in Milan, which has always been a factory of projects and home of ideas.
Domus is organizing the customary meeting at the Politecnico di Milano, which will feature Ma Yansong, founder of the MAD studio, guest editor of our magazine for 2026 and a leading figure in the contemporary architectural scene. Through the lecture "Architecture is not architecture," he will tell about his vision of this discipline, whose boundaries, in constant mutation, are no longer definable and whose mission is to open up to new dimensions. An urgency that until the end of this year he will also recount through issues of Domus.
We will meet Neri & Hu at Casa Mutina. The architecture studio founded in Shanghai in 2004 by Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu signs two collections for the brand: Weaving, ceramic wall tiles inspired by the art of bamboo weaving, and Hé, a line of table accessories, a proposal of Mutina Edition, the company's segment dedicated to objects.
Confronting design is an opportunity for architects to read themselves and their practice through a different scale.
The intervention by Lina Ghotmeh is one of this year's most anticipated installations: her project revolutionizes the space of the courtyard of Palazzo Litta, which has been MoscowPartners' territory for years. His is an invitation to think of the courtyard of the palace for what it has always been, namely a place of transition from the urban to the private dimension. The installation aims to make that large square closed and open at the same time, a dynamic and spectacular event.
It has a habitable dimension the branching architecture signed by Michele De Lucchi and his studio AMDL. The installation in the courtyard of the University of Milan, Traces of Care, develops like a space to be discovered by crossing it: it does not reveal itself immediately, but seduces through its fragmentation and the plaster sculptures placed inside.
The Rome-based studio Lazzarini Pickering Architetti brings to the Marta Sala Éditions spaces a new upholstered seat which, together with those produced by the Milanese brand in the past, traces a well-established collaboration and forms part of a lesser-known design legacy of the studio, one that has engaged on several occasions with furniture design.
Inside its hub, the Park collective is setting up Loopwork - The Meanwhile Club, which will transform the space into a collective environment for exchange and listening through a public program organized by Le Cannibale, which has been dedicated to club culture and sound experimentation for more than fifteen years.
For all the times we've told you that the USM system can potentially be configured to infinity, now comes confirmation: the collaboration between USM Haller, the Swiss steel system company, and architecture firm Snøhetta brings to the Luigi Rovati Foundation a configuration of USM on a scale never seen before. We will discover it in Renaissance of the Real, the installation curated by artist Annabelle Schneider.
With Carlo Ratti Associati, however, the appointment is at the fair: the studio signs an outdoor kitchen for Veneta Cucine. Starting from one of the most intimate spaces in the home, the studio imagines a space in which cooking becomes a pretext for rethinking the threshold between inside and outside, between private and collective, between technique and conviviality.