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Inhabiting imperfections: Walter Mariotti on design as regeneration in Tokyo

At the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo, during Italian Design Day 2026, the Editorial Director of Domus reflects on the future of design through the Japanese practice of kintsugi — between redesign, care, and the aesthetics of wabi-sabi.

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“To dwell poetically,” and therefore properly, in the world — including the world of design and architecture: this intuition of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger formed the starting point of Walter Mariotti’s talk at the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo, on the occasion of Italian Design Day 2026.

Dwelling, Heidegger wrote in 1951, means not only occupying space but taking care of the things of the world — not living as masters of objects, but acting as their custodians. A concept that resonates with kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with urushi lacquer mixed with gold powder.

Andrea Branzi, Animali Domestici, 1985 Would Andrea Branzi have agreed to link wabi-sabi to his Animali Domestici (Domestic Animals) collection? Perhaps not, but this pivotal work, marking his move beyond the Alchimia and Memphis experiences, does introduce a vivid, almost living simulacrum of nature into the domestic sphere. By framing irregular trunks and branches as design elements, Branzi reawakens our sense of their formal, tactile, and metaphysical beauty.

Domus 667, December 1985

Shiro Kuramata, How High the Moon, 1986 For Shiro Kuramata, an object is never just functional: it’s a vehicle for spiritual inquiry. In this generous, wire-mesh armchair, Kuramata redefines lightness and invites us to look beyond – to the moon, as its name suggests – to grasp a fleeting moment of poetry and contemplation.

foto Emilio Tremolada

George Nakashima, Holtz Dining Table, 1986 In this series of tables, Nakashima turns joinery into a seamless dialogue between the natural and the crafted. His hybrid pieces reveal wood’s mutable presence without disguise, celebrating its states and metamorphoses.

foto Emilio Tremolada

Marcel Wanders, Foam Bowl, 1997 Between 1990 and 1995, the Droog collective reshaped the meaning of objects according to principles close to wabi-sabi: process over perfection, equality among materials, the embrace of irregularity and the “ugly.” In this porcelain bowl cast from a natural sponge, Marcel Wanders captures the raw materiality of an organic form, breaking from porcelain’s polished codes and distilling nature’s essence in faithful detail.

foto Emilio Tremolada

Estudio Campana, Favela Chair, 1991 Often framed through the lens of “tropical baroque,” the Campana brothers’ work also resonates with wabi-sabi, especially in their early icon, the Favela Chair. Built from discarded wood scraps, its spontaneous assembly recalls the idea that beauty can arise from what is deemed worthless. As the Italian songwriter Fabrizio De André once sang, “dal letame nascono i fior (“From manure, flowers bloom”).

photo Emilio Tremolada

5.5, Chaise soignée avec béquille, 2004 In 2004, the French collective 5.5 “hacked” a worn-out bistro chair by fitting it with a conspicuously artificial prosthesis. The result juxtaposes wood and neon-green plastic – nature and synthetic matter – but also evokes healing and rebirth, as the name (“chair treated with a crutch”) suggests. Now a classic of repair design, it’s a kind of kintsugi that replaces gold with a punk spirit.

foto Emilio Tremolada

Maarten Baas, Standard Unique, Established & Sons, 2011 How can serial production generate uniqueness? Maarten Baas offers an ingenious answer with his Standard Unique series: sixteen kitchen chair components, always the same, can be assembled in countless variations. The result celebrates asymmetry, rough cuts, and imperfection as a new everyday aesthetic.

foto Emilio Tremolada

Paola Navone, Brick Table, Gervasoni, 2015 A longtime devotee of wabi-sabi, Turin-born designer Paola Navone absorbed its sensibility during extended stays in Asia, revisiting it across numerous interiors and installations. Yet beyond her appreciation of the humble and anonymous object, Navone’s true contribution lies in translating wabi-sabi into industrial production. In Gervasoni’s Brick collection, a wax-treated steel top rests on tree trunk sections used as legs: a delicate yet stable balance, suggesting a new coexistence between nature and design.

foto Emilio Tremolada

Anais Jarnoux et Samuel Tomatis, LX.1.spir, 2025 Will the wabi-sabi of the future be a design of the living? In this lamp made from an algae-based substrate, the natural trace becomes a magnetic presence, functional yet deeply evocative. It redefines beauty through materials many consider “ugly,” exalting a patina that is alive, mutable, and endlessly becoming.

photo Eline Willaert


The conference, organized by the Italian Embassy in Tokyo and the Italian Cultural Institute, revolved around a central question: how can we “regenerate the imperfect beauty of the world”? The answer lies in the value of imperfection: where Western culture sees a defect, Japanese culture has always recognized an opportunity. “Regeneration will be understood as recognizing the value of what already exists,” reported ANSA in its online announcement of the conference, “resisting the logic of consumption and perpetual replacement.”

These are two different ways of understanding design, yet they can engage in dialogue. This is demonstrated by the rediscovery of wabi-sabi, which celebrates imperfection and incompleteness in furnishings, and by the return of redesign — rethinking and re-projecting what already exists, from a building or a piece of furniture to an interface, a space, or even a social system.

In his talk, Mariotti connected Western thought with Japanese sensibility, evoking the work of Fosco Maraini, an anthropologist and profound connoisseur of Japanese culture, as well as central figures of twentieth-century Japanese literature such as Yasunari Kawabata, Nobel Prize winner, and Yukio Mishima. Regeneration, it emerged, is not a nostalgic gesture but a critical act that honors history, imperfections, and the marks of time. It is a complex practice, yet indispensable in an era in which “urban spaces risk being reduced to functional containers, objects to disposable goods, and ideas to products,” as the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo writes in presenting the project. Today, regeneration is not only something that should interest us: it is something we need.

Read also: “Sometimes it’s worth taking the risk” — Jeanne Gang on architecture as a collective choice

All images: Walter Mariotti at the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo

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