Summer readings 2022: 18 articles for these holidays

What are Joe Colombo and Vico Magistretti doing in Space: 1999? In the Sixties and Seventies sci-fi sets, from the most expensive TV series to the cheapest of B-movies, were furnished with the icons of Italian design, which at the time looked as something coming straight from the future.

By Lorenzo Ottone

A new generation of increasingly sophisticated AI – such as Midjourney – unveils new possibilities for design: we have tried to figure out whether and how they will replace humans and their work.

By Andrea Daniele Signorelli

The Quartiere Triennale Ottava is a rare example of urban planning that combines ordinary qualities and extraordinary features, functionality and avant-garde building solutions: an ideally self-sufficient district, presented in 1947.

By Alessandro Benetti

Designed together with his brother Gianni, it takes its name from methacrylate. What we commonly call plexiglass was used for this lamp in a way never been seen before.

By Silvana Annicchiarico

The Portuguese approach to architecture as told to Domus by one of its masters: an anti-archistar, a thinker rather than a communicator, a convinced pragmatist who quotes Calvino and Lukács.

By Alessandro Benetti

“Queerness can save us”, Adam Nathaniel Furman tells Domus. The designer is the author of Queer Spaces, an atlas of LGBTQIA+ places edited together with architectural historian Joshua Mardell: we've selected six projects presented in the seminal volume.

By Romina Totaro

A recent exhibition in Florence sparked off the debate again: are blockchain artworks really the future? We asked this question to curator Serena Tabacchi, who is also the director of the MoCDA, the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art.

By Silvia Dal Dosso

The German designer tells Domus about the birth of his exhibition entitled “New Normals” – an ode to the normalization of diversity and interpretative gap obtained through the hacking of his own pieces.

By Giulia Zappa

As carbon emissions continue to rise, energy-efficient building design is an increasingly important issue in the construction industry, but not a novelty in the history of architecture.

By Romina Totaro

The former director of Domus analyzes the similarities between the mechanical world and the one of architecture, comparing the different realities on common objectives of innovation and new solutions: from investments to effective research.

By Deyan Sudjic

“I arrived in Milan in 1954. I had left Pesaro, together with my brother Giò, with a global dream”: the sculptor talks about his historic workspace, a former post house that Gregotti renovated for him in the 1980s.

By Matilde Scaramellini

From war machines to social status symbols, the lift has radically changed what we expect from a building and the hierarchies that exist within it.

By Romina Totaro

In the design of houses, architects today often forget a fundamental element: things. Starting from the reflections of Sottsass and Coccia, we asked ourselves if the houses need the objects, or vice versa.

By Silvana Annicchiarico

The gallerist’s Neapolitan home is a house that dives into the sea, and is surrounded by an enormous terrace. Inside, new and old meet, and the works of artists dear to her are displayed.

By Maria Cristina Didero

The demand for bunker apartments for the super-rich skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the invasion of Ukraine, demand is increasing, a symptom of a global anxiety that should be addressed differently.

By Silvia Dal Dosso

Domus meets architectural historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina for an exchange on the complex relationship between architecture and sickness, the subject of the exhibition she curated at CIVA Bruxelles. 

By Giovanni Comoglio

At the latest Balenciaga fashion show, the first 38 looks wore an inky full-face helmet. But the “masquerade runaway” counts other important references in the history of fashion.

By Romina Totaro

Two thousand years later, the fascination of the way of life of an ancient Bedouin people comes to the present day, amidst the contradictions of mass tourism and the ideal of a symbiosis between architecture and nature.

By Alessandro Scarano