Until March 15th, 2026, Spazio UniFor at Viale Pasubio 15 in Milan hosts La città degli oggetti: Aldo Rossi e Francesco Somaini (The City of Objects: Aldo Rossi and Francesco Somaini) as part of the In Vetrina program promoted by MuseoCity. Curated by Studio Klass with Fondazione Francesco Somaini Scultore, the installation brings into dialogue iconic furnishings designed by Aldo Rossi for UniFor and a selection of 1970s sculptures by Francesco Somaini. The exhibition takes place in the central hall of Spazio UniFor, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and reflects the city as object, memory, and constructed idea.

all images by Alessandro Saletta – DSL Studio

four rooms, one urban grid

Studio Klass structures the exhibition as a sequence of four rooms aligned with the structural grid of the building, extending the logic of the architecture into the curatorial layout. The spaces function as compact, museological architectures, pairing one sculptural work with one architectural object and introducing a distinct chromatic register, a recurring theme in Rossi’s work.

Visitors move through calibrated spaces where light, scale, and material contrasts shape the encounter. Cartesio, Consiglio, Parigi, and Museo are presented as architectural objects. Designed by Rossi for UniFor, they condense personal and archetypal memories while evoking imaginary cityscapes. Bookcases assume the presence of facades, cabinets read as civic volumes with modular rhythms. Rossi’s notion of the analogue city, a conceptual city assembled through memory, typology, and repetition, becomes tangible in these pieces. 

Spazio UniFor at Viale Pasubio 15 in Milan hosts La città degli oggetti: Aldo Rossi e Francesco Somaini

sculpture against the metropolis

In counterpoint, Somaini’s archi-sculptures introduce a material and formal tension. Conceived in the 1970s through his engagement with the built environment, these works treat the city as a field of forces rather than a fixed image. For the sculptor, New York becomes a paradigmatic site in which to test the relationship between art and architecture at urban scale. Placed alongside Rossi’s objects-architectures, the sculptures expand the dialogue between memory, matter and the city. 

From this encounter emerges a landscape in which the real city overlaps with the imagined one. The installation constructs what can be understood as an analogue city, shaped by collective memory and set in contrast with a critical reinterpretation of the modern metropolis.

Within the framework of MuseoCity’s In Vetrina initiative, Spazio UniFor becomes a vessel for La città degli oggetti: Aldo Rossi e Francesco Somaini, an exhibition that proposes a precise, close-range reading of two parallel investigations into how the city can be reimagined through art and design.

part of the In Vetrina program promoted by MuseoCity

the installation brings together iconic furnishings by Aldo Rossi for UniFor and 1970s sculptures by Francesco Somaini

the exhibition takes place in the central hall of Spazio UniFor

Studio Klass structures the exhibition as a sequence of four rooms

aligned with the structural grid of the building

the spaces function as compact, museological architectures

introducing a distinct chromatic register, a recurring theme in Rossi’s work

pairing one sculptural work with one architectural object

visitors move through calibrated spaces where light, scale, and material contrasts shape the encounter

project info:

name: La città degli oggetti: Aldo Rossi e Francesco Somaini (The City of Objects: Aldo Rossi and Francesco Somaini)

location: Spazio UniFor, viale Pasubio 15, Milano

dates: February 6th – March 15th 2026

host: UniFor | @unifor_official

collaborator: Fondazione Francesco Somaini Scultore | @fondazionesomaini

exhibition design: Studio Klass | @studioklass

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As the capital of Saudi Arabia continues its rapid cultural metamorphosis, the seventh edition of Tuwaiq Sculpture Symposium and Exhibition arrives to punctuate the city’s skyline with 25 large-scale works. The exhibition, which runs from February 9 to 22, 2026, occupies Prince Mohammed bin Abdulaziz Street (Al Tahlia), turning a site once defined by water desalination into a into a temporary urban installation. By positioning these large-scale artworks along a historic axis of innovation, the program explores how public art can act as a catalyst for urban renewal and quality of life.

banner: Emergence by Wafa Alqunibit

above: Azm / Samu by Hassan Qureshi

all images courtesy of Riyadh Art

PUBLIC ART IN ACTION RELECTING THE CITY’S ONGOING RENEWAL

Organized by Riyadh Art under the Royal Commission for Riyadh City, the Tuwaiq Sculpture Symposium and Exhibition serves as a cultural platform that bridges local heritage with global perspectives. The 2026 edition’s theme, ‘Traces of What Will Be,’ brought together artists from 18 different countries through a focused curatorial selection process. Over the course of nearly a month, the public was invited to watch as raw, locally sourced stone and reclaimed metal were hewn into finished forms, functioning as a live laboratory to emphasize a material intelligence that responds directly to the city’s evolving identity.

Coexistence by Mohammed Althagafi

CONTRIBUTING NEW WORKS TO RIYADH ART’S PERMANENT COLLECTION

Guided by curators Lulwa Alhomoud, Sarah Staton, and Rut Blees Luxemburg, the participating artists navigate the intersection of human intervention and natural resources. From large-scale abstractions to intricate textures in granite and steel, the sculptures reflect a commitment to durability and the responsible use of materials within the urban context.

The life of these works extends far beyond the temporary exhibition on Al Tahlia. Each of the 25 pieces will eventually join the Riyadh Art’s Permanent Collection, finding a long-term home in prominent public spaces across the city. Since the program’s inception in 2019, more than 170 artists have contributed to this growing civic gallery, with over 60 works already integrated into the daily life of Riyadh residents. Through an accompanying program of workshops and panel talks, Tuwaiq Sculpture Symposium continues to weave contemporary art into the very fabric of the community.

REEF by Nilhan Sesalan

Dawn and Dusk by Irena Posner

The Alchemy and Transmutation of the Sea by José Cárcamo

The Planets Are Watching by Maryam Turkey

Drops of Life by Žilvinas Balkevičius

Traces of the Future by Wiktor Kopacz

Azm / Samu by Hassan Qureshi

Wharda by Raya Kassisieh

project info: 

name: Tuwaiq Sculpture Symposium and Exhibition 2026 | @riyadhartofficial

dates: February 9-22, 2026

location: Prince Mohammed bin Abdulaziz Street (Al Tahlia), Riyadh

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TOTEM DE LUZ by kutarq studio is conceived as a kinetic lighting object that explores the relationship between light, movement, and spatial perception. Positioned between sculpture and functional design, the piece integrates mechanical components to enable adjustable illumination through physical interaction.

The structure is composed of stainless steel, nautical tensioners, pulleys, and counterweights, combined with an onyx diffuser and a glass sphere reflector. These elements form a visible mechanical system that allows the light source to shift vertically through a double-pulley mechanism. The movement of the spotlight alters both the direction and character of the light.

all images by Iñaki Domingo

both a lighting system and a mechanical installation

In its upper position, the light is directed toward an onyx diffuser, which softens and disperses illumination upward, producing indirect ambient light. When lowered, the beam is redirected through an oval opening on the side of the structure, generating a more concentrated light suitable for reading or task-oriented use.

Through its exposed mechanics and material composition, TOTEM DE LUZ by kutarq studio operates as a lighting system that integrates motion, reflection, and diffusion within a single vertical element.

TOTEM DE LUZ by kutarq studio functions as a kinetic lighting object

the piece explores the relationship between light, movement, and spatial perception

positioned between sculpture and function, it combines art and utility

mechanical components enable adjustable illumination through physical interaction

the structure is constructed from stainless steel

a glass sphere reflector redirects the light beam

the object operates as both a lighting system and a mechanical installation

pulleys and counterweights regulate the vertical movement of the light | image by Sara Miguel

the exposed system makes the mechanics part of the design expression

reflection and diffusion are integrated into a single structure

the vertical form consolidates motion and illumination

project info:

name: TOTEM DE LUZ
designer: kutarq studio | @kutarq

lead designer: Jordi Lopez Aguilo

photographer: Iñaki Domingo | @inakidomingo

photo assitants: Diego Perez de la Cruz, David Hornillos

set design: Sara Miguel

video: kutarq studio

designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.

edited by: christina vergopoulou | designboom

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Lana Launay’s Kinship series aims to preserve the antique doilies and ancestral lace-like textiles that have been passed down through generations using glowing light sculptures. At first glance, Kinship I and II illuminate with amorphous patterns, but up close, their surfaces resolve into lace. Doilies, stockings, and fragments of textile are stretched, wrapped, and held within stainless steel frameworks, then activated from within by LED light embedded in aluminum housings. The result is a series of industrial lighting pieces meeting inherited cloth.

The textiles themselves are not decorative afterthoughts. Each doily has been collected from different families, passed down through generations before entering the light works. Once domestic objects – resting on tables, tucked beneath porcelain, stored in drawers – they are repositioned as ancestral ornaments onto the light sculptures by Lana Launay. When unlit, their patterns remain subtle, and once illuminated, the lace projects webs of shadow and light onto surrounding walls, the negative space within each stitch becoming as active as the thread itself.

all images courtesy of Lana Launay | photos by Alexander Cooke

artist assembles the lighting pieces by hand

Stockings add another layer of diffusion onto the light sculptures by artist Lana Launay. Stretched across the steel forms, they soften the LED’s glow as the light seeps through fiber and filament, revealing variations in the woven fabrics. The lace patterns overlap and intersect, creating layered grids: lines cross and reconnect, as if the antique materials themselves map out decades of history and relationship.

The artist assembles the pieces by hand, so no two editions are identical. Each textile fragment carries its own history of wear, discoloration, and repair, and the steel frame adapts accordingly, depending on the dimensions of the cloth. The light sculptures by Lana Launa keep the past and present intertwined and alive, as heirloom textiles wrapped around an industrial piece of lighting become the canvas for preserving private, familial memories. Through the series, light constructs an archive, one where ancestry is not stored but made visible.

Lana Launay’s Kinship series aims to preserve the antique doilies and ancestral lace-like textiles

these textiles have been passed down through generations

up close, the lighting pieces’ surfaces resolve into lace

doilies and stockings are wrapped within stainless steel frameworks

the result is a series of industrial lighting pieces meeting inherited cloth

detailed view of the lighting design

when unlit, their patterns remain subtle, a historical work of design

the fabric adapts to the size of the lamp

detailed view of the textile

project info:

name: Kinship

artist: Lana Launay | @lanalaunay

photography: Alexander Cooke | @alexandercooke_

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Noguchi’s New York opens at The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City with a focused look at how one artist spent decades imagining the city as a terrain for sculpture, play, and — most importantly — public life. The exhibition, which shows both realized and unrealized projects, is a survey of Isamu Noguchi‘s lifelong relationship with New York, and the experience feels like a tour through an imagined version of what the city might have been.

‘Noguchi celebrated materials as they related to place,’ the curatorial team tells designboom ahead of the show’s opening. ‘Here in New York, he often experimented with metal sculptures because he saw the city as a landscape of metal mountains emerging from the urban environment.’

Noguchi’s New York is on view at the Noguchi Museum from February 4th until July 5th, 2026.

Noguchi’s New York, install view, image © designboom

idealist design for the people of nyc

The exhibition emphasizes the ways in which New York cultivated Isamu Noguchi’s ‘restless sense of idealism.’ He first moved to New York in 1922 at age seventeen, and the city remained his home on-and-off until his death in 1988. The first rooms of the gallery gather works from these early years in the 1930s, when he arrived as a young sculptor searching for a language that could address public life.

Portrait heads of friends and collaborators share space with anti-fascist projects and proposals. A bronze model for Play Mountain (1933), intended either for Central Park or an entire city block, sits low and wide like a contoured piece of topography. Its stepped slopes, sledding run, and bandshell compress the scale of a neighborhood into a single surface.

Nearby, newly commissioned animated films project children moving across those contours, translating the bronze maquette into motion. The films answer a practical problem the team mentioned on the tour. It can be hard to picture how a child might occupy a sculpted landscape from a small model. The animations place viewers inside the proposal, climbing and sliding through space that once existed only in the forms of drawings and physical models.

Isamu Noguchi in front of the Plaza Hotel at the debut of his first public sculpture on city land, Unidentified Object (1979) in Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, NY, 1979. photo: Donna Svennevik, The Noguchi Museum Archives

noguchi celebrates the city’s working class

One realized commission on view at the exhibition may be familiar to New Yorkers: News (Associated Press Building Plaque) (1938–40), Noguchi’s first public work in the United States. It’s is a large-scale stainless steel relief installed at Rockefeller Center. Archival photographs and drawings trace the making of this piece, which renders a group of newspaper men as a celebration of the city’s heroic working class.

The material choice feels deliberate, as stainless steel belongs to the cavernous office towers of midtown Manhattan. Noguchi responded to that context with a relief that reads as both sculpture and architecture.

This relief is among the only realized works which draw heavily from Noguchi’s anti-fascist ideals. A collection of unrealized works are exhibited nearby — these include murals which render cannons shooting moneybags as well as skeletons stabbing a depiction of the financier and investment banker J.P. Morgan.

Isamu Noguchi, News (Associated Press Building Plaque), 1938–40. photo: Miguel de Guzmán and Rocío Romero / ImagenSubliminal. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

colossal, unrealized playscapes

The heart of the Noguchi’s New York exhibition lies in the artist’s unrealized playgrounds. Five major proposals fill the galleries with bronze studies, drawings, and films. Alongside Play Mountain, there are the 1940 Play Equipment maquettes, including a compact Slide (model) and Jungle Gym (model), each reduced to spare lines and curves. These resemble small modernist sculptures that happen to invite climbing.

Noguchi described these projects as places for open exploration. He wanted children to invent their own routes rather than follow a prescribed path. With Robert Moses as the Parks Commissioner, these proposals were never considered. His first proposal for Play Mountain was rejected outright, and the artist later recalled that the commissioning team ‘turned their thumbs down so forcefully they almost broke their thumbnails.’

The playground which came closest to realization was planned for Manhattan’s Riverside Park in collaboration with the iconic and influential Louis Kahn. Blueprints, plaster models, and studies map out a sculpted terrain along the Hudson, with slide mountains and skating areas flowing into one another. Community opposition stalled the plan, and it slipped away.

Isamu Noguchi, Sunken Garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza, 1960–64. Bronze. photo: © Miguel de Guzmán and Rocío Romero / ImagenSubliminal / The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Downtown Interventions

Among Isamu Noguchi’s most successful realized works in New York, a modernist zen garden, can be found below street level in the financial district. The Sunken Garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza (1961–64) is exhibited through photographs and film. River stones from Kyoto sit in a circular depression at the base of a glass tower. An archival video shows water moving quietly around the stones as office workers eat lunch along the edge.

The garden feels like a pocket of stillness carved into Wall Street. The stones carry geological time into a place governed by minutes. A few blocks away stands Red Cube (1968), tilted and bright against the grid of Lower Manhattan, and many New Yorkers pass it daily without knowing it’s the work of Isamu Noguchi.

Strange Bird (1945) (left), This Tortured Earth, 1942-43 (cast 1977) (center), Chess Table, 1944, fabricated by Herman Miller (right), image © designboom

Eros, 1966 (left), Fudo, 1966-1967 (center), Night Bird, 1966-1967 (right)

Isamu Noguchi, Swings, Slide, Jungle Gym (Play Equipment models), 1940 (left), Isamu Noguchi, model for Contoured Playground, 1941 (cast 1963) (right), image © designboom

Animated film inspired by Isamu Noguchi’s Contoured Playground, 2025, Vinyl emulsion on celluloid, DURATION (TBC), directed by Nicolas Ménard & Jack Cunningham, Eastend Western

install view, various portrait heads of friends and collaborators, image © designboom

project info:

exhibition title: Noguchi’s New York

artist: Isamu Noguchi

museum: The Noguchi Museum

dates: February 4th — July 5th, 2026

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Presented by the Luma Foundation in Engadin, Switzerland, as part of Elevation 1049, STRIP TOWER (962) brings Gerhard Richter’s long-running investigations into the Alpine landscape, extending his practice beyond the canvas and into three-dimensional space. On view until the spring of 2029, the work draws from the methodology of his Strip Paintings, where a single painted gesture is subjected to successive acts of photographing, scanning, digital slicing, and stretching.  What begins as an analogue mark is transformed into a system of color bands governed by repetition and chance. In the tower, this process leaves the flat surface behind entirely, becoming architectural and spatial.

Rising over five meters, the sculpture, recently presented at Serpentine, London, consists of eight perpendicular panels clad in glazed ceramic tiles, each carrying vertically elongated color stripes. The intersecting panels allow people to walk between the surfaces, shifting the encounter from distant viewing to bodily experience. Light reflects off the glossy surfaces, while weather, cloud cover, snow, and seasonal shifts continuously recompose the work. 

all images by Luzi Seiler courtesy of Gerhard Richter Kunststiftung and Luma Foundation, unless stated otherwise

STRIP TOWER (962): site, repetition, and slow looking

Richter’s relationship with Sils Maria stretches back decades. He first visited the village in 1989 and has returned regularly since, drawn to its distinctive light and contemplative atmosphere. Long associated with intellectual retreat and sustained reflection, the site offers a fitting context for a work that resists instant legibility. STRIP TOWER (962) encourages repeated visits and incremental perception, asking viewers to notice subtle variations rather than dramatic gestures.

The placement of the sculpture near Lake Silvaplana embeds it directly within the Alpine ecosystem. Its ceramic skin responds to moisture and temperature, while its colors shift under changing skies. The experience of the work unfolds over time, aligning with the German artist’s broader concerns with uncertainty, reflection, and the instability of visual certainty.

With this installation, the Luma Foundation tests how contemporary art can operate outside conventional exhibition formats, proposing the Alps as a landscape where artistic experimentation unfolds over time. Elevation 1049 will return to Gstaad and the Saanenland in 2027, curated by Mohamed Almusibli, but in the Engadin, Richter’s tower will remain, marking the landscape with color, light, and duration.

the work draws from the methodology of Gerhard Richter’s Strip Paintings

elevation 1049 and the alpine landscape as a thinking field

Since its inception in 2014, Elevation 1049 has approached the Alps as an intellectual and ecological field. Through site-responsive commissions, the initiative has explored the relationship between contemporary art and geography, climate, history, and local communities beyond institutional settings. The installation of STRIP TOWER (962) in the Engadin demonstrates how long-term artworks can foster sustained public engagement.

Maja Hoffmann, Founder and President of the Luma Foundation, frames the project as part of a broader commitment to situating significant artistic voices in contexts that demand attentiveness and responsibility. She describes the work as ‘a rare synthesis of conceptual rigor, formal clarity, and material precision,’ noting how its presence affirms the Alps as a site of serious cultural production rather than passive scenery.

Installed for an initial period of three years, STRIP TOWER (962) emphasizes art as a shared public experience unfolding gradually and in dialogue with place. Visitors can walk through the sculpture, pause within its interior, and return under different conditions, encountering a work that is both monumental and quietly responsive. Its scale does not overwhelm the landscape but frames it, inviting reflection on how perception itself is shaped by environment.

the sculpture consists of eight perpendicular panels clad in glazed ceramic tiles

light reflects off the glossy surfaces

sharpening attention to color, light, and movement | image courtesy of Elevation 1049

image by Victor & Simon / Joana Luz, courtesy of Gerhard Richter Kunststiftung and Luma Foundation

the intersecting panels allow people to walk between the surfaces | image by Victor & Simon / Joana Luz, courtesy of Gerhard Richter Kunststiftung and Luma Foundation

shifting the encounter from distant viewing to bodily experience | image by Victor & Simon / Joana Luz, courtesy of Gerhard Richter Kunststiftung and Luma Foundation

seasonal shifts continuously recompose the work | image by Victor & Simon / Joana Luz, courtesy of Gerhard Richter Kunststiftung and Luma Foundation

colors shift under changing skies | image by Schaub Stierli, courtesy of Gerhard Richter Kunststiftung and Luma Foundation Fotografie

proposing the Alps as a landscape where artistic experimentation unfolds over time | image by Schaub Stierli, courtesy of Gerhard Richter Kunststiftung and Luma Foundation Fotografie

the site offers a fitting context for a work that resists instant legibility

the placement of the sculpture near Lake Silvaplana embeds it directly within the Alpine ecosystem

project info:

name: STRIP TOWER (962)

artist: Gerhard Richter

location: Via d’Lej, 7514 Sils Maria, Engadin, Switzerland

dates: January 27th, 2026 – Spring 2029

presented by: Luma Foundation | @luma_arles as part of Elevation 1049 | @elevation1049

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Nicole Cherubini presents Hotel Roma at Friedman Benda‘s New York gallery, an exhibition of ceramic works that emphasize motifs of collage. Installed across the gallery, the sculptures move between monumentality and intimacy with their large-scale presence and dense symbolic detailing.

Cherubini is recognized for building by hand in clay, and that commitment to direct contact remains central here. Terracotta and white earthenware carry layered glazes in turquoise, amber, emerald, and metallic luster, applied with an eye toward weight and tempo. The surfaces feel worked over time, and show evidence of the artist’s hand that stays visible even at a distance.

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

Nicole Cherubini draws from Surrealist themes

The exhibition at Friedman Benda draws themes from Leonora Carrington’s Down Below, a text that has long shaped Nicole Cherubini’s thinking. ‘Carrington vividly writes about her harrowing experiences during World War II,’ the artist tells designboom. ‘For me, her story offered an investigation, of sorts, into ideas of creativity, reality, disbelief and humanity, and its perception through a feminist lens. It feels like a bit of a mirror to our contemporary society, reflecting much that is going on with our current rights and freedoms.’

That perspective brings historical figures into conversation with current conditions. Carrington’s experience during World War II, including her stay at Madrid’s Hotel Roma, becomes a lens for examining how creativity functioned as endurance and resistance. ‘I looked back at the women working during this time period — who are all just incredible — and really explored how their use of creativity and agency forged an energy that made change through resistance and radicalism.’ she explains.

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

the collage as a feminist aesthetic

Several sculptures in Hotel Roma revolve around the Three Graces, a classical typology Cherubini approaches through ancient philosophical texts that describe generosity as a cycle of giving and return. Each work asserts a distinct physical character, including a sculpture conjoined to a ceramic bench that stretches more than ten feet across the gallery floor.

The forms combine swelling volumes with embedded figurative details, giving the sense of bodies assembling themselves in stages. Cherubini connects this method to ideas of collage and reconstruction. ‘Frankenstein, to me, is about collage. It is a taking of disparate parts to create a new whole, to form new possibilities and understanding of structure,’ she notes. The reference aligns with her broader interest in hybrid form, where fragments accumulate through labor and choice. The sculptures draw energy from baroque abundance and surrealist excess, yet remain grounded in the logic of their materials.

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

a handcrafted process

The making of the ceramic works results from both collective effort and solitary focus. ‘The creation of these pieces involve two major processes,‘ Cherubini continues. Large molds require sustained physical work by a team she has collaborated with for years, followed by a hand-building phase carried out entirely by the artist. ‘That’s where you can see all the hand marks. It’s almost performative, like a recording of time.’

Up close, this intimacy is rendered texturally. Impressions from rings and bandages remain embedded in the clay, turning the sculpture into a record of the artist’s own unique movements. Meanwhile, in works such as Butterfly, inspired by a lyric from American songwriter Erykah Badu, doubled forms suggest motion through their massing. Across Hotel Roma, Cherubini’s sculptural pieces sustain attention through this tension between scale and detail, along with contemporary design and historical reference.

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

Hotel Roma, Nicole Cherubini, Friedman Benda | image © Pierre Le Hors

project info:

name: Hotel Roma

artist: Nicole Cherubini | @nicolecherubinistudio

gallery: Friedman Benda | @friedman_benda

location: 515 W 26th Street, New York, NY

dates: January 16th — February 21st, 2026

photography: © Pierre Le Hors

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Drywall Collection is a design series that reconsiders a conventional construction system through a set of architectural objects. The collection comprises seating, lighting, and sculptural elements developed through repetition, modularity, and material consistency. By working with standardized components, the project examines how structural logic can inform form, allowing typically concealed systems to become spatial and perceptible.

Designed by Claudio Larcher and Sofia D’Andrea, the collection is based on metal drywall guides, technical profiles usually embedded within partition walls and left unseen. These industrial elements are extracted from their conventional context and reconfigured into objects with a linear and uniform architectural language. The project positions these components not as secondary infrastructure, but as primary design material, foregrounding their formal and structural qualities.

all images courtesy of Claudio Larcher and Sofia D’Andrea

creative reuse and reinterpretation of industrial materials

Through modular composition and precise alterations to the studs’ cross-sections, achieved via bending and cutting techniques, the standard drywall profile is transformed into elements capable of generating volume, surface articulation, and three-dimensional form. Reflective properties and spatial depth emerge from these controlled modifications, extending the functional logic of the material into a design-driven application.

Designers Claudio Larcher and Sofia D’Andrea’s Drywall Collection also addresses the reuse and reinterpretation of industrial materials, highlighting the latent aesthetic potential of components commonly associated with construction waste or hidden assembly. By maintaining the material’s original identity while altering its spatial role, the project proposes an alternative approach to material value, one grounded in process, repetition, and architectural clarity.

Drywall Collection reinterprets standard construction systems as architectural objects

tDrywall Collection reinterprets standard construction systems as architectural objects

standardized drywall components form the basis of the collection

technical profiles become visible and spatially expressive elements

metal drywall guides are removed from their usual hidden context

the objects adopt a linear and uniform architectural language

industrial components are treated as primary design material

cross-sections are altered through controlled bending and cutting

modified profiles generate volume and three-dimensional form

reflective qualities enhance depth and spatial perception

project info:

name: Drywall Collection
designer: Claudio Larcher | @claudiolarcher_design, Sofia D’Andrea | @sofi.ddi

designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.

edited by: christina vergopoulou | designboom

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Tara Donovan presents Stratagems at the Transamerica Pyramid Center, installing a group of vertically oriented sculptures made entirely from thousands of recycled CDs. On view until July 31st, 2026 and organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco (ICA SF), the exhibition is installed within the transparent Annex space. Stratagems enters into a deliberate exchange with the building itself, echoing the skyscraper’s verticality and reflective skin, while their recycled material introduces a counterpoint to the monumentality of the building. ‘My most recent sculpture series titled Stratagems are deeply connected to skyscraper architecture, both in their immediate verticality and their surface appearance.’ the artist shares. ‘When ICA SF invited me to be part of their evolution across the city, I could not imagine a more perfect site to bring these works than the soaring Transamerica Pyramid Center. I am always fixated on the ways that sculptures transform space and experience, and in this context, an intention of these sculptures to engage the understanding of urban architecture can be fully realized.’

all images courtesy of ICA SF, unless stated otherwise

obsolete CDs become building blocks for sculptural systems

Donovan’s practice is grounded in a sustained investigation of accumulation and transformation. For more than two decades, she has worked with ordinary, mass-produced materials, plastic cups, rubber bands, paper plates, tape, and straws, subjecting them to repetition until their individual identities dissolve into larger systems. Earlier works, including Transplanted, Nebulous, and Haze, transformed industrial materials into environments that evoked fog, geological formations, or organic growth. Other projects gestured toward urban expansion and the Anthropocene. Stratagems continues this trajectory, shifting scale and focus toward the city itself, extending her logic toward architecture. The CD, an object associated with late twentieth-century technology and now largely obsolete, becomes a reflective unit that responds to its environment.

Constructed as dense, vertical surfaces, the sculptures register subtle changes in daylight and weather. Reflections shift as clouds pass, as the sun moves across the sky, and as viewers change position within the gallery. Rather than presenting a stable form, the works continually reconfigure themselves visually, producing an experience that unfolds over time and ties perception to movement.

The exhibition reflects ICA San Francisco’s nomadic approach, which situates contemporary art within the city. At the Transamerica Pyramid Center, the site becomes a critical partner in the presentation of the work, expanding how sculpture can engage with an urban context. 

vertically oriented sculptures composed of thousands of recycled CDs | Installation View: Tara Donovan, Stratagems, 2025, January 17–July 31, 2026, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco © Tara Donovan, image by Nicholas Lea Bruno via @pacegallery

the reflective surfaces shift in color and intensity as daylight moves across the space | Installation View: Tara Donovan, Stratagems, 2025, January 17–July 31, 2026, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco © Tara Donovan, image by Nicholas Lea Bruno via @pacegallery

the exhibition situates sculpture, architecture, and city within a shared visual field

spacing allows visitors to experience shifting perspectives

perception shifts as viewers circulate around the works | Installation View: Tara Donovan, Stratagems, 2025, January 17–July 31, 2026, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco © Tara Donovan, image by Nicholas Lea Bruno via @pacegallery

Tara Donovan’s sculptures function as responsive surfaces | Installation View: Tara Donovan, Stratagems, 2025, January 17–July 31, 2026, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco © Tara Donovan, image by Nicholas Lea Bruno via @pacegallery

the installation enters into dialogue with the architecture of the Transamerica Pyramid Center | Installation View: Tara Donovan, Stratagems, 2025, January 17–July 31, 2026, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco © Tara Donovan, image by Nicholas Lea Bruno via @pacegallery

the sculptures echo the building’s verticality while remaining materially distinct | Installation View: Tara Donovan, Stratagems, 2025, January 17–July 31, 2026, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco © Tara Donovan, image by Nicholas Lea Bruno via @pacegallery

responding to changing illumination within the gallery

reflective surfaces that fracture light into shifting bands of color | Installation View: Tara Donovan, Stratagems, 2025, January 17–July 31, 2026, Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco © Tara Donovan, image by Nicholas Lea Bruno via @pacegallery

aggregated into tightly packed, shimmering surfaces

project info:

name: Stratagems

artist: Tara Donovan

location: Transamerica Pyramid Center, Annex Gallery

dates: January 17th – July 31st, 2026

organized by: Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco | @icasanfrancisco 

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Mona Hatoum brings a constellation of hand-blown glass spheres and a motorized metal tower sculpture to her exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Milan. Named ‘Over, under, and in between,’ the site-specific project is on view from January 29th to November 9th, 2026, divided into three parts comprising a web, a map, and a grid. These installations find a temporary home in the reactivated Cisterna building, once located on Fondazione Prada’s compound and which housed the silos and tanks of a former alcohol distillery. The space accommodates the height, volume, and shape of the three large-scale installations, enveloping the viewers in a physical spatial experience.

When visitors enter the Cisterna building at Fondazione Prada, they find delicate, transparent, hand-blown glass spheres suspended above their heads. They form the shape of a spider’s web, a recurring theme in Mona Hatoum’s repertoire, as a means for her to delve into the topics of familiar ties and connectedness as well as entrapment, idleness, and neglect. For the artist, a web can provide a home or a safe place, but it can also suggest entrapment. ‘To me, the large web overhead also has poetic, even cosmic significance. The beautiful, delicate glass spheres are an apt reference to dew drops, evoking their fragility and sparkling quality. They also resemble a celestial constellation. I personally like to see it as an allusion to the interconnectedness of all things,’ says Mona Hatoum.

all images courtesy of Fondazione Prada | photos by Roberto Marossi, unless stated otherwise

Glass and metal installations in ‘Over, under, and in between’ 

In the central room of the exhibition space, Mona Hatoum covers the concrete floor with translucent red glass balls arranged in the shape of a world map. These spheres are carefully arranged but without borders, the artist hinting at the absence of any political and geographical barriers aside from underlining the continents. More than 30,000 spheres may roll around, as they’re not fixed in place. It’s their identity of being a loose and undefined territory, one that Mona Hatoum desires to highlight in her Fondazione Prada exhibition in Milan. She also makes a subtle reference to the Gall-Peters projection map, which renders Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia disproportionately smaller than their actual size, alluding to the political power and its dynamics across the world.

The last installation, a kinetic metal structure, ends the exhibition of Mona Hatoum at Fondazione Prada in Milan. Nine levels of open, stacked cubes form the gridded metallic structure, which mimics scaffolding or the skeleton of a building. At first, it rests on the floor, feigning immobility. Soon, viewers see it dance, oscillating between downward collapse and re-erection using installed motors. The sounds of creaking and clanking accompany the sways and zigzags of the structure as it moves like a human body, bending and rotating. Once it reaches a certain level, it returns to its original 8.6-meter-tall height, ending its performance. For the artist, the open cubes gesture to unease, claustrophobia, and a sense of no escape. The installation embraces an endless sensation of opposing human conditions, standing tall first before it slowly collapses then reforms back. Mona Hatoum’s Over, under, and in between exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Milan remains on-site until November 9th, 2026.

the kinetic metal structure ends the exhibition

Mona Hatoum, all of a quiver, 2022

the structure uses aluminum square tubes, steel hinges, electric motor, and cable

Mona Hatoum, Web, 2026

the installation comprises a series of hand-blown glass spheres

the round glass hangs above the visitors’ heads as they explore

Mona Hatoum, Map (red), 2026

Mona Hatoum covers the concrete floor with translucent red glass balls arranged in the shape of a world map

these spheres are carefully arranged but without borders

portrait of Mona Hatoum | photo by Marta Marinotti

project info:

name: Over, under, and in between

artist: Mona Hatoum 

institution: Fondazione Prada, Milan | @fondazioneprada

location: Largo Isarco, 2, 20139 Milan, Italy

photography: Roberto Marossi, Marta Marinotti | @robertomarossi, @marta.marinotti

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