What’s Happening: For one night this weekend, dancers and DJs sought to recreate the energy of the erstwhile New York queer club in an unexpected place: Lincoln Center. Our contributor Jesse Dorris scoped out the scene.

The Download: In 1977, Michael Brody opened a thumping queer club in a Lower Manhattan parking garage. The following year, after installing a sprung dance floor and a peerless Richard Long sound system, it became Paradise Garage. When it closed a decade later, it had changed the world.

With resident DJ Larry Levan and a vibrant crowd of mostly Black and brown queer revelers, the club created an unparalleled and welcoming vibe, while cementing ideas around the music selector as music creator and the sound system as space makers. As a hub of organizing—it was among the very first fundraisers for Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the AIDS advocacy organization that now owns the club’s trademark—the club proved nightlife can be a political force. Its legacy lives on every time a dancer hits the floor and finds their people, lost in music, in that bliss of being in and out of their bodies at the same time.

Lincoln Center isn’t the first place one might think of when contemplating the queer Black bliss the Paradise Garage made a home for and out of. The complex of High Modernist buildings housing temples to High Culture is far from the Paradise Garage’s after-dark sweat-fests, and even further from the club’s progeny out in Bushwick and beyond. “Architecture can be welcoming or forbidding,” says Jon Nakagawa, Lincoln Center’s senior director of contemporary programs. “Architecture may be a barrier to people coming, so we’re trying to gradually create safe spaces,” he says, in which “people feel like they belong.”

To that end, for this year’s American Songbook series, Lincoln Center invited George C. Wolff to remember, or perhaps resurrect, spaces that embodied that belonging. On April 14, Lincoln Center turned over its David Rubenstein Atrium, a slightly awkward wedge designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects just off the main plaza, to Eric Sosa and Michael Zuco, the team behind C’mon Everybody and Good Judy, two of Brooklyn’s crucial queer nightlife spaces. Pushing the atrium’s surprisingly good sound system, its small capacity, and its strict 10 PM curfew to their limits, “A Tribute to Paradise Garage” nimbly sidestepped nostalgia, gathering a packed house of partygoers for a trio of performances that paid tribute to Levan and his world without paying fealty to it.

Opening DJ Samuella joyfully invoked the spirit, connecting the dots between, for example, Patrice Rushen and Beyoncé. Drag hip-hop deities The Dragon Sisters followed, with their full band and a full stack of tracks shouting out sex workers and altered states of consciousness as survival strategies. Sosa said they selected disco dolls The Illustrious Blacks to close because they fully embody the Paradise Garage promise, in which expert DJing is just as vital as flamboyant dancing: both have the ability to make a space your own.

Crowds lined up in hope of making it into the atrium, and when capacity denied them, they pushed their faces against the big windows and danced on the sidewalk. Inside, revelers danced to an updated American Songbook, one that includes Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Is It All Over My Face” by Loose Joints. Paradise Garage turned these songs into building blocks, city blocks, cemetery blocks, and the Illustrious Blacks asked the crowd to play with them again and build someplace new.

In Their Own Words: “We didn’t want to replicate the Paradise Garage,” Sosa says. “We wanted to imagine what it would be like today.”

Surface Says: As Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” lifted us all, I shook my ass and laughed with a Garage old-timer, our bodies building something between us. “Girl,” she said, “you belong on the dancefloor.” For a moment, we all did.

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Valentina Ciuffi and Joseph Grima founded Alcova five years ago to champion emerging designers who don’t quite fit the mold of Salone del Mobile or the innumerable satellite exhibitions that pop up during Fuorisalone. The duo’s mission became more urgent when the Ventura Lambrate design district, long a stronghold for up-and-comers, shut down due to the area’s rising rents. What was missing during Milan Design Week, they realized, was a platform for rising talents who wielded an experimental edge in an often slow-moving profession—designers bullish on breaking barriers and bucking conventions.

Alcova’s inaugural edition united 26 designers in a disused panettone factory—a roofless, ramshackle building overrun with plants. Since then, the itinerant show has gravitated toward unexpected settings off the beaten path. Previous outings took over a cashmere mill and an ex-military hospital complex. That strategy, they say, is meant to keep things exciting. “When you become stationary, you get all sorts of weird hangers-on accumulating around you,” Grima told Dezeen. “We don’t want to have an adverse impact on a neighborhood by allowing speculative other projects to capitalize on the presence of this cool, energetic, young design platform and distort the market base.”

This year, the show lands at the dilapidated former Porta Vittoria abattoir on Via Molise. The ideas on offer are no less groundbreaking. One major headliner is Lindsey Adelman, design’s reigning queen of sculptural lighting, who debuts LaLAB for experimental, not-to-market concepts. The innovators behind PROWL Studio are unveiling the hemp-based Peel Chair, the first injection-molded chair that can be composted. Art + Loom’s founder Samantha Gallacher teamed up with Miami interior designer Bea Pernia to plumb the depths of geological formations. The handmade rugs and one-of-a-kind furniture speak to nature’s untouched beauty—not unlike Alcova’s jaunts to unexpected venues in Milan.

The pink diamond, with its characteristic cherry-blossom hue, is among the world’s most precious gems. (This past October, a rare 6.11-carat beauty sold in Japan for 530 million yen, or about $3.36 million, reportedly making it the most expensive gem ever sold in the country.) Its clarity and rarity makes it the perfect touchstone for the new Bulgari Hotel Tokyo, which opened April 4. Tucked into floors 40 through 45 of the Tokyo Midtown Yaesu skyscraper in the Yaesu 2-Chome North District, the hotel offers 98 rooms and suites, including an over-the-top 4,300-square-foot Bulgari Suite with some of the city’s best views.

Coming back down to earth, Sushi Hōseki offers eight seats overlooking a private Japanese rock garden and cuisine by triple Michelin Star chef Kenji Gyoten. Larger parties can celebrate at the Wedding Salon or a pair of ballrooms, or take in the air via the Bulgari Bar and Terrace Gardens, Il Ristorante-Niko Romito (who also earned three Michelin stars for his Abruzzo restaurant Reale), and the Fireplace Lounge. The famed Bulgari Spa, meanwhile, includes an 82-foot indoor pool of Venetian glass and mosaic, with hand-painted gold ceilings along with full ranges of treatments and therapies to balance the decadent dining.

It wouldn’t be Bulgari without the Italian touch, of course: interiors are by ACPV Architects Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel. And while guests might not find pink diamonds set into the furniture, they will find Japanese black granite bathtubs, Hosoo gold bedspreads, and room ceilings hand-painted with layers of gold.

The intensity of Milan Design Week’s bustling crowds and showy spectacle can be disorienting, fatiguing, and maybe even a little detaching, even for seasoned veterans. This year, curator Federica Sala has brought together six Italian architecture studios to build Campo Base, a group of interventions conceived to foster intimacy and calm.

A “fabric placenta” made in collaboration with French wall coverings mainstay Élitis offers access to a labyrinth defined by an ASMR acoustic installation by artist Norma Jeane. Rooms open up: in one, Massimo Adario offers a portrait of a collector through the objects they might assemble; others, including those by Marcante-Testa and Giuliano Andrea dell’Uva, explore the contours and possibilities of emptiness itself.

Some participants use the opportunity to reference fine art, like Hannes Peer’s invocation of artist ateliers as domestic spheres, or center artwork in their installation, as Eligostudio has in its using work by Lorenzo Vitturi in a tribute to the legendary Italian architect Renzo Mongiardino. Studiopepe, finally, embraces entrants to its space in a project called Omphalos, the Greek word for navel—and, indeed, a little navel-gazing might be the perfect opportunity for self-care during the furor of Fuorisalone.

The maximalist homewares dreamed up by Kiki Goti reflect both her formal training in architecture and her knack for experimentation—vivid colors, striking patterns, and unexpected materials all combine to form unapologetically bold pieces that command attention no matter the setting. At this year’s Milan Design Week, the Greek-American talent delves into how dressing room vanities have endured as emblems of the human condition through an exuberant Alcova showing of Balkan-inspired pieces whose textures are so radiant they could take on a life of their own.

When: April 18

Where: San Vittore e 40 Martiri, Milan

What: More than 20 talents on the collectible design gallery’s roster explore the concept of desacralization in an apt setting: a deconsecrated 11th-century Milanese church that closed for worship 200 years ago. Among the highlights: Studiopepe’s octagonal marble side table inspired by Italian baptistery, Kar Studio’s chair inspired by China’s oldest Shang Dynasty script, and Elsa Foulon’s abstract light sculptures that wield seashells, a motif omnipresent in Christian iconography. But the centerpiece is a monumental chandelier by Morghen Studio that offers a truly transformative experience with light.

Situated at the heart of the bustling Bandra Kurla Complex, the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) is on a fast track to becoming one of Mumbai’s most spectacular cultural hubs—largely thanks to the ambitious fashion, design, and art programming slated for the lavish building’s state-of-the-art theaters and galleries. It starts on the outside: Three giant golden leaves grace the exterior, nodding to the holy trinity of Hindu Gods. The interior, meanwhile, plays host to public artwork like Yayoi Kusama’s Clouds, a 90-piece stainless steel structure that mirrors the sky.

Inaugural programming forecasts a bright future. Taking over the Richard Gluckman–designed Art House is an exhibition by Jeffrey Deitch and Indian poet Ranjit Hoskote that highlights connections between homegrown artists and international names. It’s also hosting a landmark show about Indian fashion’s influence on global style coinciding with curator Hamish Bowles’ newly published Rizzoli tome about the same topic. Perhaps the building’s crown jewel is the Grand Theatre, centered on a chandelier emblazoned with Swarovski crystals.

The Malin offers spaces that inspire members to work beautifully—in workspaces surrounded by thoughtful design, not distraction. The Malin provides the services, amenities, and perks that its members need to make working a pleasure.

Surface Says: Co-founders Ciaran McGuigan and Charlie Robinson both envisioned a stylish co-working space that checks all the boxes for an ideal post-pandemic return to the office. With its central locations, thoughtfully delineated zones for different types of work, and a design that’s both comfortable and inviting, the Malin is set to deliver on all fronts.

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