What’s Happening: At this past week’s Salone del Mobile, the Pritzker Prize–winning architect walked a rapt crowd through four decades of his own accomplishments—and challenged the industry to do better.

The Download: Like every design fair, the point of Milan’s Salone del Mobile is to encourage consumption. Better consumption, of course: definitely with better aesthetics, perhaps with better ethics, but unquestioned in its necessity. This year’s fair, which ran April 18–23, floated the word revolution—or, as its president Maria Porro demurred during the press breakfast, evolution—and made vows to lessen the environmental damages of events of its size.

But perhaps its boldest move was curator Annalisa Rosso’s decision to give Shigeru Ban the microphone for an hour’s talk in which the 2014 Pritzker Prize winner walked a rapt crowd through almost 40 years of work, cracking pointed jokes about his industry and talking trash about companies he felt aren’t living up to their obligations.

He began at his own beginning, designing a 1984 exhibition of Alvar Aalto’s furniture and glass works at the Museum of Modern Art. “Nobody was talking about the environment yet,” he said. “Nobody talked about ecology or sustainability.” He had no real budget for the show, but he had an abundance of waste paper left over from sketching, which he transformed into the recycled paper tubes that became his signature and launched a series of architectural and environmental innovations.

While those tubes made for sturdy, provocative residences worldwide, he kicked off the fad for shipping containers as building materials in 2005. His artful Nomadic Museums in New York, Santa Monica, and Tokyo stacked containers in checkerboard patterns, sometimes with membrane roofs to enclose outdoor spaces without the need for further walls. “I chose the shipping container not because shipping containers can travel,” he says, “but because they’re an international standard, so you can find the same container anywhere.” The museums could be built by renting containers in their host city, then returning them—no shipping necessary.

Ban built stylish abodes and boutiques over the years, but his work for communities in crisis injected urgency into his innovations. He went “without appointment” to UN camps in Rwanda after the country’s civil war, where refugees were given plastic sheeting to hang between branches of trees they had to cut themselves; the deforestation was becoming another emergency. “International groups started providing them with aluminum pipes,” he says, “but it’s a very expensive material and the refugees sold them for money and cut the trees again.” He also worked with Vitra to make a prototype house out of paper tubes, built in 1999.

Ban regaled the Salone crowd with dozens of stories of companies sending crates of beer he transformed into paper house foundations (sadly, he noted, without the beer), and executives disappointed that the giraffes he drew on renderings to give a sense of scale weren’t actually present in the finished project. He recommended architects and designers bypass governmental and NGO bureaucracy and listen directly to the needs of people on the ground.

And he called out his own. “I started working in disaster areas because I was disappointed in my own profession as architects, because mainly we’re working for privileged people who have money and power,” he says. “I hope to use my knowledge and experiences not only for privilege, but for the general public. I recognize that an earthquake never kills people, but the collapse of buildings kills people. That’s our responsibility as architects. When cities are rebuilt after disasters, you’re going to get all the new projects architects are looking for. I shouldn’t say that,” he laughed. But he did, and hopefully Salone was listening.

In Their Own Words: “I have many good clients, and I try to charge as much as possible to use this money for the disaster work,” Ban says. “It’s really helpful to work for a good client, then.”

Surface Says: If Salone isn’t quite ready for revolution, then Ban offers proof that redistribution also works.

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This year during NYCxDesign, Surface is partnering with furniture designer Kouros Maghsoudi to host a one-night showcase and blowout cocktail party. Interested in learning more about partnership opportunities and event integrations as we shake up design week and celebrate New York’s unrivaled creative spirit? Let’s chat.

A fair distance from the hubbub of Salone and Fuorisalone but steps from La Scala and Piazza Duomo, the grand 1798 Teatro Filodrammatici di Milano became home to the latest Prada Frames multidisciplinary symposium during Milan Design Week. This spring’s theme, curated by Formafantasma, was Materials in Flux, a fitting topic for a building that has morphed over the centuries, including the addition of an Art Nouveau facade and, in the 1960s, a buzzy interior redesign by architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni utilizing his ‘40s-era furniture and lighting for Azucena.

For Prada Frames (April 17–19) rotating groups of speakers took the stage to elaborate and complicate Tim Ingold’s research into phenomenological anthropology. Monday saw Hans Ulrich Obrist, academic and filmmaker Elizabeth Povinelli, and others exploring the social underpinnings of waste management. On Wednesday, materials scientist Veena Sahajwalla explored how we categorize what’s “unwanted” while architect Mark Wigley unpacked the local politics of electronic waste.

But the most provocative panels were on Tuesday. After an exploration of design and ecosystems by Paola Antonelli, the architect and engineer Lydia Kallipoliti gave a fascinating lecture on what she called the power of shit. “In many ways, shit forces us to look at questions of ecology viscerally, via the raw ecologies of our bodies and the understanding that recycling is not just a statistical problem that we can relate to the management of urban resources, but also a basic bodily reality that affects the water we drink and the air we breathe,” she says.

One example is the vast quantities of waste, human and otherwise, shipped from New York City to majority Black communities in Alabama, which connects the reality of shit to the reality of environmental racism. “Integrating the body’s dirty physiology, or what I call the dirty footprint in the ecology of habitation,” she says, “can potentially reveal alternative scenarios for handling waste as a resource in the future of urban environments.” Shit happens, in other words; it’s one of the few constants of life. We might as well make the most of it.

Accompanying a show at Dubai’s 1x1 Gallery is a triptych of portal-like canvases the Brazilian painter decided on a whim to perch in the desert. Thanks to a special enamel treatment, their tones harmonize with their surroundings and shift gradually as light conditions change.

Here, we ask an artist to frame the essential details behind one of their latest works.

Bio: Theo Pinto, 33, Brooklyn.

Title of work: Skyscapes Mirage (2023).

Where to see it: 1×1 Gallery, Dubai, until May 15.

Three words to describe this work: Be here now.

What was on your mind at the time: A week before the opening, I had a vision of unveiling the paintings in the Dubai desert. The idea was to create an installation that captures the essence of my paintings while juxtaposing nature and art. It was a surreal experience to be there, a week later, feeling the desert sand on my feet and the warmth of the sun on my paintings.

Milan Design Week had its fill of nonsense this year, but the city’s architecture and design firm Dimore celebrated its 20th anniversary with a pair of blockbuster exhibitions. While “Silence” installed a kind of visual biography of the firm in its new Dimorecentrale location, “No Sense” took over a historic Via Solferino apartment and filled its six rooms with discombobulating combinations of work by young living artists and masterpieces courtesy of Galleria Massimo Minini.

The apartment’s fireplace room was particularly successful: within its dark, mirrored walls, Dimore juxtaposed a storage unit by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, a bookcase by Afra and Tobia Scarpa for B&B Italia, and vb.v 006, an early work made by Vanessa Beecroft, who began blurring the lines between female bodies and furniture while studying nearby at Brera.

Elsewhere, arrangements went slightly apocalyptic, with an alcove defined by a panoply of various chandeliers, chattering brightly; and another violet room boasted the studio’s own limited-edition sideboard and chairs by Gio Ponti among others, along with the slightly disembodied facial sculptures of Armando Andrade Tudela. The installations might not follow traditional design sense, but they illuminate Dimorestudio’s sensibility loud and clear.

On the first episode of “The Exhibit,” the MTV reality competition show set adjacent to the art world, lead judge Melissa Chiu boasts about the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the DC institution she directs and which will host the titular prize. “Some people think of us as the wild child of the Smithsonian,” she says. Then smirks. “A bit wild.” But whatever wildness it might have didn’t make it onto the canvas of “The Exhibit,” in which seven artists compete by making zeitgeisty work for a chance to win $100,000, exhibit at the Hirshhorn, and earn the title of “the next great artist.”

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