FROM 16.4.2026
The geographies of Vico Magistretti return to the spotlight. 
Following the conference Vico Magistretti. Between Milan and the world and the exhibition Il Magistretti inglese, attention now turns to a more distant destination: Japan. 
This time there is also a travelling companion: ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne.

Vico Magistretti and Japan brings together encounters, collaborations, journeys and projects:: from the Cerruti 1881 shops in Tokyo (1974) and Osaka (1986), to the houses in Tokyo (1984–86) and Aburatsubo (1987–91) for the Tanimoto family, and products designed for Japanese companies.
Above all, it is a story of formal and conceptual correspondences between the work of the Milanese architect and designer and Japanese aesthetics: over twenty projects are revisited through three aesthetic concepts from Japanese culture – wa, harmonious beauty and balance; iro, the sense of colour; and iki, the elegance of restraint – that resonate in Magistretti’s work: simplicity of forms, the use of natural materials, a design approach that intertwines craftsmanship, aesthetics and everyday life into a coherent and measured whole; and the ability to combine grace and spontaneity.

The exhibition features — in miniature, given the studio museum’s characteristically small spaces — all the main furniture typologies that Magistretti designed over the course of his career: chairs, sofas, tables, bookcases, wardrobes, lamps, beds and even ceramics. Alongside these are architectural and interior design projects, both realised and unbuilt, accompanied and reinterpreted through drawings specially produced for the exhibition by the Brussels-based studio Dogma.