The exhibition brings together historic and contemporary voices whose practices are united by their pursuit of form as thought. The precision of Nendo’s Scatter Shelf (2011), Serge Mouille’s Large Lamp with Six Rotating Arms (1963), and David Adjaye’s Yaawa T1 Table (2020) speaks to an architectural clarity where structure becomes poetry. In contrast, Wendell Castle’s Double Trouble Settee (2014), Nacho Carbonell’s Big Round Chandelier (2021), and Shaha Raphael’s Articulation01 Desk (2025) celebrate intuition and material experimentation — the trace of the artist’s hand.
Historic works by Charlotte Perriand & Jean Prouvé, Pierre Jeanneret, and Zanine Caldas anchor the exhibition within a lineage of functional modernism, while contemporary creators such as Ingrid Donat, DRIFT, Vincenzo De Cotiis, and Maarten Baas expand that legacy through surface, light, and emotion. Together they articulate a continuum of making — where craftsmanship is not an end in itself, but a form of thinking made visible.
Radical Making features new works by Italian artist Giacomo Ravagli. In tribute to the complex workings of gravity, each piece responds the forces of vertical pressure, balance and collapse. Light functions as a material, activating the viewer’s observation of the object. Ravagli sees the artworks as inert yet luminous: they do not breath, grow or feel, but light creates space for experiencing them, illuminating perception and creating emotion.
These new works reflect the relationships between form, material, proportion and composition, with the tension between metal and mica exposing how precision and randomness, or permanence and impermanence, come together. Conveying ideas of process and negotiation, these artworks provoke questions of what holds and what shifts, of what is designed and what simply becomes. They stand as physical remnants of the almost violent act of creation – as objects that seek autonomy in space.
Each artwork in Radical Making can be read as both an object and a sentence in an ongoing conversation about design as thought: an exchange across decades, materials, and minds. From molten bronze to volcanic stone, from dandelion seed to carved marble, the exhibition traces how ideas evolve into tangible form.
