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GUBI’s presentation at Bagni Misteriosi for Milan Design Week. (Courtesy GUBI)
GUBI’s presentation at Bagni Misteriosi for Milan Design Week. (Courtesy GUBI)

Everywhere I went during this year’s Milan Design Week, there seemed to be a palpable feeling that the Salone del Mobile design and furniture fair, now in its 61st year, is sputtering, or, at the very least, puttering. While it unquestionably remains the world’s most important annual design event, it was evident that the winds are increasingly blowing toward the Fuori Salone, or “Outside Salone,” presentations and events around the city—particularly the buzzy independent design fair Alcova, which this year took place at a former slaughterhouse, and spaces in and around the city’s Brera neighborhood, long a Milan Design Week stronghold. Going forward, I expect more design brands, eschewing the notion of a “booth” and pursuing more experiential (and, let’s hope, more sustainable) approaches to presenting their wares, to take over atypical environments such as the Bagni Misteriosi, a pool from the 1930s where the Danish design brand GUBI presented its latest collections this year, or the Bonacossa Tennis Club, where the Milan-based designer Cristina Celestino created a pop-up restaurant with the food collective We Are Ona. Many architects, designers, and journalists I spoke with skipped the Rho fairgrounds altogether this year, preferring to stick to the city’s happenings. They, too, noted the fair’s growing sense of irrelevance, if in hushed tones.

Salone is quite literally losing ground: The 2023 edition of the fair was streamlined to be on one level instead of two at the 42-acre fairgrounds, a move that was promoted for sustainability reasons, but that also obviously stemmed from practical business matters. This year, there were 1,962 exhibitors, down from 2,418 in 2019. And though the fair was back to its regular April dates—following Covid closures that led to a mini edition in September 2021 and a decidedly slimmed-down iteration last June—the event was no return to business as usual. For many brands participating, there was a clear desire to return to a pre-Covid sense of “normal,” but across the five hours I walked the fairgrounds last week, it was evident that, emerging out of the pandemic, Salone, as with the world around it, has changed forever. Long beheld as the tentpole of Milan Design Week, Salone is still an impressive behemoth, with more than 300,000 attendees this year, but it no longer has the magnetic pull it once did.

Aside from a handful of standout booths—especially Knoll and Flos—there wasn’t much at Salone that surprised me or stopped me in my tracks. So many of the new designs presented there seemed derivative and staid, or even, in some cases, rushed. Given the timeframe between last June’s edition to this April’s, this wasn’t necessarily surprising. And while the fair did have some degree of curation, including an exhibition by the Swiss-French architectural photographer Hélène Binet and its Salone Satellite presentation of work by designers 35 and under, now in its 35th year and still overseen by the peerless Marva Griffin, it was largely lacking in terms of cultural depth.

I think now is a good time to question the need for an annual fair. While Salone is a vital industry organ and a key economic driver for the city of Milan, why does it need to take place every year? Why must brands build booths again and again, only to tear them down after a week, and too often fail to reuse, recycle, or upcycle their materials? Why not turn Salone into an every-other-year occasion, biennial-style, and tighten its curation and focus—make it an experience? Does simply producing more stuff actually equal more sales growth? I’m not convinced. As a (or even the) centerpiece of the industry, Salone has the power to shift global design conversations, highlight best practices, and even redefine the meaning and purpose of a fair. “Fewer, better things” should be its mantra. Practicing true sustainability would be to produce less, and without a reliance on virgin materials. The fair should be considering this as part of its business model and ethos.

In the manifesto for “Take It or Leave It,” the exhibition and lottery The Slowdown organized with Paola Navone in Milan’s Zona Tortona neighborhood this year (at which nearly 600 numbered objects collected or designed by Navone were given away across five days), we argued that designers will no longer serve the role they have throughout much of the 20th and early 21st centuries. “Designers will need to embrace regenerative resources and nonstandard materials,” the manifesto reads. “Upcycling, recycling, and reuse won’t just be should-dos; they’ll be musts.” The same, I believe, goes for Salone and other design fairs.

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The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)
The Knoll pavilion at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Bas Princen. Courtesy Knoll)

The American furniture company Knoll appears to have gotten the memo. Turning the notion of a fair booth on its head, it presented a refreshingly pragmatic model and way forward: a transportable pavilion made out of 50 percent recycled materials, designed by the Belgian architects Kersten Geers and David Van Severen. Built out of aluminum posts and beams, glass panels, and a recycled concrete terrazzo floor, it was the company’s first major effort under designer Jonathan Olivares, who joined Knoll as senior vice president last year. “It’s an architectural project,” he told me of the structure, which is more befitting of Palm Springs than any convention hall. “When I’ve run into my friends this week, I’ve said, ‘You have to come see the house.’ I haven’t said, ‘You have to come see the furniture’—or, god forbid, ‘the booth.’ That’s derogatory.” Noting that this year was his first time back at the fairgrounds in around a decade, he said, “Yes, there’s furniture here, but Knoll is not a furniture brand. It makes works that are in dialogue with architecture. ‘Furniture,’ at this point, is an overused word. These are works.”

Three versions of Philippe Malouin’s Bilboquet adjustable table lamp for Flos. (Courtesy Flos)
Three versions of Philippe Malouin’s Bilboquet adjustable table lamp for Flos. (Courtesy Flos)

Exiting Knoll, I realized that that was exactly what I was longing for at this year’s fair, and that was largely lacking: not furniture, but works, or what Anders Byriel, the CEO of the Danish textile company Kvadrat, recently described to me on our Time Sensitive podcast as designs with an “artistic edge.” At the booth of the Italian lighting brand Flos, there were new pieces from Konstantin Grcic, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, and Philippe Malouin that embodied this sensibility. With its retro-style design, based on vintage cars, and magnetic ball joint, Malouin’s Bilboquet adjustable table lamp especially stood out. The world may not need another lamp, but Bilboquet makes a strong case for adding at least just one more. The rest of the fair mostly felt conventional, snoozy, and status-quo. Visiting Knoll and Flos made it worth the trip.

Carwan Gallery’s presentation of Robert Stadler’s OMG-GMO series at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Alejandro Ramirez Orozco. Courtesy Carwan Gallery)
Carwan Gallery’s presentation of Robert Stadler’s OMG-GMO series at Salone del Mobile. (Photo: Alejandro Ramirez Orozco. Courtesy Carwan Gallery)

Around the city, a few moments of joy and wonder took hold, and not just at “Take It or Leave It,” where the lottery participants came and went with beaming smiles. At a pop-up space on Via Zenale, Carwan Gallery presented Paris-based designer Robert Stadler’s whimsical OMG-GMO series of ceramic hand-painted objects and furniture from the Italian company Bitossi, several of which first debuted last year at Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut (where I spent a most perfect afternoon with Stadler as he finished installing the show). The pieces, which humorously nod to both emoji culture and the absurdity of modern-day farming practices, include shelves supported by L-shaped zucchinis, a tripod lamp comprising three oversized interconnecting carrots, and a glass-topped coffee table supported by eggplant wheels. Not just a cheeky exercise, OMG-GMO was two years in the making and rigorously executed. As with all of Stadler’s work, it’s shrewdly rooted in art history and design references.

AMO founders Ambra Medda and Veronica Sommaruga at the Teatro Albers presentation for Milan Design Week. (Photo: Natasha Stanglmeyer)
AMO founders Ambra Medda and Veronica Sommaruga at the Teatro Albers presentation for Milan Design Week. (Photo: Natasha Stanglmeyer)

Inside the Istituto Marcelline Tommaseo, a school and nunnery near the Triennale Design Museum, the design venture AMO—newly formed by Ambra Medda, a founder of Design Miami, and Veronica Sommaruga, a textile expert who has worked with the likes of Calvin Klein and Hermès—presented its debut project, Teatro Albers, in collaboration with the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation. There, Medda and Sommaruga curated a selection of works by designer Marco Compardo and master weaver Laura de Cesare that reference the Alberses’ approaches to seeing and making (Compardo, who created a series of resin benches, looked to Josef’s 1963 book Interaction of Color; de Cesare reinterpreted Anni’s textile techniques). On Sunday evening, at a dinner inside the school (which Medda and Sommaruga both attended in their youth)—during which several of the nuns were present—Nicholas Fox Weber, the Albers Foundation’s longtime director, said that the project was, as with the Alberses’ work, “about experimentation, understanding the process, not imitation,” practically summing up the spirit of what has, I believe, long made Milan Design Week a potent moment for presenting innovation, experimentation, and craft. Through its subtle installation in a special setting, Teatro Albers was Milan Design Week at its best: thoughtful, contextual, beautiful, rigorous, forward-looking, exquisitely-presented, craft-oriented.

Atelier Biagetti’s exhibition “The King” for Milan Design Week. (Photo: Alessandro Saletta. Courtesy Atelier Biagetti)
Atelier Biagetti’s exhibition “The King” for Milan Design Week. (Photo: Alessandro Saletta. Courtesy Atelier Biagetti)

Elsewhere, the prankster artist-designer couple Laura Baldassari and Alberto Biagetti of Atelier Biagetti—with their wry work, sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly what the joke is, or if it’s even a joke in the first place—presented “The King,” an Elvis Presley–themed exhibition. The centerpiece was a massive deep-red seating concept that Biagetti told me is intended to turn your living room into a stage. Casually sitting on the sofa in a white leather sequin outfit, in Marina Abramović–style performance mode, was Baldassari, who sang an opera rendition of Presley’s 1961 hit song “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” (In addition to being an artist and designer, she is a trained opera singer.) On the walls were paintings she had made that subtly and satirically reference Graceland. In an industry that far too often takes itself too seriously, Baldassari and Biagetti always inject some humor (past projects have delved into bodybuilding, sex, money, and cats), and this year, perhaps their campiest act yet, was no exception.

Loewe’s new collection of chairs, presented at the 16th-century Palazzo Isimbardi for Milan Design Week. (Courtesy Loewe)
Loewe’s new collection of chairs, presented at the 16th-century Palazzo Isimbardi for Milan Design Week. (Courtesy Loewe)

Other highlights of the week for me included Kvadrat, which debuted fabrics by the French designer Ronan Bouroullec that translated several of his drawings into textile form; the Spanish luxury house Loewe, which at the 16th-century Palazzo Isimbardi showcased a playful collection of chairs reimagined by artisans who adorned them with materials such as metallic foils and leather; Lexus, which presented a mobile installation of Noguchi-esque forms from architect Suchi Reddy (alongside work by the winners of the 2023 Lexus Design Award, now in its tenth year); and Google, which under the direction of its visionary vice president of hardware design, the neuroaesthetics expert Ivy Ross, presented “Shaped by Water,” an exhibition conceived with Los Angeles–based artist Lachlan Turczan and emphasizing a subject near and dear to Ross’s heart: vibration.

Suchi Reddy’s exhibition “Shaped by Air” at Milan Design Week. (Courtesy Reddymade)
Suchi Reddy’s exhibition “Shaped by Air” at Milan Design Week. (Courtesy Reddymade)

If ever there were a metaphor for what Salone del Mobile and Milan Design Week need a bit more of, vibration is exactly it. The echoes that reverberate out from the fair literally shape the world, and have done so for more than half a century. I wasn’t feeling a whole lot of vibration this year. At least there were a few bright spots.

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That the first work of art I saw during this year’s Miami Art Week was a newscast seems somehow appropriate in our precaage of misinformation and sped-up media ecosystem?” the artists behind it, from the civic-engagement coalition For Freedoms, appeared to be asking. “And really, what’s t

Installation view of “Young Lords and Their Traces” at the New Museum. (Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy the New Museum)

What’s the purpose of a museum—and who decides which objects are worthy of value, attention, and care? These two questioYoung Lords and Their Traces” at the New Museum, the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates’s first-ever museum survey exhibition to be staged in New Y

The Sculpture Gallery at The Glass House. (Photo: Michael Biondo)

It’s a serene, bluebird-sky day, a slight chill in the air, and I’m walking with the Paris-based, Austrian-born designerSculpture Gallery, a transfixing space of light and shadow built in 1970 that’s home to works by artists including Michael Heizer, Robert

The “shite” (primary performer) in “Makura Jido” (“Chrysanthemum Boy”). (Photo: Yutaka Ishida. Courtesy Japan Society)

Two winters ago, I picked up a copy of Penguin Classics’ Japanese Nō Dramas, a volume of two dozen translations by Royall Tyler I’d been meaning to read since tearing through Yukio Mishima’s Five Modern Noh Plays a decade previous. I had moved into a New York City gem (an apartment with a fireplace), and with Covid cases skyrocketi

The “Urban Sun” installation at the Solar Biennale, designed by Studio Roosegaarde. (Courtesy the Solar Biennale)

As changes in weather patterns, economic realities, and public perception have triggered a wave of climate consciousness over the past few years, renewable energy sources have enjoyed a newfound level of attention, no longer relegated to thlong-sputtering industry of solar power. Factoids like how an hour and half worth of sunlight hitting the earth could provide the world’s total energy consumption in a year have been employed to tease out the industry’s transformative power for decades. Now, with technological advances makincheaper and more efficient than ever, it seems better poised than ever to take on a greater role in weaning humanity off of its fossil fuel and coal depende

Elizabeth Dee. (Courtesy Independent Art Fair)

Since 1997, when she founded her eponymous (now shuttered) gallery, Elizabeth Dee has been a fixture of the New York artIndependent Art Fair. An elegant, tightly curated event that remains an outlier in its efforts to elevate overlooked, underrepresented, and

Courtesy Mack Books

What does it mean to revisit a photograph? When a camera shutters, it locks a moment in time, forever trapping the imageGathered Leaves, the latest book by the Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth, whose work has long documented lonely souls and fractured dreams in spaces across the United States. In Gathered Leaves, Soth revisits five of his previous books, including in its pages new notes, annotations, text excerpts, and even photo

Kate Berry. (Photo: Jessica Antola)

Kate Berry’s glowing personality transmits what she seems to desire most: a breath of fresh air, and time to care for her myriad plants; raise her 9-year-old daughter, Quinn; or host intimate dinner parties for friends on the garden-covered terrace of her Domino and of the food, wine, and travel magazine Saveur, Berry has interactions with media that, due to her demanding schedule, tend to be brief and light—and meaningful. She lives her work, which leaves plenty of time for creating media, but not so much for taking it in. As she puts it, “You don’t

Courtesy Thames & Hudson

Consider the flower. What image blossoms to mind? What emotion does it elicit? For centuries, flowers have persisted as Flora Photographica: The Flower in Contemporary Photography (Thames & Hudson), out August 30, editors William Ewing and Danaé Panchaud compose a selection of vibrant modern floral

The Wind and Water Bar mid-construction. (Photo: Phan Quang. Courtesy Thames & Hudson.)

Lush fruit trees bursting over a roof. A canopy of plants covering a facade. Intricate bamboo constructions spiraling frVõ Trọng Nghĩa: Building Nature (Thames & Hudson), readers get an inside look into how the celebrated architect has embraced two core themes throughout

David Wallace-Wells. (Photo: Andrew Zuckerman / The Slowdown)

The climate writer and essayist David Wallace-Wells has a knack for translating the unimaginable into the painfully realarticle for New York magazine and subsequent book of the same name, The Uninhabitable Earth, played a critical role in jolting the conversation, detailing the varied plagues and, finally, apocalyptic conditions The New York Times, who added him to their Opinion section, where he has begun a weekly newsletter to reflect on the latest in our Anthropocene Age.

The Future Library Forest. (Photo: Rio Gandara. Courtesy Helsingin Sanomat)

“A forest in Norway is growing.” So begins the cryptic text printed on a certificate for the Future Library, or Framtidsbiblioteket, an artwork by Scottish artist Katie Paterson that, over the span of a century, cumulatively builds a collection of wri

Sound installation by Devon Turnbull. (Courtesy Lisson Gallery)

At New York’s Lisson Gallery, an unfettered approach to sculpture is the driving force behind a new group exhibition. OnThe Odds Are Good, The Goods Are Odd” presents the work of 11 groundbreaking New York City–based contemporary artists. In the exhibition, sculptures are a m

“Windy” spins on New York’s High Line. (Courtesy Meriem Bennani, High Line Art, and Audemars Piguet)

Rising from a patch of spiny ornamental grass on New York’s High Line park, a 9-foot-tall tornado spins in place, whirliWindy”, a new (and first-ever) sculpture by the Moroccan-born, New York–based artist Meriem Bennani, installed near West 23rd2 Lizards” (2020), made with filmmaker Orian Barki and launched on Instagram at the start of the pandemic, depicted the bewilderi

Baratunde Thurston at the Badwater Basin in California’s Death Valley National Park. (Courtesy Twin Cities PBS/Part2 Pictures)

“We think we invent things and create things and define ourselves by ourselves, but that’s not the whole story,” BaratunAmerica Outdoors, a six-part travel series that premiered last week on PBS. Thurston—a writer, comedian, and podcaster who has advised tThe Daily Show, and authored the best-selling memoir How To Be Black—has a knack for navigating nuanced conversations around race, culture, politics, and technology, framing these discussi

Cover of “Rocky Mountain Modern” by John Gendall

The jagged spine of the Rocky Mountains is too beautiful to mar. Yet over the years, developers and builders have manageBuckminster Fuller, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eliot Noyes, and Eero Saarinen completed commissions in the Western United States, transforming it into a hub for architectural modRocky Mountain Modern: Contemporary Alpine Homes (Monacelli Press).

Alexandra Lange. (Photo: Mark Wickens)

A recurring theme in design critic Alexandra Lange’s work is unpacking how—and for whom—objects and spaces are designed.The Dot-Com City, and surveyed how kids’ toys and physical environments impact their development in her 2018 book, The Design of Childhood. The ways in which outdoor public spaces, with their basketball courts, playgrounds, and skate parks, fail teen girls wa story she wrote for Bloomberg CityLab—one of many publications she has contributed to over the past two-plus decades.

A still from Kandis Williams’s multiscreen work “Triadic Ballet” (2021). (Courtesy the artist and the Rosenkranz Collection.)

Time standards are one of the many seemingly invisible societal constructs we interact with every day but seldom ponder.Mountain / Time,” the show is a nod to both the local time zone in Aspen, Mountain Standard Time (MST)—which the writer and critic Kylehas hailed for its “apartness” and “sense of detachment from the economic and cultural centers of the nation”—and the conceptual d

Installation view of the “Hermès in the Making” exhibition in Troy, Michigan. (Photo: William Jess Laird)

Detroit is a city of craft. Of carmakers and Carhartt. Of Motown Records and Eminem. Of iconic midcentury design (Isamu Noguchi’s Hart Plaza and Dodge Fountain, buildings by Mies van der Rohe and Minoru Heidelberg Project. So it’s fitting that, following previous iterations in Copenhagen, last fall, and in Turin, Italy, last month, the Freits latest “Hermès in the Making” exhibition (through June 15). A playful, Willy Wonka factory–like presentation of the company’s know-how, the display offers “an o not to smile while walking through it. Divided into four sections—”A Culture of Traditional Craftsmanship,” “High-Quality Msecret!” Beyond, stations feature artisans in saddle-stitching, porcelain painting, gemstone setting, glove-making, leather wor

Photo: Carlo Banfi. (Courtesy Flos)

Emerging from the pandemic, the design industry, like most of us, has changed. The past two and a half years, which havean increasingly pressing climate crisis, have formed a solemn backdrop. In March 2020, almost at once, in the locked-down lives of many, the notion of “home” a

Maria Cristina Didero. (Photo: Stefan Giftthaler)

The concept of the Golden Age was first introduced by the ancient Greek philosopher Hesiod, around 700 B.C., in a refereDesign Miami Basel (June 14–19), taking place at the Swiss city’s Messeplatz. Organized around the theme “The Golden Age: Rooted in the Pa

Cover of “The Trayvon Generation” by Elizabeth Alexander

How do the generation of Black Americans who grew up in the past 25 years reckon with the tragedies that play out in theThe Trayvon Generation (Grand Central Publishing), poet, educator, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander—who currently serves as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest humanities philanthropy in the UnEp. 52 of our Time Sensitive podcast)—explores these questions, and others, by meditating on race, class, trauma, justice, and memory, and their influences

Installation view of “Plastic: Remaking Our World.” (Photo: Bettina Matthiessen)

In the early 1860s, an advertisement in The New York Times offered $10,000 to anyone who could invent a new material for billiard balls. At the time, elephant ivory was the matercamphor, a waxy substance found in the wood of the camphor laurel tree. Though celluloid would later prove to be less than idea

Rendering of Drift’s indoor drone performance, “Social Sacrifice” (2022). (Courtesy Drift and Aorist)

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs (one-of-a-kind digital assets created using blockchain technology), have divided the art woEp. 59 of our Time Sensitive podcast), see them as pathways to a promising future, while others express concern around the sky-high price points and carbon emissions they generate.

“Between the Mountain and the Sky” by Maggie Doyne

At 35, Maggie Doyne is the mother of more than 50 children. One is her biological child, who lives with Doyne, her husbaBetween the Mountain and the Sky: A Mother’s Story of Hope and Love (Harper Horizon), out last month. Through telling her extraordinary story, she demonstrates the life-altering power of

A ramen bowl by Taku Satoh. (Photo: Hiroshi Tsujitani. Courtesy Nacasa & Partners Inc.)

Eating ramen is a multisensory experience: the fragrant steam coming off of the broth, the slurping sound of enjoying thThe Art of the Ramen Bowl” (March 18–July 5) that’s on view at the Los Angeles location of Japan House, an initiative with additional hubs in Londonburi, the porcelain receptacles in which ramen is traditionally served, and renge, the compact, teardrop-shaped spoons that often accompany them, made by 30 leading artists, architects, and designers.

Anicka Yi’s “Biologizing the Machine (spillover zoonotica)” (2022), on view at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. (Photo: Agostino Osio. Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca.)

Anicka Yi’s intoxicatingly sensory installations don’t just surround the viewer—many of them literally permeate the body, their sEp. 14 of our At a Distance podcast), in which three industrial steel tanks saturate the air with an aroma concocted by fusing secretions from carpenter an

Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch

Integrative nutritionist Daphne Javitch helps people develop their versions of a healthy life—a potentially daunting tasDoing Well, Javitch, a former womenswear consultant at Theory and Uniqlo, offers private health and career coaching as well as groEp. 46 of our At a Distance podcast.)

Installation view of “David Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic.” (Courtesy Pace Gallery)

Thick, wobbly lines branch out across a wall of Pace Gallery’s global headquarters in New York. Follow each stroke to itwomen, grandpas, and singers craning toward the ceiling, and donuts, hairs, and holes reaching into the ground. Part absurdist diagram, part heart-melting poem, and part consciousness-shifting artwork, thiDavid Byrne: How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic” (on view Feb. 2–March 19), a restorative survey of drawings the musician has made over the past two decades.

Skyscraper Page website

With their audacious, gravity-defying forms, skyscrapers have captured the public’s imagination for more than a century.Skyscraper Page, a zany website with a skyscraper discussion forum that has spread to some 100,000 threads. But what’s the point of obs