De Lucchi Takes Over as Triennale Milano's Creative Director

Michele De Lucchi has been appointed creative director of Triennale Milano. He describes two axes for the role: turning sustainability into part of a collective imagination, and supporting the Italian craft tradition. Coming from a designer who moved between Memphis, industrial products and architecture, the two read less as separate agendas than as halves of one argument about material knowledge and production ethics.

Framing sustainability as a question of imagination shifts it away from compliance. In most design institutions the subject currently arrives as a certificate, a materials report, a carbon figure. Necessary, but not enough to build a culture around. The craft emphasis is the institutional half of the same move. Furniture workshops in Brianza, glass studios in Murano and leather firms in Tuscany are all dealing with ageing masters and no succession. A museum cannot fix that, but it can stop treating craft as a past tense. Whether it does will be legible from the exhibition calendar, not the announcement.