La Triennale di Milano is Italy's design and architecture international, founded in 1923 in Monza as a biennial of decorative arts (the Biennale delle Arti Decorative), and relocated to Milan in 1933, where it took its current name and was housed in the purpose-built Palazzo dell'Arte designed by the architect Giovanni Muzio. The institution is one of three Italian world's-fair-recognised events under the Bureau International des Expositions, and across its hundred-and-two-year history it has been the principal Italian institutional venue at which the design and architecture professions have argued out their continuing positions. After a long pause across the late twentieth century, the International Exhibition returned to its three-year rhythm with the 21st edition in 2016.
The 24th International Exhibition, Inequalities, opened on 13 May 2025 and ran to 9 November 2025 under President and Commissioner General Stefano Boeri, the Milanese architect (founder of Stefano Boeri Architetti, designer of the Bosco Verticale) who has led the Triennale Foundation since 2018. The curatorial premise — that the most consequential continuing question facing design and architecture is the geopolitical and biopolitical fact of inequality, and that design's principal continuing instrument is the production of more equal futures — was developed by a curatorial team including Norman Foster (whose Norman Foster Foundation's Towards an Equal Future occupied the ground floor with research on housing in emergency contexts), the architectural historian Beatriz Colomina and the architect Mark Wigley, Hans Ulrich Obrist (Director of the Serpentine Galleries) with Natalia Grabowska, the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, the philosopher Telmo Pievani, and twenty-eight further curators working across 341 authors from 43 countries.
An institution at the centenary, retooled
The structural argument the Triennale has made under Boeri is that the historic International Exhibition format — the prewar pavilion model out of which the postwar Italian design industry was institutionally produced — required reformatting for the twenty-first century if the Triennale was to retain the institutional weight it once held. The XXII edition, Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival, opened on 1 March 2019 under curator Paola Antonelli (Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, New York), with restorative design — design that addresses the threads connecting humans to their natural environments — as its constituting subject. The XXIII edition, Unknown Unknowns: An Introduction to Mysteries, ran from 15 July to 11 December 2022 under curators Ersilia Vaudo (astrophysicist; Chief Diversity Officer at the European Space Agency) and Francis Kéré (founder of Kéré Architecture; Pritzker Architecture Prize 2022), and addressed what the human and physical sciences continue not to know.
The XXI edition, in 2016 — 21st Century. Design After Design — was the institution's restart after a twenty-year interruption in the International Exhibition cycle, with exhibits spread across nineteen venues in and around Milan and 22,000 square metres of exhibition area. The scientific committee included Andrea Branzi, who co-curated Neo-Prehistory: 100 Verbs with Kenya Hara and The Multi-ethnic Metropolis. The 2016, 2019, 2022 and 2025 editions together constitute the institution's contemporary working argument.
