Force of Nature | This spring and summer, 200-plus sub-tropical plants will manifest their own ecosystem inside a building in Venice. The Belgian Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2025 is hosting this experiment in artificial, natural and collective intelligence, titled “Building Biospheres,” which grew out of a decade-long conversation between Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets and Italian neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso. Meters and weather stations monitoring the plants’ inner workings supply information to an AI system that controls light, water and air. If photosynthesis stops, the artificial sunlight turns on; if evapotranspiration stops, the water switches on; if evapotranspiration stops, but the soil is still damp, the ventilation starts up to lower the humidity. “The plants don’t speak. They don’t push buttons. But they are doing it,” explains Smets. “A plant is very good at understanding its environment. So there’s this idea that the plants at some point will know how to activate a light. Is it true or not? We’ll test it.” In Smets’ view, architecture is fundamentally about survival, about building a roof against the elements, and with climate change, we may need to extend this protection to plants, bringing them indoors for our mutual benefit. Smets, whose Brussels-based firm has envisioned innovative landscaping for the Luma Foundation in Arles, France and Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, hopes for a future where nature and architecture are no longer in opposition, but become something more hybrid. “We’re opening doors for a new understanding of architecture,” Smets says, “not as an inside cut off from an outside, but as a continuum of biospheres and atmospheres.”
Cruise Control | Dominique Crenn rose to fame in San Francisco, where her restaurant Atelier Crenn received three Michelin stars–making her the first woman chef in the U.S. to achieve that distinction. After decades in California, though, she’s still inspired by the food of her native France, especially Brittany, where she spent many childhood summers. This year, in collaboration with Les Bateaux Belmond, she has created a series of menus for Belmond’s fleet of 4- to 12-passenger boats that navigate French waterways. Each route offers a different gourmet itinerary, such as a tasting tour of Bordeaux châteaux or a pilgrimage to five of Burgundy’s Michelin-starred restaurants, but they all share the opportunity to relish Crenn’s onboard fare. Voyages through southern regions will emphasize Mediterranean cuisine–vegetable-heavy soupe au pistou, Comté-filled ravioles du Dauphiné and roasted sea bream–while northern journeys will go back to the land, highlighting spring peas, morels, green peppercorns and braised leeks.
Grand Gesture | On Milan's Via Manzoni stands a former private mansion that Molteni&C has converted into a striking new flagship, with interiors by Belgian designer Vincent van Duysen, the brand’s creative director. First built in the 19th century, the structure was given a Liberty style makeover in 1922. More recently, two new aerie-like stories were added to the top of the building, where Molteni will host events like designer talks and book readings.
Spouting Off | At this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, Loewe debuted a series of 25 unique teapots, each envisioned by a different artist or creative type, such as painter Rose Wylie, designer Patricia Urquiola and architect David Chipperfield. Shown here is the vessel by Walter Price, the 36-year-old painter from Macon, Ga., whose practice sits somewhere between abstraction and representation. Walter Price teapot, price upon request; loewe.com.
By Hand | The Swedish woodcarver Per Norén, who also goes by Spångossen, thinks of his work in musical terms. “I tune the different aspects of the shape,” he explains. “It’s bass notes in some areas, and the most delicate parts shimmer in the upper part of the frequency.” Norén, who lives in the Hälsingland region, takes inspiration from the area’s folk music, folkdräkt clothing and UNESCO-recognized farmhouses, as well as sloyd woodworking traditions. He works mostly on commission, often fielding inquiries via Spångossen’s Instagram account. Later this year he’ll have his first solo show at the Hälsinglands Museum, featuring “maximized” versions of his exquisitely etched spoons and containers. instagram.com/spangossen; halsinglandsmuseum.se.
Banner Year | Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty, partners in the Paris-based architecture firm Studio KO, like to ask themselves more questions than they can answer, a habit they picked up as students at the École des Beaux-Arts in the ’90s. Certainty is outside the mindset of Studio KO, which prides itself on sensitivity to context and a perpetual attitude of discovery. The firm, which celebrates its 25th birthday this year, is probably best known for the Chiltern Firehouse hotel in London, a Victorian fantasia that opened in 2013 (and recently endured a tragic fire—it is now being restored). But the project that put it on the architectural map is the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech, a tour de force of sunbaked brick completed in 2017.
Studio KO’s love for the handmade took root in Morocco, and a new project there with Beni Rugs has already become a touchstone in the firm’s anniversary year. Working with Beni’s weavers outside Marrakech, it has designed 10 carpets that take the techniques of flatweave, intricate knotting and embroidery to new levels of refinement. The collection launched in April, ahead of another exercise in culturally attuned reinvention: the Fashion & Costume Museum in Arles, where three centuries of Provençal artisanship will play out against Studio KO’s transformation of a Baroque-era hôtel particulier.
In Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Studio KO’s design for the Center for Contemporary Arts will open in the fall, recontextualizing a series of existing buildings for use as exhibition and teaching spaces and an artists’ residency. And finally, an anniversary project close to home: the Bus Palladium, a much-loved Parisian nightclub, is also set to reopen this fall as a concert venue topped with a luxury hotel.
A quarter century on, what surprises Fournier and Marty most about their continued success? “Creating your own work is somewhat like giving birth to a living organism,” Fournier says wryly. “It quickly escapes your control and follows its own growth.” —Sarah Medford
The World of Wes | The films of Wes Anderson offer a multilayered viewing experience, thanks not only to their extensive and memorable casts of characters but also to their expertly executed, instantly recognizable visual style. Highly detailed sets featuring spot-on interiors help build an entire world around each narrative. Anderson’s latest, “The Phoenician Scheme,” adds blue-chip artwork, borrowed from museums and private collections, to this approach.
“The Phoenician Scheme” stars Benicio del Toro as international businessman Zsa-zsa Korda, one of Europe’s richest men. Korda is “a ruthless, uncompromising dealmaker, a man of exquisite taste and a pathological collector of people, places and precious objects,” says Jasper Sharp, a curator who worked on the film. “It was imperative that he have an impressive art collection.” Tasked with assembling this trove, Sharp brought together several Old Master works, including German altarpieces and Dutch still lifes and hunting scenes, as well as two later portraits: Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s 1889 painting of his young nephew and what Sharp calls an “enigmatic, brooding” canvas painted by René Magritte in 1942, only a few years before the film’s midcentury setting. Together these works, Sharp says, “provide an elegant foil to the madness that often ensues around them.”
Sharp’s curation serves as a magnifying glass for Korda’s character, with each artwork representing, he notes, “a strand of Zsa-zsa’s complex personality, a result of his dealmaking and a tangible representation of the fortune that he puts on the line.” —Sarah Massey
Sipping Street Art | In France, new ideas are growing among the vines. This year marks the 10th anniversary of UNESCO recognizing the climats of Burgundy—1,247 small vineyards that make up the Côte de Nuits and Côte de Beaune wine regions—as a World Heritage Site. Guillaume Koch, director of the Hospices Civils de Beaune—the organization that today hosts the world’s oldest charity wine auction, held annually since 1859—wanted to use the occasion to celebrate the area’s cultural history in a fresh way.
He has invited Mode 2, a Mauritian-born graffiti artist who honed his skills in London and Paris, to devise a program with La Karrière, a nearby arts space based in a former stone quarry. Mode 2 has commissioned three fellow street artists—Jace, Eron and Delta—to create a series of artworks on show through until late in the year at the Hôtel-Dieu, Beaune’s original 15th-century hospital building. “I always look for people who are curious about humankind in general, passionate about what they do and open to art history,” explains Mode 2. —James Haldane
Going Wild | Creating exquisite flora and fauna has been part of Buccellati’s DNA since its early years. In the 1960s, the Furry collection introduced novel silversmithing techniques that captured the details of feathers and pelts. The jewelry house’s Naturalia exhibition, celebrating this silver menagerie, went on view in Milan in April and travels to the US later this year.
Sitting Pretty | Armani Casa’s Vivace chair mixes the elegance of its sloping curves and embroidered-silk upholstery with the playfulness of its bamboo-textured metal frame. Vivace chair, price upon request; armani.com.
Dutch Treat | On Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht canal, the 17th-century edifice that served as the city’s Palace of Justice for nearly 200 years reopens June 1 as the new Rosewood Amsterdam. The building’s former jail cells and courtrooms have been handsomely reimagined as 134 rooms and seven suites by Dutch design firm Studio Piet Boon, and the new courtyard garden features the artistry of landscape designer Piet Oudolf. For interested guests, the hotel offers tours of the new-media showcase Nxt Museum and the gallery scene in Amsterdam North.
