SO KOIZUMI DESIGN Presents “As” at ALCOVA MILANO 2026
SO KOIZUMI DESIGN will present As at ALCOVA MILANO during Milan Design Week, running from April 20 to April 26, 2026.
Staged within the grounds of the former Baggio Military Hospital in Milan’s Primaticcio District, the exhibition brings the collection into a setting marked by age, memory, and quiet transformation. The works will be shown in Room C32 on the second floor of Casa delle Suore, a 19th-century convent once used to house nurses serving the nearby military hospital.
Conceived as an art exhibition as much as a design presentation, As examines asphalt through a historical and material lens. Known today as a substance tied to paving and infrastructure, asphalt is approached here through its earlier role as an adhesive. Around 10,000 years ago in Japan’s Jomon period, it was used to bind wooden shafts to stone arrowheads for hunting. Koizumi returns to that origin and brings it into the present, treating asphalt as a medium that joins different elements while carrying its own physical presence.
Across the works, asphalt is used to connect metal, stone, and resin, allowing each material to retain its own character while entering into a more complex relationship with the others. These combinations give the pieces a sculptural quality, where weight, density, texture, and surface treatment become as important as function. Koizumi treats furniture as a site of material tension and contact, using each object to examine how substances with different physical properties can be brought together without losing their individual force.
The process behind the collection is equally bound to this exploration, since some of the materials, including the asphalt itself, are shaped and finished by hand as part of the making of the work. That physical involvement gives the pieces a heightened sense of presence, while repeated experimentation allows structural and tactile qualities to emerge through close attention to matter and form. What comes forward is an exhibition grounded in process, where each object carries evidence of testing, handling, and refinement.
Presented within ALCOVA’s historic setting, As gains further depth through its encounter with the layered surfaces of Casa delle Suore and the wider site of the former military hospital. The buildings, long disused and now partially overtaken by nature, create a charged environment in which architecture and objects seem to speak across different periods of use and decay. Koizumi’s second appearance at ALCOVA MILANO, following a presentation in 2024, brings that dialogue into sharper focus through a collection that considers how materials hold memory, how objects can register acts of connection, and how an exhibition can reshape the way familiar substances are seen.
