Entrance of Opificio 31 – All photos are by Tortona Rocks 2026.

Design. There’s a particular energy to the Tortona district that’s hard to replicate elsewhere in Milan. Reclaimed buildings, open courtyards and a long-standing appetite for creative risk — it’s the neighbourhood where Milan Design Week effectively grew up. Here, Tortona Rocks 2026 channels that spirit into a curated platform with a decidedly ‘rebellious’ streak. As media partner of the event, now at its eleventh edition, we’ve picked seven exhibitions at Opificio 31 [21–26 April, Map] that are genuinely worth your time.

• RELATED STORIES: Read more about Milan Design Week 2026 on Archipanic.

All’Origine Boutique by Otto Studio.

Forty years is a long time to spend rethinking a single object — but that’s essentially what Hans Boodt Mannequins has been doing. The Dutch company has gradually shifted the mannequin from background prop to something far more considered: a figure capable of communicating identity, texture and presence. Their REBEL exhibition makes the process visible, drawing on 3D scans of real bodies to produce forms that embrace imperfection as much as aesthetics. The result sits somewhere between sculpture and portraiture — quietly compelling stuff.

© Hans Boodt Mannequins.

That interest in what objects carry — memory, meaning, time — runs through Paola Navone‘s contribution as well. At her Otto Studio, she’s assembled All’Origine Boutique, a temporary retail space that functions more like an essay than a shop. Mid-century European pieces sit alongside contemporary works, and the effect is less about acquisition than about looking: at how things age, how they resist obsolescence, and why certain objects still feel alive decades after they were made.

All’Origine Boutique by Otto Studio.

A different kind of aliveness is on offer at the Soundsorial Design exhibition, the result of a collaboration between IQOS and Devialet, a French leader in acoustic engineering. The installation uses water, movement, and recorded human voices to create a responsive environment that shifts with every visitor who enters. Rather than presenting a finished work, it accumulates — logging interactions and folding them back into the piece, so that what you encounter depends partly on who came before you.

Soundsorial Design by Devialet x IQOS.

Italdesign brings a broader industrial perspective to Tortona Rocks 2026. The firm, established by Giorgetto Giugiaro, has spent decades working across automotive, aerospace, robotics and product design, and the installation here maps that range — showing how design thinking travels between disciplines when given the room to do so. The Honda NSX Tribute by Italdesign, a knowing nod to one of the most admired sports cars ever produced, anchors the display with a touch of considered nostalgia.

NSX tribute by Italdesign.

Archiproducts arrives at the fourth and final chapter of its elemental series with Focò, Living Notes by Studiopepe — dedicated to fire. Milan-based interior design studio Studiopepe has taken the brief and run with it, producing an installation that treats flame not as spectacle but as structural logic: something that shapes the relationship between material, light and form without announcing itself too loudly.

Fòco by Studiopepe x Archiproducts.

From the elemental to the collaborative, uau studio‘s Designed by Who? participatory exhibition shifts the focus to the part of the design process that rarely gets shown: the messy, generative early stage where ideas are still being negotiated. Visitors aren’t passive here — they’re invited to add to a collective project that evolves in real time, moving between analogue sketches and digital tools. It’s an honest look at how design actually begins, before the resolved object takes over.

uau studio in Milan.

Tortona Rocks 2026 wraps up, in our selection at least, with Bud Brand and a group of emerging Japanese designers whose installation does something disarmingly simple: it places objects just above your natural line of sight, so that engaging with them requires a small, conscious effort. That slight upward shift changes the dynamic of the whole space — introducing a sense of lightness and quiet intention that lingers a little longer than expected.

Designed by Who? by Bud Brand – Courtesy of Tortona Rocks 2026.