A number of dozen metres from the Triennale Milano Design Museum, in the centre of the sprawling Sempione Park, high-vis-vested development staff scurried between a forest of cranes, placing the ultimate touches on what, in a couple of days, will grow to be the Olympic Fan Zone, the place attendees will convene to rejoice and watch the 2026 Winter Olympic Games.
All throughout the metropolis, comparable websites have been taking form – from the Santa Giulia ice-hockey rink in the metropolis’s south-east to the San Siro Stadium, the place the Opening Ceremony might be held on 6 February. The Triennale, too, was teeming with technicians and installers this previous Tuesday morning (27 January), on the brink of open a slate of new exhibitions in time for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics. Among them is ‘White Out: The Future of Winter Sports’ (till 15 March 2026), an exhibition curated by the German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic and Triennale’s design director Marco Sammicheli.
‘White Out: The Future of Winter Sports’ at Triennale Milano
(Image credit score: Andrea e Filippo Tagliabue © Triennale Milano)
‘It felt very pure for us to make a contribution throughout the Olympics,’ Grcic informed Wallpaper* throughout the opening of the exhibition. ‘We targeted particularly on winter-sports-related design tasks. And as a designer, the relationship between design and sport is at all times extraordinarily enticing and attention-grabbing. Sports gear was my first design trainer. Before I even studied design, I used to be fascinated by it – it’s at all times tied to efficiency and performance.’
The exhibition is organised into 9 totally different sections: Skins, Dainese, Safety, Infrastructure, Bob Track, Ski, Extremes, Futures, and Material Index. Each part shows a variety of revolutionary objects and concepts which have formed winter sports over the previous a number of a long time.
(Image credit score: Andrea e Filippo Tagliabue © Triennale Milano)
For occasion, the part Skins, which greets guests at the entrance of the exhibition, presents three glass vitrines containing a trio of kits that after belonged to elite athletes. Among them are alpine skier Federica Brignone’s jumpsuit, helmet, goggles, mittens, boots and again protector – designed to defend her backbone in case of high-speed accidents – permitting guests to think about the 5ft 4in athlete’s physique racing down a mountainside at breakneck speeds. ‘The concept was to current the actual objects,’ stated Grcic. ‘The precise gear athletes use.’
Along the round route of the exhibition, comparable high-tech gear is obtainable to see up shut. There’s a prototype of the Arc’teryx x Skip Mo/Go, a carbon-fibre exoskeleton resembling a knee brace, which helps propel its wearer uphill whereas mountaineering to scale back fatigue. Adjacent is a gleaming steel synthetic knee implant by Zimmer Biomet, which stabilises the fragile joint after harm.
For Grcic, the worth of staging an exhibition like this lies in the proven fact that sport usually turns into a proving floor for brand spanking new concepts. ‘Sport has at all times been a pioneering area for know-how and design,’ he acknowledges. ‘If you concentrate on individuals’s acceptance of radical design, they’re way more open to it in terms of sports gear than, say, when they’re shopping for a chair.’
(Image credit score: Andrea e Filippo Tagliabue © Triennale Milano)
Elsewhere in the exhibition, consideration shifts past sport to the very actual dangers concerned with inhabiting the mountains. From Recco handheld rescue detectors, which assist search-and-rescue efforts after avalanches, to inflatable vests that defend athletes from traumatic falls. Beyond the gear on show, nonetheless, ‘White Out’ additionally tackles the bigger points that form – and even threaten – the existence of winter sports. In the part devoted to infrastructure, questions of mobility, sustainability and local weather change come to the fore.
‘This isn’t solely about gear. It’s about infrastructure: how we design ski resorts, how individuals get there and return, and the way we intervene in nature in a means that’s acceptable,’ explains Grcic. ‘What’s attention-grabbing is that the largest environmental drawback for winter-sports resorts just isn’t synthetic snow, and even the bodily affect of lifts on the panorama. It’s automotive visitors going into and out of resorts. That additionally implies a comparatively easy answer: creating robust public transport hyperlinks to those resorts might make a major distinction.’
(Image credit score: Courtesy Triennale Milano)
With these considerations in thoughts, for the ultimate part of the exhibition, the curators commissioned the American media artist Scott Cannon to create an AI-generated animation depicting a speculative future in the 12 months 2100. In it, ski- and snowboard-toting travellers board a Shinkansen-style high-speed practice, which deposits them in the centre of a mountain city. From there, they transfer round futuristic-looking buildings embedded in the panorama, imagining a future that reconciles the wishes of sports fans with the fragility of a altering setting.
‘The elephant in the room is local weather change,’ displays Grcic on the topic, noting the precariousness of a sport and its associated industries that depend on an more and more risky setting. ‘We need to ask ourselves what we’re actually speaking about right here. Is winter sport only a nice however momentary kind of leisure that may quickly disappear, or does it have a future – a optimistic future – that responds intelligently to those challenges?’
‘White Out: The Future of Winter Sports’ is on view till 15 March 2026
(Image credit score: Courtesy Triennale Milano)
(Image credit score: Courtesy Triennale Milano)
(Image credit score: Courtesy Triennale Milano)
(Image credit score: Courtesy Triennale Milano)