Genova Design Week 2025: Container design and more

For six years in a row, Genova Design Week (Genoa Design Week) proved itself a widespread hub of design culture and innovation. In 2025, it featured over 140 events – exhibitions, immersive installations, and leading names in contemporary architecture. A new highlight this year: 146 architecture firms participated, 80 percent from all over Italy, across Container 02 (21), Best Houses Design (80), Design Radar (24), Festival Design Talk (3), plus 18 general events.

More than 25,000 design professionals and enthusiasts attended. Over five days, they filled alleyways and squares in the historic center, as well as the Darsena area. There, they discovered the thirteen female-led Container 02 design installations. 

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Genoa Design Week 2025

Outdoor Senza Confini (Outdoor Without Borders), this year year, drew large crowds. ANNIE, a site-specific installation by Studio caarpa architettura e paesaggio, featured giant water-lily leaves in Piazza San Lorenzo. These created an open, welcoming, and surprising space. The Valchromat benches, shaped like lily pads, blended naturally with the piazza.

Genova Design Week 2025: Matter, the Soul of Design

“Matter” and materials led the theme of Genoa Design Week 2025. Matter is not just a physical support – it connects form and technology and carries creative narrative. The event explored materials from tradition (glass, wood, marble) to innovation (biopolymers, recycled textiles), focusing on sustainable and smart solutions. Designers and brands presented installations and workshops showing how materials shaped aesthetics, functionality, and environmental impact. It featured interactive surfaces, bio-based materials, 3D printing, and reactive textiles. The goal: to offer fresh perspectives on innovative, sustainable design.

Discover Milan Design Week 2025

Piazza Giustiniani, Genova Historical centre

Events & Exhibitions

Mani e Materia (Hands and Matter)

Curated by Miria Uras, this event explored the secret lives of objects and the deep link between matter and creation. It told the story behind each handmade piece: a journey that blended tradition and innovation, showing design as a true art form.

Images from Mani e Materia (Hands and Matter) exhibition

Design Under 35 – Creative Flows

Genova Design Week always supported young talents. Laura Palazzini, Dide Secretary and curator, says they aimed to promote emerging designers through little-known building alleyways offered for free. In 2025, under the theme “Less is Design,” 25 projects by 44 designers were displayed across 13 sites. A jury including the Scientific Committee, ADI Liguria, and tarchitects Gianandrea Barreca and Alberto Vanin, judged entries. Winners and notable works will be on show at ADI Design Museum in November 2025.

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Images from Design Under 35 exhibition

CONTAINER 02: the containers re-design

Container 02 repurposed freight containers into creative interior design spaces. In its second year, the exhibition was held in the heart of Porto Antico, near the Galata Sea Museum. Started in 2024 by architect Massimiliano Dalle Sasse, the project was directed by Simona Finessi of Platform. In 2025, it featured 13 containers, each transformed by female designers. The 21 selected architects worked inside 20-foot containers, creating unique spaces. Located in a 10,000 m² area in the old Arsenale – now home to Genoa’s Economics Faculty and Sea Museum – this open-air exhibit ran along the docks. It showed how interior architecture could improve space quality and life.

Images from Container 02 exhibition

Best Italian Houses

This exhibition made people think about contemporary living, through 80 selected single-family homes. Built in various geographic and cultural contexts, these houses shared a conscious and forward-looking vision. The selection favored understated yet meaningful architecture born from functionality, aesthetics, constraints, and creative freedom, to look at architecture as a process, not a standalone gesture. The homes revealed deep ties between inhabitants, structure, and landscape. Some were new, others were adaptive reuse, but all interacted with their environment and time. Curated by Studio Superluna, Luca Sartori, and Marco Bonfatti Paini, the display was held at the “Sala delle Grida” in the Genoa Stock Exchange building.

The Best Houses exhibiton

Design Radar

Genova Design Week extended beyond the old port to Sestri Ponente, a vibrant city district. From May 21 to 25, the Sestri Ponente Design Radar transformed Via Sestri into a 700 m open-air exhibition of design, architecture, and creativity. Conceived by Simona Finessi and Studio caarpa, and installed by Finessi and Angelo Dadda, the route featured marine-buoy-inspired decagonal “buoys,” each hosting panels from four creative studios – showing 24 emerging Genoese firms. Lily-pad “Annie” benches, also in Piazza San Lorenzo, served as resting points. Made of Valchromat, they represented points of rest and linked city center and suburbs. The project bridged design and community, making Design Week more inclusive.

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Images from Design Radar exhibition at via Sestri Ponente

Design Talks

Genova Design Week 2025 also hosted three very interesting conference sessions. Massimo Adiansi, founder of Architerror: The Dark Side of Architecture, explored questionable architecture through a 200,000‑member community focused on urban decay and construction abuses.

Luigi Priano, partner at Renzo Piano Building Workshop, along with Raffaella Parodi and Gabriel Fagundes, presented the studio’s philosophy. Finally, Mario Cucinella, pioneer of sustainable architecture and founder of MCA and SOS – School of Sustainability, shared innovative projects like the 3D‑printed earthen TECLA school in Guastalla, showing how design could tackle climate and social challenges.

Mario Cucinella talk

Genova Design Week will returns in 2026, May 13-17