Up front, the Diary plugs the issue into the here and now. In Tashkent, Francesca Critelli visits the CCA, designed by Studio KO inside a former 1912 tram depot. It’s a “non-museum” through which Uzbekistan is building its own contemporary identity, choosing what to show and what to veil behind the lattice of the panjara. From the Domus Archive, Simona Bordone digs up Isamu Noguchi’s garden for UNESCO headquarters in Paris, published in the magazine back in 1959 and restored for the second time in 2025. With the wry wit of Commonplaces, Paul Smith runs through the scaffold wraps that hide construction sites, from the Pont Neuf wrapped by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and turned into rock this year by JR, all the way to the Great Gatehouse at Hampton Court. “There is a work you don’t look at, but that looks at you”: it’s from this idea by Luca Salamone, director of the Italian Space Agency, that Valentina Petrucci builds her Details on the Mona Lisa. Why did Coca-Cola’s new typeface remind everyone of Marlboro? In Graphics, Francesco Franchi explains, pointing to a branding culture that now hunts for the future in the archive.
In the Chihuahuan Desert, Urbánika’s brutalist oasis ARC Park is the subject of Elena Sommariva’s Kids page. The number eight, from Castel del Monte to Ettore Sottsass and Gae Aulenti, gets the spotlight in Nicola Ermanno Barracchia’s The Architecture of Numbers. For Talents, Silvana Annicchiarico picks Nikola & Florian, who met on Foster + Partners’ industrial design team, and their honest materials. It’s a family affair at CP Parquet, which Antonio Armano traces in Companies: from two founders who cut sugar cane in Queensland to the recent merger into Casa CP.