An apprenticeship in Italian culture – is how  Bjarke Ingels described his work with Domus, speaking to a packed Aula Magna at the Trifoglio building, another of Ponti’s creations following the founding of the magazine itself.

What followed was a rapid-fire immersion into the “pragmatic utopia” that has shaped his interpretation of Domus. The architect who turned a waste-to-energy plant into a skiable mountain, transformed a massive decommissioned ferry into an urban residence overlooking that same slope, and reimagined an industrial loading bay as a cathedral.

It’s within this framework that his concept of “new materialism” takes shape — not just as a theme, but as a manifesto: “We thought it could be interesting to take the word materialism – that today is mostly associated with a negative idea of empty consumerism – and instead trying to sort of create the viewpoint that our world, our society, has been shaped by the materials we know, by how to harvest and manipulate, how to create the world that we would like to live in. We thought it would be an interesting departure”.

his idea became the foundation for the ten issues of Domus 2025, each one dedicated to a specific material like stone, earth, concrete, metal, and so on. They embody what Ingels describes as a “Piranesian rationalism” — one of his many deliberate oxymorons — where materials are celebrated in the honesty of their texture, and above all, their function: their capacity to expand the definition of technology.

For Ingels, design is the transformation of one’s world and future — just as Lego, for which he designed the headquarters, is not merely a toy but a tool for shaping. This is the humanistic essence of technology that he seeks to capture: one that identifies harmony in the universe and propels it forward.

The lecture was introduced by Maria Giovanna Mazzocchi Bordone, president of Editoriale Domus, Emilio Faroldi, Executive Vice Rector Politecnico di Milano, and Walter Mariotti, Editorial Director of the Domus system.

Before a full house, Bjarke Ingels concluded his talk to resounding applause. The latest issue of Domus, dedicated to metal, hits newsstands this week.