Istituto Marangoni Milano Design celebrates a significant international achievement: Gustav Craft, a third-year Swedish student in Product Design, is the winner of the Fendi Design Prize 2026, one of the most prestigious recognitions for emerging designers.

The award was presented on April 19 at the Fendi Casa spaces in Milan and includes a €50,000 prize, providing tangible support for the winner’s professional development. A recognition that rewards not only a project, but a clear design direction—one that looks to the past to build the future.

The VIA project: design as an infrastructure of time

VIA is not simply a furniture collection. It is a system. A language. A statement.

At its core lies a simple yet radical intuition: design can function as an infrastructure, much like Roman roads. Not decoration, but structure. Not surface, but construction.

The starting point is the sampietrino, the iconic paving stone of Rome. A universal, anonymous object walked over for centuries, often unnoticed precisely because it is always present. Gustav Craft brings it back into focus, transforming it into a generative design code.

From this idea emerges a coherent collection, where each element stems from the same conceptual matrix:

• The seating pieces reinterpret urban paving through a Selleria leather weave: each strap becomes a stone, each intersection a joint.
• The steel structures evoke the rational logic of Roman planning, with visible welds becoming a defining feature rather than a flaw.
• The rug offers an aerial view of the city: an irregular grid of solids and voids, enriched by tones that recall the warm, material light of Rome.
• The mirror, finally, rests on a block of basalt: the weight of history supporting the image of the present.

In VIA, every element speaks to the others. There are no isolated objects, only parts of a design ecosystem that addresses a fundamental question: what does it mean today to design something meant to last?

The answer is striking in its simplicity: to build with intention, precision, and time—just as it was done two thousand years ago.

Beyond the award

The success of VIA is not just an individual achievement. It signals a broader way of understanding design: as a discipline capable of bridging memory and innovation, material and vision, culture and industry.

At a time when everything seems to accelerate, VIA invites us to slow down and look at the ground beneath our feet. To recognize what has always been there—and to transform it, consciously, into design.

Within this context, Istituto Marangoni Milano Design reaffirms its ability to engage in a concrete and ongoing dialogue with the production world, fostering direct collaboration between students and companies and turning education into a real design experience. An approach that enables emerging designers to confront authentic challenges and develop visions that are relevant to the contemporary industry.

Because, ultimately, the future of design may already be written—we just need to learn how to read the traces left by stones.