For Milan Design Week 2026, Samir Bantal, director of AMO, was invited by SolidNature to design this year’s installation for the Designboom Room for Dreams exhibition. As long-standing collaborators with SolidNature, Bantal and AMO reinterpreted the everyday and the mundane – in this case, shopping for groceries – to create a world of wonder where products made from various types of natural stone are displayed on stone shelves.
Natural stone offers an alternative perception of value, grounded in sustainability, durability and authenticity. In contrast to the speed and disposability of the everyday supermarket, this one shifts consumption towards awareness. Our consumer choices instead become part of a larger dream, shaping a more conscious and future-oriented reality. This invites a different way of looking at the world. What if we defined the environments we move through daily by their long-term value, intention and awareness? In Il Sonno, this perspective is realised through materials and experiences, prompting us to reconsider our systems, values and behaviour.
Samir Bantal is an architect and the director of AMO, OMA’s research studio which was founded in response to the changing nature of architectural clients. AMO transforms brands into cultural platforms and explores speculative futures for private and public entities. Samir Bantal first joined OMA in 2005, later becoming the Director of AMO in 2016. Prior to joining OMA, he worked for Toyo Ito and was an associate professor at TU Delft, where he had also studied.
The world’s first online magazine specializing in architecture, design, technology and art, Designboom was founded in 1999 in Milan by Birgit Lohmann and Massimo Mini. Today, it serves a global audience of creatives with in-depth project features, interviews and news, while also hosting design competitions and exhibitions – most recently Room for Dreams at Milan Design Week this year, taking over the ME Milan Il Duca hotel with ‘a temporary ecosystem of ideas’.
Il Sonno is about freezing the idea of time. It is a timeless space, where the products, shaped by the earth over millions of years, will outlast us in this space. It is us who have become the fleeting stock, relentlessly changing over time, with a date of expiration,
