A few dozen metres from the Triennale Milano Design Museum, in the centre of the sprawling Sempione Park, high-vis-vested construction workers scurried between a forest of cranes, putting the final touches on what, in a few days, will become the Olympic Fan Zone, where attendees will convene to celebrate and watch the 2026 Winter Olympic Games.
All across the city, similar sites were taking shape – from the Santa Giulia ice-hockey rink in the city’s south-east to the San Siro Stadium, where the Opening Ceremony will be held on 6 February. The Triennale, too, was teeming with technicians and installers this past Tuesday morning (27 January), getting ready to open a slate of new exhibitions in time for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics. Among them is ‘White Out: The Future of Winter Sports’ (until 15 March 2026), an exhibition curated by the German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic and Triennale’s design director Marco Sammicheli.
‘White Out: The Future of Winter Sports’ at Triennale Milano
'It felt very natural for us to make a contribution during the Olympics,' Grcic told Wallpaper* during the opening of the exhibition. 'We focused specifically on winter-sports-related design projects. And as a designer, the relationship between design and sport is always extremely attractive and interesting. Sports equipment was my first design teacher. Before I even studied design, I was fascinated by it – it’s always tied to performance and function.'
The exhibition is organised into nine different sections: Skins, Dainese, Safety, Infrastructure, Bob Track, Ski, Extremes, Futures, and Material Index. Each section displays a range of innovative objects and ideas that have shaped winter sports over the past several decades.
For instance, the section Skins, which greets visitors at the entrance of the exhibition, presents three glass vitrines containing a trio of kits that once belonged to elite athletes. Among them are alpine skier Federica Brignone’s jumpsuit, helmet, goggles, mittens, boots and back protector – designed to shield her spine in case of high-speed accidents – allowing visitors to imagine the 5ft 4in athlete’s body racing down a mountainside at breakneck speeds. 'The idea was to present the real objects,' said Grcic. 'The actual equipment athletes use.'
Along the circular route of the exhibition, similar high-tech gear is available to see up close. There’s a prototype of the Arc’teryx x Skip Mo/Go, a carbon-fibre exoskeleton resembling a knee brace, which helps propel its wearer uphill while hiking to reduce fatigue. Adjacent is a gleaming metal artificial knee implant by Zimmer Biomet, which stabilises the fragile joint after injury.
For Grcic, the value of staging an exhibition like this lies in the fact that sport often becomes a proving ground for new ideas. 'Sport has always been a pioneering domain for technology and design,' he acknowledges. 'If you think about people’s acceptance of radical design, they are far more open to it when it comes to sports equipment than, say, when they are buying a chair.'
Elsewhere in the exhibition, attention shifts beyond sport to the very real risks involved with inhabiting the mountains. From Recco handheld rescue detectors, which aid search-and-rescue efforts after avalanches, to inflatable vests that protect athletes from traumatic falls. Beyond the equipment on display, however, ‘White Out’ also tackles the larger issues that shape – and even threaten – the existence of winter sports. In the section dedicated to infrastructure, questions of mobility, sustainability and climate change come to the fore.
'This isn’t only about equipment. It’s about infrastructure: how we design ski resorts, how people get there and return, and how we intervene in nature in a way that is acceptable,' explains Grcic. 'What’s interesting is that the biggest environmental problem for winter-sports resorts is not artificial snow, or even the physical impact of lifts on the landscape. It’s car traffic going into and out of resorts. That also implies a relatively simple solution: creating strong public transport links to these resorts could make a significant difference.'
With these concerns in mind, for the final section of the exhibition, the curators commissioned the American media artist Scott Cannon to create an AI-generated animation depicting a speculative future in the year 2100. In it, ski- and snowboard-toting travellers board a Shinkansen-style high-speed train, which deposits them in the centre of a mountain town. From there, they move around futuristic-looking structures embedded in the landscape, imagining a future that reconciles the desires of sports enthusiasts with the fragility of a changing environment.
'The elephant in the room is climate change,' reflects Grcic on the subject, noting the precariousness of a sport and its related industries that rely on an increasingly volatile environment. 'We have to ask ourselves what we are really talking about here. Is winter sport just a pleasant but temporary form of entertainment that will soon disappear, or does it have a future – a positive future – that responds intelligently to these challenges?'
‘White Out: The Future of Winter Sports’ is on view until 15 March 2026
