Perhaps the most technically ambitious piece in the series: a branch stem supports a full-scale 3D-printed leaf whose surface is mapped with dense, flowing contour lines, each one tracing the leaf's topography with the precision of a geological survey. The dark veins of the original branch run through it like a skeleton, visible beneath the printed surface.

TAKT PROJECT Turns Humble Branches into a Quiet Meditation on Making at Milan Design Week 2026

Words by Yatzer

Milan, Italy

Every year, Milan Design Week pulls the city into a vortex of spectacle. Competing for attention across a packed, sprawling programme, exhibitions lean into immersive scenographies, monumental installations, and tech-driven set-ups engineered to hook you at hello. Lesson in Relations: Dialogue with Trees #100 by Tokyo-based design studio TAKT PROJECT is anything but that. Quiet and contemplative, it demands time and attention to be appreciated, which is, in part, what made a lasting impression—picture an empty 15th-century church, its floor scattered with small tree branches, each one partly 3D-printed, lying there as if the wind had blown them in. But there's another reason it stood out. In a week when design is celebrated as something that shapes everyday life, fusing functionality with creativity, innovation, and sustainability, this project takes a deliberate step back from the very notion of function as the driving force of making: the pieces on display have no defined purpose; they are something else entirely.

Satoshi Yoshiizumi, principal of Tokyo-based TAKT PROJECT, holds one of the series' most intricate pieces — a branch bearing a large 3D-printed leaf mapped with dense topographic contour lines — in front of his face before the church altarpiece. The leaf obscures his features entirely, leaving only his hands and the gilded panels behind: a playful portrait in which maker and made become briefly, deliberately indistinguishable.

Satoshi Yoshiizumi, principal of TAKT PROJECT at Chiesa di San Bernardino alle Monache, Milan. Photography by Costas Voyatzis.

The weathered red-brick façade of Chiesa di San Bernardino alle Monache in Milan, a compact jewel of 15th-century late Gothic architecture. Three pointed arched windows, a rose window, and a mosaic lunette above the entrance animate the surface, while two white exhibition banners flanking the doorway signal the contemporary intervention within.

Lesson in Relations, installation view, Milan Design Week 2026. Photography by Takumi Ota.

An elevated view of the nave floor reveals the full diversity of the series in a single frame. Branches paired with latticed nets, coiled spirals, looping forms, and mesh-like structures are scattered across the ancient terracotta at irregular intervals, a diagonal band of warm afternoon light dividing the composition. The overall effect is less curated display than field of found evidence.

Lesson in Relations, installation view, Milan Design Week 2026. Photography by Takumi Ota.

A branch bearing a small, precisely 3D-printed rectangular cage-like form at its joint rests at the foot of a heavy wooden church door, its rough bark contrasting with the architectural precision of the white structure. The placement feels incidental, even found, yet the tension between the organic and the geometric is entirely deliberate.

Lesson in Relations, installation view, Milan Design Week 2026. Photography by Takumi Ota.

A long, gently curved branch is fitted at its midpoint with a white 3D-printed lattice sleeve — a cylindrical grid structure that wraps the wood's most prominent bend like a sectional diagram of its own geometry. The contrast between the sleeve's clinical precision and the irregular, lichen-mottled bark it encases is quietly arresting.

Photography by Masaki Ogawa.

The project is rooted in a simple question: what happens when you approach a material not as a resource to be shaped to your will, but as something to be listened to? For TAKT PROJECT principal Satoshi Yoshiizumi, the answer starts with a walk in the forest where branches are collected on instinct. They are then 3D-scanned, their form, structural idiosyncrasies and weight studied in granular detail through a digital lens. The intimate reading of each piece leads to small, precise interventions made using 3D printing that seem to grow from the branch itself. The technology, Yoshiizumi explains, is not a tool of control here but an instrument of perception, a way of amplifying sensitivity to a material rather than overriding it.

Blurring the line between natural and artificial, the resulting pieces resist easy categorisation. They are part object, part drawing, part specimen. Each one preserves the branch's irregularity while extending it into something new; a record of an encounter rather than the realisation of a predetermined idea. Their title, Lesson in Relations, says it plainly: this is not about mastery; it's about paying attention.

Perhaps the most technically ambitious piece in the series: a branch stem supports a full-scale 3D-printed leaf whose surface is mapped with dense, flowing contour lines, each one tracing the leaf's topography with the precision of a geological survey. The dark veins of the original branch run through it like a skeleton, visible beneath the printed surface.

Photography by Masaki Ogawa.

Dialogue with Trees _ #100 by TAKT PROJECT.

A studio shot against a cool grey ground presents one of the series' most explosive pieces: a forked branch enveloped by hundreds of white 3D-printed filaments radiating outward from every node, dense at the centre and thinning toward the edges like dispersing light. The result reads simultaneously as scientific diagram, botanical illustration, and abstract drawing.

Photography by Masaki Ogawa.

Photographed against a neutral grey ground, a branch with a subtle fork is encircled by a continuous 3D-printed contour — a single flowing line that traces its silhouette in a series of concentric offsets, like a topographic map rendered in white. The piece makes visible what the eye might otherwise miss: the particular, irreducible character of one branch's form.

Photography by Masaki Ogawa.

A single branch and its 3D-printed parallel are presented side by side against grey: on one side, the original curved stem in dark weathered wood; on the other, a white printed counterpart that faithfully follows its path before fanning into a layered cascade of progressively shorter offshoots. The piece reads as both portrait of the branch and speculative extension of it.

Photography by Masaki Ogawa.

A forked branch is traced by a white 3D-printed outline that follows its entire silhouette closely, including a small spiral flourish at one of its nodes — as if the technology paused to dwell on a particular detail before continuing. The result feels less like a design intervention than an act of close looking made physical.

Photography by Masaki Ogawa.

A naturally twisted branch is paired with a white 3D-printed counterpart that mirrors and interweaves with it along its full length, the two forms coiling around each other like a double helix. Against the neutral grey ground, the piece reads as both scientific diagram and intimate exchange — two distinct entities in continuous, unhurried conversation.

Photography by Masaki Ogawa.

A spare, close-up view of a curved branch resting on the ancient floor, its two ends marked by small white 3D-printed crosses — minimal, almost accidental interventions that feel more like notations than design. The deep warm tones of the terracotta and the darkness of the wood give the image a composed, still quality.

Lesson in Relations, installation view, Milan Design Week 2026. Photography by Takumi Ota.

One of the series' most visually arresting pieces: a long, gently curving branch with a continuous white 3D-printed sinusoidal form coiling along its entire length, beginning and ending in free air. Lying on the warm terracotta beside the church door, the object reads simultaneously as natural specimen and drawn line.

Lesson in Relations, installation view, Milan Design Week 2026. Photography by Takumi Ota.

One of the exhibition's most visually commanding pieces: a dark forked branch extends into an elaborate white 3D-printed canopy of radiating spurs, mimicking — and amplifying — the branching logic of the wood itself. The contrast between the rough, bark-covered stem and the crisp geometric precision of the printed form is at its sharpest here, the two materials in genuine dialogue rather than opposition.

Lesson in Relations, installation view, Milan Design Week 2026. Photography by Takumi Ota.

This message is thoughtfully amplified by the choice of venue and installation set-up. Chiesa di San Bernardino alle Monache is a small jewel of 15th-century late Gothic architecture, its interior graced by beautifully restored early 16th-century frescoes depicting biblical scenes like the Flight into Egypt, the Nativity and the Annunciation. Rather than compete for attention by using vitrines, plinths or pedestals, the pieces lie directly on the ancient terracotta floor, scattered like the aftermath of an act of God.

More than a nod to their provenance as branches gathered from the forest floor, the austerity of this set-up shapes the visitor’s experience: to see the pieces properly, you have to lower your gaze, even crouch if you want to examine them in detail. In a space designed to direct the eye upward, toward the frescoes and their lofty narratives of faith and transcendence, the exhibition insists on the opposite gesture: here, the sacred thing is the humble branch. The invitation is to look down, to lean in, to notice what is right in front of you and underfoot. It's a subtle but rather pointed reminder that the most consequential relationships are often the ones we overlook.

A full view of the church interior looking toward the apse, where a gilded altarpiece and crucifix preside over richly frescoed walls. On the ancient terracotta floor below, TAKT PROJECT's branch-based objects lie scattered without plinths or pedestals, their white 3D-printed forms catching the raking light. The juxtaposition of centuries-old devotional art and humble found branches is quietly arresting.

Lesson in Relations, installation view, Milan Design Week 2026. Photography by Takumi Ota.

A view of the church floor reveals two of TAKT PROJECT's pieces alongside small phrases printed directly on the terracotta in dotted text — a quietly poetic detail that extends the work beyond the objects themselves. The warm rose-brown of the ancient tiles sets off the pale 3D-printed forms, giving the whole scene the quality of an annotated field study

Lesson in Relations, installation view, Milan Design Week 2026. Photography by Takumi Ota.

In the softly lit nave, a slender branch rests on the floor alongside a small white 3D-printed cone, while a wall-mounted Calvary group of wooden figures occupies the dim background. The composition draws a quiet visual rhyme between the two: one an age-old act of devotion, the other a contemporary gesture of attention toward the natural world.

Lesson in Relations, installation view, Milan Design Week 2026. Photography by Takumi Ota.

In the foreground, a cluster of twigs bound together into a slender pyramidal form by horizontal 3D-printed rings stands upright on the terracotta floor — one of the few pieces in the series that rises rather than lies flat. Behind it, a fully white 3D-printed branch and other pieces populate the nave, with a devotional painting visible in the far background.

Lesson in Relations, installation view, Milan Design Week 2026. Photography by Takumi Ota.

One of the exhibition's most visually commanding pieces: a dark forked branch extends into an elaborate white 3D-printed canopy of radiating spurs, mimicking — and amplifying — the branching logic of the wood itself. The contrast between the rough, bark-covered stem and the crisp geometric precision of the printed form is at its sharpest here, the two materials in genuine dialogue rather than opposition.

Lesson in Relations, installation view, Milan Design Week 2026. Photography by Takumi Ota.

Churches have always been places where lessons are taught, about how to live, how to relate to the world, what deserves our reverence. It feels right, then, that this one should host an exhibition whose lesson is precisely that: for the act of making to be sustainable, we must first learn to listen—to materials before they become materials, and to the environments from which they come. That, Yoshiizumi suggests, is not a lesser form of making; it’s “an act of intelligence and of essential beauty”.

  • A gently kinked branch is enclosed within a single white 3D-printed outline — a slender, slightly irregular oval that traces its overall silhouette from a distance, like a frame drawn in response to what it contains. The gap between branch and line is as considered as the line itself, giving the piece a quiet, meditative spaciousness.

    Photography by Masaki Ogawa.

  • One of the series' most economical interventions: a dark, elegantly branching form against grey, with a single short arc of white 3D-printed material bridging two of its upper forks like a taut bowstring. The restraint is deliberate and assured — the smallest possible addition that changes everything about how the branch is read.

    Photography by Masaki Ogawa.

  • A textured branch anchors two 3D-printed white circles of different sizes — one large, one small — connected by a continuous looping line that winds through the branch's nodes. Against the neutral grey ground the composition has the spare clarity of a diagram, yet the irregularity of the wood keeps it firmly rooted in the sensory world.

    Photography by Masaki Ogawa.

  • Against a cool grey ground, a forked branch is threaded through a perfect white 3D-printed circle, the geometric form sitting at the junction of the two arms like a found ring. The composition has an almost calligraphic quality — dark organic line intersecting crisp white geometry — and reads as effortlessly as a drawn mark.

    Photography by Masaki Ogawa.

A gracefully curved branch terminates in a delicate 3D-printed mesh canopy, its latticed white surface evoking both a leaf and an insect wing. The gradual transition from rough, lichen-flecked bark to the airy precision of the printed form is one of the series' most elegant, the natural and the digital completing each other without competition.

Photography by Masaki Ogawa.

A tall white exhibition scroll bearing TAKT PROJECT's text hangs against the aged red brick of the church's exterior, its crisp minimalism quietly contrasting the worn masonry. At the base, a few loose branches lie scattered on the stone forecourt — an unassuming first hint at what awaits inside.

Lesson in Relations, installation view, Milan Design Week 2026. Photography by Takumi Ota.

TAKT PROJECT Turns Humble Branches into a Quiet Meditation on Making at Milan Design Week 2026