ARSHAM AND KOHLER WALKED THROUGH PALAZZO DEL SENATO

## A Centuries-Old Senate Chamber and a Faucet Company Walk Into a Tunnel Daniel Arsham re-shared archive footage of 'Divided Layers' on May 21, 2026, four years after the installation closed at Palazzo del Senato in Milan. The original work ran during Milan Design Week 2022 as a commissioned collaboration with Kohler, the 152-year-old Wisconsin plumbing and bathroom fixtures manufacturer. The pairing should not have worked. A centuries-old government building in Milan and an American company best known for kitchen sinks. The Fuorisalone Award jury, which selects the most significant projects of Milan Design Week each spring, said it did. The installation was a walkable tunnel. Stacked layers of resin, plaster, and structural fiber compressed into geological strata you could step inside. A reflective pool sat beneath the opening. Light hit the pool, bounced into the layered ceiling, and visitors moving through reported the floor felt like it kept extending downward. Trompe l'oeil at architectural scale. ## Topographic Maps Compressed Into Walls You Could Touch Arsham's stated reference points for 'Divided Layers' were three: geological core samples, USGS topographic contour maps, and the digital contour lines rendered by 3D scanning software. The structure made each visible at the same time. Cross-sections of stratified material exposed banded patterns the way a sliced sedimentary rock does. Rendered at human scale, the layers read as both natural deposits and computer output. The translation between the two is the work. Kohler's brand brief reportedly asked for an installation that connected the company's century-and-a-half of water and stone history to contemporary art. Arsham's solution was to build the layers in the language of his existing practice: eroded sculpture, fictional archaeology, the gesture of finding something old that never existed. Kohler funded the production. The studio scaled it to the 19th-century neoclassical hall. ## Palazzo del Senato, 1565. The Building Already Did the Heavy Lifting. The Palazzo del Senato was designed by Fabio Mangone in 1565 and completed by Francesco Maria Richini in 1640. It housed the Habsburg Senate and now functions as the Italian State Archive. The interior stone is Trani marble. The columns are Doric. Arsham's structure was placed in the central cortile, the open courtyard, with one entrance through the colonnade and an exit on the opposite side. The contrast did half the curatorial work. A futuristic synthetic object inside a 460-year-old courtyard. [Finally Offline previously documented Arsham's installation work at architectural scale](/quick/daniel-arsham-turned-two-hollow-heads-into-a-walkable-architecture-mokcbjg8) when his Tinworks Art commission in Bozeman, Montana paired two hollow head sculptures into a structure you could walk between. 'Divided Layers' arrived a year earlier and pointed the same direction. Arsham is not interested in objects to look at. He is interested in architectures to enter. ## The Fuorisalone Award Recognized Something Specific The Fuorisalone Award is given annually during Milan Design Week to the most significant off-site installation across the city. Past winners include the 2019 Hermes Tools for Life pavilion, the 2017 COS x Studio Swine forest installation, and the 2014 Lexus AMAZING IN MOTION sculpture. The jury rotates but the criteria stay consistent: scale, public access, and conceptual cohesion. 'Divided Layers' won the 2022 prize. Kohler's name appeared on every press credit beside Arsham's. The award mattered to Kohler because it shifted the company's design profile from product to patron. The company had already commissioned the Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin in 1967, but its Milan work was the first to win an art-world prize for the brand directly. Corporate sponsorship of an art installation, paying off in editorial coverage worth significantly more than the installation cost. ## Arsham Re-Shared the Archive on a Thursday for a Reason Re-shares from the Arsham Studio archive are rarely random. The studio has been seeding 2022-era work across Instagram for the past six weeks, ahead of what staff confirmed in late April is a major retrospective announcement coming June 2026. [Wall Excavation, the 300-foot installation that carved walls into the shape of a human figure](/quick/daniel-arsham-wall-excavation-carved-300-feet-of-walls-into-a-human-form-mo0ci11t), got a similar archive re-share treatment in April. The pattern: prime the audience with the immersive work first, announce the show second. The Kohler collaboration sits at the center of Arsham's commercial practice the way Porsche sits at the center of his automotive practice. Both were repeat clients. Both funded museum-grade work. Both let the studio scale beyond gallery footprints. The Kohler partnership produced four projects between 2019 and 2024, of which 'Divided Layers' was the most ambitious. The retrospective will need them all. ## Watch June Carefully The temperature read on this archive post: a retrospective announcement is loaded and the studio is testing which works to lead with. 'Divided Layers' did 4.2 million Instagram views within 36 hours of the re-share, according to Arsham Studio's social dashboard data shared in an industry newsletter on May 22. That number puts the Kohler work in the top three of Arsham's all-time archive performance, behind the Porsche 911 Eroded sculpture and the Pokemon crystallized bulbasaur. The retrospective will include all three. The June announcement will tell the rest of the story. The Senate Palace sat there for 460 years before Arsham used it. It will be there long after the layered tunnel is gone.