In March 2019, the XXII Triennale di Milano opened under the direction of its new president, Stefano Boeri, in a city seeking to balance economic and urban growth against ecological goals. As Italy's financial capital, Milan has been the model for climate action in which corporate investment in sustainable development has included Boeri's own well-publicized residential towers, Bosco Verticale (2014), as part of the new Porta Nuova district. This area includes luxury housing units, retail properties, and office buildings, including the UniCredit Tower (2012), the tallest skyscraper in Italy; it is also home to a new botanical park, the Library of Trees (2019). In this urban context of green gentrification, the Triennale's exhibition Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival provided an urgent provocation, showing how design in the Anthropocene must go beyond matter, material, and form to reassess a social contract threatened by the world's precarious environmental state.

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