The WING Wins the 29th Compasso d'Oro Award

The Compasso d'Oro is the oldest design award in Europe, founded in 1954 on the initiative of Gio Ponti. In 2004, the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage declared the award's historical collection "of exceptional artistic and historical interest," placing it within the national cultural heritage. The prize is not given to the most popular or the most beautiful objects, but to those that best represent the idea of Italian design as a convergence of social, aesthetic, industrial, and economic qualities.

The WING is a museum-grade lectern case engineered for the conservation and display of books, documents, prints, photographs, and archival materials. It originated in 2023 as part of Norman Foster's retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a 2,200 square-meter exhibition designed by Norman Foster himself and executed in collaboration with Foster+Partners and the Norman Foster Foundation. The challenge was to display several hundred of the architect's personal sketchbooks and transparencies. No existing product met the requirements.

Norman Foster and a small project team developed the initial concept, then brought it to Goppion. The collaboration that followed drew on a relationship between Goppion and Foster that extends back nearly two decades, through projects at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (2007), the Cartier in Motion exhibition at the Design Museum in London (2017), the Roman museum Narbo Via in Narbonne (2021), and most recently the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi (2025). As Alessandro Goppion has said of the partnership: "To work with Norman means taking part in the most sophisticated level of architectural design, which he makes possible through the beauty of simplicity and the elegance of dialogue."

Goppion's engineering developed the concept into a fully resolved conservation instrument. The WING combines airtightness and climate control with a minimalist form optimized for legibility, using adjustable internal lighting and configurable display inclinations. The cases can be installed individually, arranged in rows, paired, wall-mounted, or configured as island displays. They are constructed entirely from recyclable materials and designed for reuse across multiple exhibitions, a direct expression of the sustainable design principles that both practices share.

Following the Pompidou retrospective, the WING cases were relocated to their permanent home at the Norman Foster Foundation in Madrid, where they continue to house the architect's working archive. The transition between two very different spatial contexts demonstrated exactly the adaptability the design was conceived to achieve.

The WING was selected for the ADI Design Index in 2024, the annual pre-selection overseen by ADI's Permanent Design Observatory that forms the pathway to the Compasso d'Oro. It was exhibited at the ADI Design Museum in Milan as part of the 29th Compasso d'Oro exhibition, which opened on April 15 to coincide with the Giornata Nazionale del Made in Italy.

In a video message recorded for the occasion, Norman Foster said: "This award is really a tribute to Italian craftsmanship and particularly to Sandro and Bruno Goppion and their extraordinary team. Congratulations."

For Goppion, this recognition affirms something the company has long practiced: that the engineering of a display case is not separate from its design, and that conservation performance and formal clarity are not competing objectives. The WING is evidence of what becomes possible when that principle is shared between architect and maker.