Punk Witch is the new Annabel Karim Kassar’s architecture of knowledge

Can we transform what begins as a constraint – the need to accommodate over 10,000 books from the collection of George Kerevan (Scottish journalist, economist, and politician) – to a project’s generative device? Can we find a way to translate what an object of design is in an interior, a spatial system? And being truthful to the idea of a library, in constant evolution, with a social and intellectual path to follow?

In the dense choreography of Milan Design Week 2026, where interiors often collapse into image and objects into spectacle, Punk Witch by Annabel Karim Kassar stands apart by doing something deceptively simple: reorganizing space from the inside out. Set within a former modernist showroom in Brera, originally designed by Armando Ronca, the project proposes a radical inversion of domestic logic – imagining a house around a library, rather than the other way around.

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Annabel Karim Kassar’s portrait

Punk Witch ©Annabel Karim Kassar

Punk Witch ©Annabel Karim Kassar

Punk Witch © Annabel Karim Kassar

Punk Witch © Annabel Karim Kassar

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The title itself sets the tone, and “Punk” signals rupture, a refusal of typological conventions, while “Witch” introduces something more elusive, almost anti-rational – an architecture that operates through atmosphere, intuition, and affect. With this design, Kassar is staging a condition in which knowledge, domesticity, and interaction collapse into one another, which at its core stands a single, decisive gesture: an approximately 30-meter-long brushed metal bookshelf that runs through the apartment, defining itself as an infrastructure more than furniture.

The shelf determines the geometry of the space, producing rooms as a by-product rather than a starting point. Bedrooms, study areas, and service spaces are carved out of its linear logic, creating a sequence that is neither fully open nor traditionally enclosed.

In this sense, the project quietly extends and subverts the legacy of modernism, and where modernist interiors often pursued clarity through separation – function articulated in discrete zones – Kassar introduces density and overlap. Circulation is embedded within storage, and thresholds are implied rather than fixed. So, the apartment becomes a continuous field structured by alignment, adjacency, and interruption.

This strategy resonates with earlier radical proposals that treated architecture as an open system rather than a fixed object. One might think of Cedric Price and his unbuilt Fun Palace, where program and structure were conceived as adaptable frameworks, or the speculative interiors of Superstudio, in which the domestic environment dissolved into an abstract infrastructural grid. Kassar’s project operates at a different scale and with a different sensibility, yet shares a similar intuition, the one that architecture can organise relationships rather than simply contain them. In this case, also, if the bookshelf provides the project’s structural backbone, materials articulate its narrative. 

Annabel Karim Kassar’s practice has long been defined by a transnational sensibility – moving between France, Lebanon, Morocco, the United Kingdom and the UAE – and here that geography is translated into a layered interior language. Textiles sourced from Lebanese markets sit next to handcrafted elements from Tripoli, and hand-painted wallpapers produced in Saint-Pandelon are installed according to the French “domino” tradition – these are not decorative gestures but temporal markers, embedding different cultural rhythms within the same space.

In the end, the collaboration with Swiss ceramist Bérengère Lux reinforces this approach, because her works, defined by stratified surfaces and a pronounced tactility, extend the architectural logic into the scale of objects, and boundaries are in this way able to blur – and furniture, to become landscape, surfaces to become carriers of depth.

Kassar has often described her work as producing “speaking architectures” – spaces that communicate through texture, light, and spatial sequencing rather than formal rhetoric. This positions her at an interesting intersection between the discipline of architecture and a more installation-driven, almost scenographic approach. We clearly remember her 2022 Lebanese House installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where the architect already explored domestic space as a cultural and political construct, layering memory and identity through collective experience. Punk Witch pushes this investigation further, shifting from representation to inhabitation.

Crucially, the project does not stop at spatial organisation, describing the real form of use – in front of the library, a seven-metre composition of stainless steel and wood tables hosts The Milan Conversations, a program curated by Francesca Grassi and directed by Kerevan. Writers, architects, and thinkers – including Nigel Coates and Amedeo Balbi – are invited to engage with a deliberately open question: Is Europe still creative? The format, intentionally informal, is structured around a shared breakfast rather than a conventional talk, where the spatial configuration – table in front of the bookshelf – turns the library into both backdrop and participant, suggesting that knowledge is not static but activated through exchange.

This emphasis on interaction recalls another lineage of experimental practice, one in which space is understood as a platform for social production. From the participatory environments of the 1960s to more recent discourses around relational architecture, the focus shifts from object to event, and Kassar’s contribution lies in grounding this ambition within a tangible, inhabitable framework – neither purely speculative nor entirely functional. 

The project’s final gesture is perhaps its most disarming, replacing carpets with grass. This subtle, almost understated, shifts the entire reading of the space, and interiors becomes landscape, domesticity acquires an ecological dimension, the boundary between inside and outside are ambiguous, open to interpretation and use. A condition that extends beyond the apartment itself, using Punk Witch to establish a dialogue with Kassar’s parallel installation, Garden of Hesperides, at the Orto Botanico di Brera. If the former constructs an architecture of knowledge, the latter unfolds as a spatial narrative between myth and landscape mapping a trajectory across the city, linking interiority and exteriority, archive and imagination.

Within the broader context of Milan Design Week – still largely oriented around objects, brands, controlled experiences – the work of Annabel Karim Kassar feels deliberately misaligned, where there is no single focal point, no immediately legible image. In asking for time, for moving, for reading, for listening, it repositions the domestic interior as a site of production and not just a human retreat, where knowledge is spatialized and defines entirely environments and their way of living inside them.

A hybrid condition – part house, part library, part forum, where thinking is part of living and reflecting part of shaping a space. The question, then, is less whether Europe is still creative, as posed by the conversations hosted within the space, and more whether architecture can still act as a critical tool for organizing that creativity.