Base: Copenhagen, Denmark

Material Position: Biological material as 3D printing substrate, hand-sculpted into final form.

Award Reading: Russo Betak took first prize at the SaloneSatellite Award 2026 for Nippon, from the Ark collection. The project begins with seashells: ground, mixed into a printable composite and 3D printed into a pendant lamp form, then hand-sculpted layer by layer until the surface reveals the grain of the material and the decisions of the hand that finished it. The result is a tiered pendant lamp in warm cream tones whose stacked horizontal panels read, at distance, as architecture — volumes that hold and diffuse light simultaneously. At close range, the texture tells the full story of its making: the origin in the shell, the pressure of the print, the mark of the hand. The jury recognised its material experimentation and its translation into a refined and luminous form, two things that are usually in tension and are here resolved.

Why it matters: Nippon demonstrates what becomes possible when a designer treats a biological material not as surface finish but as structural argument. The shell is not decoration. It is the reason the lamp exists in this form and no other. In the SaloneSatellite reading, this is the operating logic of the most serious emerging design: the material sets the terms, and the maker’s knowledge is the capacity to follow them.

Base: Rotterdam, Netherlands

Material Position: Computational design applied to ceramic extrusion, producing facade tiles in which no two pieces are identical.

Award Reading: IOUS Studio took second prize at the SaloneSatellite Award 2026 for 3DP Ceramic Tiles. The studio was founded in Rotterdam by Sol Sanchez Cimarelli and Agustin Ros, both Argentinian-born architects who graduated from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires before working across offices in Dubai, Rome, Berlin and Rotterdam. Their 3DP Ceramic Tiles system uses robotic clay extrusion to produce exterior facade tiles whose surface texture is determined by an algorithm responsive to structural requirements: the form that emerges is both functionally optimal and visually specific to its position in the facade. The tiles shown at SaloneSatellite 2026 demonstrate the system across three material registers — a dense white interlocking surface, a teal glaze with layered relief, a pale grey with fine horizontal striations — each produced from the same computational logic applied to different clay bodies. The terracotta edge left exposed on each tile is not a detail. It is a declaration: the clay knows what it is.

Why it matters: What IOUS Studio proposes is a facade architecture in which no two tiles are identical and every tile is the direct output of its material conditions. The studio is currently establishing the first large-scale ceramic and 3D printing lab in Latin America in Buenos Aires, bringing this production logic to a new geography. In the SaloneSatellite reading, 3DP Ceramic Tiles holds both registers simultaneously: the precision of the algorithm and the irreducible variability of the clay. That combination is where the most interesting architecture of the coming decade is forming.

Base: Germany

Material Position: A mechanical device that reads object surfaces and carves their topography back into ceramic.

Award Reading: Jüngerkühn took third prize at the SaloneSatellite Award 2026 for Soft Touch. The project is a device: a twin-axis mechanical arm mounted over a rotating turntable, fitted with a sensor that reads the surface of any object placed beneath it. The arm records the topography of the surface in real time and translates that recording into a cutting path applied to a second object on the same turntable. For the SaloneSatellite presentation, the studio placed hand-formed porcelain vases beneath the arm. The machine read their surfaces and carved the pattern it found back into the clay, each vase receiving a unique incised relief determined entirely by its own form. The result is a series of vessels in which pink, cream and terracotta glazes move in concentric topographic lines, every piece different, none of them possible without the machine listening to what the hand had made first.

Why it matters: Soft Touch does not automate ceramics. It uses automation to listen to what a ceramic already is. Where most machine-assisted design imposes a form determined before the material is touched, Jüngerkühn’s device responds to the form the material has already taken. Every vase in the series is unique because every hand-formed vessel it read was unique. In the SaloneSatellite reading, this is a precise model for how computation and craft can operate in relation rather than in hierarchy.

Base: Santiago, Chile

Material Position: Ancestral horsehair weaving from Rari combined with 3D-printed structural components.

Award Reading: Nicolás Romero of Aiko Design received a Special Mention at the SaloneSatellite Award 2026 for Números. The studio draws from the crin tradition of Rari, a village of around 600 people in the Maule region of Chile, in the foothills of the Andes, where horsehair weaving has been practiced for over 200 years and passed from mother to daughter across generations. The technique involves weaving horsehair strand by strand over a frame of ixtle, a plant fibre imported from Mexico, building three-dimensional forms without tools: only hands, scissors and a needle. Números is a floor lamp: a tall totem of stacked geometric wicker and crin modules, each one a different weave pattern from the Rari tradition, the whole column lit from within so that light passes through the interstices of the woven structure and turns the lamp into a luminous catalogue of the hand techniques it carries. The structural components connecting the modules are 3D printed, allowing the handmade forms to be assembled without adhesive.

Why it matters: The jury recognised Números for the way its symbolic figure holds both industrial production and meticulous craft as simultaneous conditions rather than alternatives. The lamp stands as a record of what the hands in Rari know and what computation makes possible when it works in their service rather than in their place. In the SaloneSatellite reading, Aiko Design represents the Local Soul logic at its most precise: a production philosophy rooted in a specific geography, a specific material and a specific community of makers, brought into the global conversation without losing the specificity that gives it value. Aiko Design received a month-long design residency at the Róng Design Library in Hangzhou, China.

Base: China

Material Position: Fiberglass arranged in a lace-like mesh structure, fired without resin to preserve translucency and fragility.

Award Reading: Yixian Wang received a Special Mention at the SaloneSatellite Award 2026 for Foggy. The project investigates fiberglass at the boundary between industrial process and organic form. Wang arranges fiberglass strands into a lace-like mesh structure and fires the vessel without resin, so that the material retains its translucency and fragility rather than hardening into a composite. The result is a dome-shaped vessel that holds its form while remaining visually permeable: light passes through the mesh, the surface reads as fog or as the finest gauze, and the dried botanical placed inside becomes visible through the structure as though the vessel were made of air. The process treats fiberglass as a material with its own grain and behaviour, not as a substrate for other properties.

Why it matters: The jury recognised Foggy for reinterpreting the visual properties of a material the medium had not previously expressed this way. Fiberglass is an industrial material designed for opacity and structural performance. Wang’s process finds in it a delicacy that its industrial context had never required it to produce. This is the argument that runs through all five winning projects: the knowledge of what a material can do when it is not asked to be something else. Yixian Wang received a month-long design residency at the Róng Design Library in Hangzhou, China.