WILLO PERRON’S COLOR THEORY

Wassily Kandinsky believed that color could stir the soul — that blue brought spiritual calm, while yellow, especially in its brightest forms, could verge on disturbing. He wrote of a synesthetic world where hues acted like musical notes: “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings.”

Using that as a kind of tuning fork, Canadian designer Willo Perron built an alternate spectrum with Checkered Future: Frequency Manifest, an immersive installation housed inside the Triennale Milano, Milan’s official museum for design. A collaboration with Vans’s OTW line for the launch of the Old Skool 36 FM — a shoe inspired by sound waves and frequencies — Perron’s installation sought not just to visualize sound, but to let architecture itself respond to it.

Inverting the usual dynamic between sound and space, Perron asked what it might look like if architecture bent to music’s emotional tone. “How can a low frequency feel scary?” he asked. “How can a high one feel gleeful?” The answers played out across the installation: the Triennale’s towering 1930s ceilings rising further via mirrored panels, saturated lights deepening with an especially ominous moment of Tim Hecker’s score.

It was a busy Milan Design Week for Perron. Elsewhere in the city, he debuted a new lounge chair for Knoll and a series of side tables and mirrors for NO GA — solid, elegant objects that extended his minimal but sensorial design language. But Checkered Future was less object, more experience — both technical and deeply emotional, a convergence Perron knows well. Having designed iconic stages for Rihanna and Drake, he’s adept at manipulating atmospheres through mirrors, fog, and light. But Checkered Future felt less like a pop spectacle and more like a lucid dream — or perhaps a rave just before the comedown. One moment you were slanted back on a triangular metal chaise in a room of moving grids and panels; the next, the ceiling opened up to reveal beams of light.

“It’s like the ocean,” Perron said, when asked why tall ceilings evoke such awe. “Uninterrupted space is a luxury.” And that’s what this installation offered — a rare pause. Despite being one of Milan Design Week’s most talked-about events (and certainly one of its loudest — especially after Björk DJ’d later that night, in front of an audience of thousands), Checkered Future offered a surprisingly meditative few moments. Whether or not you noticed the new Vans sneaker on display, this was one of the few moments during the week that made space for introspection, in a city — and a design week — increasingly built on sensory overload. At one point, as the mirrors parted and a flood of light fell from above, it felt like something sacred had cracked open — or maybe it was just good lighting. Either way, it worked.