Crosby Studios Brings Bold Design to New York's World Cup Pop-Up Exhibition
As the excitement of the 2026 FIFA World Cup sweeps across North America, design is proving just as electrifying as the sport itself. New York City has become home to one of the tournament's most visually striking activations — a pop-up exhibition called Home of Football, outfitted by the internationally acclaimed Crosby Studios, led by designer Harry Nuriev. The studio has transformed the space with a signature move: an immersive, floor-to-ceiling installation anchored by a vivid, bright-green carpet that blurs the line between interior design and spectacle.
Who Is Harry Nuriev and Crosby Studios?
Harry Nuriev is a Russian-born, New York and Paris-based designer who founded Crosby Studios, a creative practice known for its provocative, maximalist aesthetic and fearless use of color. The studio has built a global reputation by turning everyday spaces into high-concept environments that challenge conventional ideas of comfort, function, and beauty. From fur-lined interiors to inflatable furniture collections, Nuriev consistently pushes material and spatial boundaries.
Crosby Studios has worked with some of the world's most recognizable brands and cultural institutions, yet maintains an unmistakably independent creative voice. The studio's work frequently sits at the intersection of fashion, art, and architecture — making it a natural partner for an event as culturally charged as the FIFA World Cup.
The Home of Football Exhibition: A Concept Rooted in Energy
The Home of Football pop-up in New York City is designed to celebrate the global spectacle of the World Cup while offering fans an immersive, design-forward experience in the heart of one of the world's most design-conscious cities. Rather than relying on conventional sports branding or predictable exhibition aesthetics, the organizers turned to Crosby Studios to create something far more unexpected.
The result is a space that feels less like a traditional fan activation and more like stepping inside a living, breathing design statement. At the center of this vision is the studio's bold deployment of bright-green carpet — a material choice that immediately evokes the football pitch while transforming it into something entirely new through scale, saturation, and repetition.
The Design Language: Green as More Than a Color
In design, color is rarely neutral, and Nuriev understands this better than most. The choice of bright green for the Home of Football installation is simultaneously obvious and subversive. Green is, of course, the color of the football field — but here it is amplified, saturated, and spread across surfaces in a way that denaturalizes it from its sporting context and reimagines it as a design element in its own right.
The carpet wraps across floors and potentially up walls and furnishings, creating a cohesive, enveloping environment that is immediately photogenic and deeply immersive. This kind of total-environment design is a hallmark of Nuriev's approach — the idea that a space should consume the visitor rather than simply surround them.
- The bright-green carpet references the football pitch in a bold, abstracted way.
- The saturated color palette creates a visually consistent, highly shareable aesthetic.
- The material choice grounds the space in texture and tactility, softening what could otherwise feel like a corporate activation.
- The installation reflects Crosby Studios' broader commitment to using familiar materials in unfamiliar ways.
Why Design-Forward Activations Matter in Sports Culture
The decision to bring a studio like Crosby Studios into a World Cup activation signals a broader shift in how major sporting events are thinking about design, space, and audience experience. The modern sports fan — particularly the younger, design-literate audience that organizations like FIFA are increasingly targeting — expects more than merchandise tables and branded photo walls. They want environments worth experiencing, documenting, and talking about.
In an era where the visual impact of a space can travel globally within minutes through social media, the design of an exhibition or pop-up is as much a marketing tool as it is an aesthetic statement. Commissioning Harry Nuriev and Crosby Studios ensures the Home of Football space has genuine cultural currency — the kind that cannot be manufactured through conventional event production alone.
This approach also connects football to a broader world of contemporary culture: fashion, art, interior design, and lifestyle. It reinforces the idea that the World Cup is not just a sporting tournament but a global cultural moment that touches every creative discipline.
New York City as the Perfect Backdrop
Staging this kind of bold design intervention in New York City makes perfect sense. As one of the 2026 World Cup host cities — with matches scheduled at MetLife Stadium in nearby New Jersey — New York brings together an audience that is simultaneously global and intensely local, deeply sports-passionate and highly design-aware. The city's appetite for creative experiences, combined with its massive international footfall during the tournament, gives the Home of Football installation maximum exposure and relevance.
Crosby Studios, with its strong roots in both New York and the broader international design conversation, is ideally positioned to speak to this audience. The studio's aesthetic sensibility resonates with the city's creative community while its global profile ensures the project attracts attention far beyond New York's borders.
A New Chapter for Sports and Interior Design
The Home of Football pop-up by Crosby Studios is more than a well-designed room. It represents a meaningful convergence of sports culture and the design world — a collaboration that takes both seriously and elevates each through the other. Harry Nuriev's signature bright-green carpet installation gives visitors something genuinely memorable: an environment that feels as alive and energetic as the tournament it celebrates.
As the 2026 FIFA World Cup continues to unfold across North America, the Home of Football exhibition stands as a reminder that the spaces in which we celebrate sport can be as inspired and inventive as the sport itself. For fans of both football and design, it is a destination not to be missed.