Sustainability, Museums, and Codes of Exhibition Design. History and Counter-History of Exhibition Design

Today, culture is considered the fourth pillar of sustainability. It is therefore essential to address this theme in relation to museums, which are bastions of culture and potentially a driving sector for global sustainable development. The recent inclusion of sustainability in 2022 ICOM’s definition of a museum highlights the need to rethink exhibition design as a systemic design lever. On the one hand, museums are undergoing a radical transition facing many challenges; on the other, we must ask how to intervene more effectively. This paper analyzes the field of temporary museum exhibitions and identifies recurring principles, the ‘three codes of exhibit design’, emerging from the history of exhibition design discipline. In line with Bruno Zevi’s view of history as a tool for present-day action, this study examines 102 case studies (1927 to 2022) through the contemporary lens of sustainability. The goal is to define a fourth, essential design code: the Environment Code, which complements and integrates the existing three. This research proposes a counter-historical reading of exhibition projects as a methodological and operative tool to define a new sustainable methodology, establishing the Environment Code as a generative hypothesis for the future of exhibition design. Today, sustainability essentially means taking care of future needs, addressing the environmental, economic, and social dimensions (Goodland, 1995). However, as described in Culture: Fourth Pillar of Sustainable Development (Wiktor, 2020), these three aspects no longer capture all the dimensions of our global societies. The cultural dimension is therefore proposed as a fundamental fourth pillar of sustainable development. As Duxbury (2019) points out, “imagining transformation requires a deeper understanding of how people shift their worldviews and shape new modes of engagement with sustainability”. Given these premises, it is necessary to address sustainability in relation to institutions whose core activity revolves around culture: museums. A pivotal moment in this direction was the 2022 ICOM General Conference in Prague, where the definition of ‘museum’ was updated to explicitly include sustainability as a founding value (ICOM, 2022). There are approximately 95.000 museums worldwide, welcoming between 1 and 2 billion visitors each year. These institutions clearly have the potential to support sustainable development. This paper discusses the current status of museums regarding sustainability, highlighting in particular the sector’s weak- nesses in the area of exhibition design. The aim is to provide a new interpretive framework for contemporary museum exhibitions by identifying three recurring constants, the Codes of Exhibition Design, and by introducing a fourth, the Environment Code, through a critical reading of the History of Exhibition Design.