Sustainability, Museums, and Codes 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 method- ological and operative tool to define a new sustainable methodology, establishing the Environment Code as a generative hypothesis for the future of exhibition design.