TRELLIS Reversible Architectures for Museum Exhibitions

Exhibition design has always mirrored historical and environmental conditions. From the Wunderkammer to the Louvre, from the Guggenheim to the great Expositions, these spaces are not simply places where one displays and another consumes; rather, they are sites of assembly where forms of sociality and collectivity can emerge, and where assumptions taken for granted before entering may be unsettled. A walk through a museum is never passive: by moving through it, the visitor already participates in the debate surrounding what is on display. The museum embodies a paradox: it is owned by someone, yet it speaks to and about everyone. It is therefore unsurprising that these spaces -often articulated through ephemeral architectures- have increasingly absorbed critical themes. From reflections on consumerism to those on climate justice and decolonization, contemporary exhibition design portrays a fragmented present and an obscured future. We live in an age of uncertainty , in which we grope our way through ruins and climate collapse. In this context, the museum becomes a device for representing a blurred world, akin to the one described by Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying. The new one struggles to be born. And in this chiaroscuro, monsters emerge.” The phrase, reproduced in neon by the artist collective Claire Fontaine for the 2019 Biennale Arcipelago Mediterraneo at the ZAC in Palermo, reads as a declaration of intent: uncertainty is the condition to be narrated in this century, and exhibition spaces must become spaces of this story. It could be argued that this shift -now widely acknowledged- began when the museum came to be understood as a systemic object composed of interrelated parts. From spatial distribution to systems of display, from joints to materials, exhibition design is an architectural project that must not disappear behind the themes it presents or, worse, contradict the principles it claims to uphold . Rather than functioning as neutral backdrop, the exhibition apparatus becomes a "narrative landscape" where space itself acts as meaning-generator (Borsotti, 2024). We cannot address environmental issues in purely technicist terms, imagining that attaching prosthetic devices to buildings is enough to mitigate impact. Rather, we must ask what Ecological Transition truly entails and what it means to ground our projects in it. If it is to become a foundational substratum, we cannot ignore that exhibitions are commonly conceived as temporary while generating permanent environmental effects. At the same time, disciplinary fragmentation among architecture, scenography, and exhibition design has dispersed theoretical reflection on these spaces. In a moment when architecture risks losing contact with the materiality of construction , it is crucial to reconsider the aesthetics of sustainable exhibition design, envisioning forms that reconnect morphology and materiality. When the exhibition apparatus -both material and immaterial- takes these aspects into account, systems of reversible and adaptable architecture emerge clearly defined, functional, even experimental. The detail of Carlo Scarpa, the modular rigor of Peter Zumthor; the metal grids of Yona Friedman, the sculptural lightness of Edoardo Tresoldi; the compositions of Antonio Ravalli and Margherita Palli. If this may seem like a digression, the architectural project itself ultimately becomes the ground on which the thesis is tested. This is the context in which my doctoral research takes shape. Investigating exhibition design, it adopts the project as a tool for navigating uncertainty. By synthesizing theory, history, and practical experience in sustainable exhibition design, the research aims to produce a contribution relevant to both scholarship and practice. Within this framework, theories and projects can be examined in parallel. Alongside the construction of a historical-critical and theoretical foundation, the research develops exhibition projects for two case studies in Sicily, each defined by profoundly different conditions: one within the interior of a historic building, the other set within a rural landscape of olive and citrus trees; one devoted to staging the works of an eclectic painter, the other conceived as a landscape intervention. These cases offer a unique opportunity to reflect on architecture as situated knowledge. Working in Sicily -a territory shaped by centuries of cultural stratification- means acknowledging a genius loci without assuming that site-specific solutions are inherently definitive. The question becomes how architecture can remain accountable to local conditions while responding to planetary constraints. Architecture occupies a distinctive position within situated practice: it is deeply local, bound to the physical and cultural memory of specific buildings and landscapes, yet intrinsically nomadic, sometimes designed to be dismantled, reconfigured, and transformed. This dual condition makes it a fertile ground for exploring how architectural research can move between rootedness and mobility, between measured precision and the openness demanded by ecological uncertainty. Designing reversible systems for a historic palazzo or modular structures within an agricultural landscape is not merely a technical exercise; it is the construction of a methodology that resists the illusion of universal solutions. The question, then, is not whether design for art can be sustainable, but how designing impermanence -for structures meant to age, adapt, and ultimately disappear without leaving a trace- might model a different relationship to building itself. This entails learning to read landscapes and buildings not as static backdrops, but as active participants in the design process, capable of articulating their needs rather than passively receiving imposed forms.