Architectures of Display examines exhibition design as an arena where spatial logics, institutional frameworks, art practices, and publics confront one another. The seminar approaches display not as a neutral backdrop, but as a political and material practice shaped by tourism, digital mediation, economies of culture, and shifting conditions of access, often operating against the backdrop of political crisis and instability.

Drawing on the Italian tradition of allestimento, the course traces a genealogy of the white Cube as both an ideological space and branded aesthetic, asking why it persists across contemporary cultural production. In a moment marked by material precarity and increasing crosspollination between museums, retail, media, and spectacle, exhibition design emerges as more than background service: it frames history, produces meaning, and assembles publics.

The seminar is organized around rotating protagonists: the Display Architect, the White Cube, the Artist, the Registrar, the Curator, the Institution, the Visitor, the Label, and the Installer —treating exhibition making as a continuous negotiation between competing spatial, technical, political, and ideological agendas.

Today, display operates across art fairs, biennales, national pavilions, fashion flagship stores, political stages, diplomatic receptions, presidential offices and online galleries. Exhibition design becomes a lens through which to read the politics of attention, the architectures of public life, and the codes through which value, taste, legitimacy, and cultural authority are constructed and circulated.