Framing Atmospheres: The Display Window as a Dioramic Device for Atmospheric Experimentation in Historical and Contemporary Exhibit Design Culture

Abstract

When the breath of a passerby momentarily clouds the glass of a display window that distinctly withdraws from the urban continuum, it signals the presence of a perceptual threshold, an atmospheric interruption before resuming its path. This liminal space engages the observer not through physical entry, but through a multisensory activation. While the notion of atmosphere has been extensively theorised in architecture and environmental aesthetics, its implications remain insufficiently explored within retail design, particularly in the spatial and exhibit design perspective in the display window. Contemporary shop windows aim to engage passersby beyond mere product visibility; the need to articulate and design for atmosphere becomes more urgent. This article offers an atmospheric interpretation of the display window, understood not simply as a commercial interface or spatial facade but as a dioramic device in which all elements are staged in evocative micro-environments. Through the reinterpretation of selected historical and contemporary case studies, the research positions the display window as a privileged site for atmospheric experimentation. By framing window display design as an environmental and perceptual construct, the study contributes to the broader discourse on atmospheres, advancing the atmospheric paradigm as an operative approach for contemporary exhibit and spatial design practices.

1. Introduction: Breath on Glass

When the breath of a passerby briefly fogs the glass of a shop window, breaking the continuity of the urban fabric and interrupting the perceptual inertia of everyday life, an atmosphere emerges across a subtle perceptual threshold. In this suspended moment, the city’s rhythm slows, the gaze lingers, and the surrounding space is imperceptibly transformed. The shop window thus operates as a liminal device: it does not require physical crossing, yet it activates an intimate immaterial engagement through diffuse perception. Neither a mere commercial display¹ nor a simple architectural interface, it functions as a layered narrative boundary, where public space intertwines with symbolic and imaginative worlds. From the first often accidental glance, the shop window acts as an atmospheric medium, altering the air we breathe and interrupting habitual perception, projecting the observer into a spatial and narrative elsewhere, an opening to wonder [1]. When this encounter endures, the body slows, breath is held, and the display becomes a whole atmospheric experience: an impassable passage capable of revealing another environment, another staged ecosystem.

This research investigates how the atmospheric paradigm can be applied to the shop window display in the exhibit design field, addressing three main research questions: how atmospheres can be read and interpreted in window displays; how historical and contemporary examples can be reinterpreted from an atmospheric perspective; and why the window display constitutes a privileged field for experimenting with atmospheric theory.

To answer these questions, the study re-reads selected historical and contemporary window displays through an atmospheric lens in order to better understand their spatial quality and experiential effectiveness. While these projects were not necessarily conceived within an explicit atmospheric framework, which was developed only more recently, they often already treated the window as an environmental construct, conceiving the frame and background as a dioramic immersive space. Reinterpreting such works from a contemporary perspective allows latent or previously marginal qualities to emerge, revealing their relevance to current design culture.

By framing window display staging as a strategic tool for understanding how atmospheres are produced, perceived, and culturally codified, this paper contributes to the disciplinary debate on atmospheres by focusing on a design domain that remains marginal in academic discourse, yet is highly significant for contemporary exhibition practices and sensory spatial design.

The paper is structured in four parts: first, a conceptual and metaphorical analysis of the window display is the starting point of the research; second, its positioning within contemporary theories of atmospheric aesthetics is described; third is the reinterpretation of historical and contemporary case studies, leading to the identification of key reference categories; and finally, we propose the window display as an atmospheric diorama, framing the atmospheric paradigm as an operative approach for contemporary display design practice.

The Shop Window as a Conceptual and Metaphorical Lens

In Das Passagen-Werk (1927–1940), Walter Benjamin [2] identified passages and shop windows as emblematic devices of the urban, social, and perceptual transformations produced by the nascent consumer society. Through the concept of phantasmagoria—a web of images, lights and illusions that confuses the real and the imaginary—Benjamin describes the experience of the modern city as a seductive and alienating spectacle, in which urban space is a dynamic and changing organism. The passages, covered galleries that encourage encounters between different social classes, and shop windows, especially those dedicated to luxury goods, become privileged places of observation and desire, capable of attracting the gaze around the ‘aura’ created around the product on display. Thus, just as the shop window is proposed as a paradigmatic device of modernity at that time [3], today, it is also possible to expand Benjamin’s reading, ‘from aura to atmosphere’, and conceive of the shop window from an alternative contemporary perspective, capable of capturing the perceptual, spatial, and relational dimensions it encompasses. The contemporary shop window can thus be understood not only as a tool for display and visual seduction but also as a threshold and atmospheric device—a ‘dioramic’ space, environmental and temporal, which interrupts and modulates the urban experience, revealing new forms of perception and relationships with the staged environment.

In this context, the shop window takes the form of a conceptual and metaphorical device: it is matter and a perceptual threshold; a protective envelope and a tool for enhancement; a reflective medium and, at the same time, a negation of itself; to the point of overcoming itself, which cancels out distance.

The shop window, therefore, refers first and foremost to its constituent material, namely glass, a thin transparent membrane that conditions the perception of what it separates. This element acts as a ‘frontier’ [4] (pp. 209–216), an invisible threshold that marks the passage from ‘one state to another’: it allows us to see but not to touch, it lets light through but protects the contents from external atmospheric agents; it opens onto the street but requires conscious entry to be crossed. The contents, enclosed as if under a ‘glass bell’, recall the logic of traditional museum displays, in which the display case exhibits and makes accessible, while at the same time establishing a protective distance, as in blister packs, and contributes value to what is on display. Furthermore, the glass inside the display case acts as a reflective device. On the one hand, it allows the gaze to penetrate beyond its surface, while on the other, it retains and reflects what is outside. In this sense, the reflection is not limited to reflecting the surrounding environment² but can also reflect the image of the observer themselves. This is a reflection similar to the ‘ancestral’ one, which is produced by mirroring oneself in a pool of water, never clear, incapable of accurately reflecting every feature, but sufficient to allow self-recognition. In this perceptual oscillation between looking and seeing oneself looking, an experiential field takes shape that exceeds the mere optical function. From a phenomenological perspective, as Merleau-Ponty might observe, this dynamic highlights the perceptual paradox of ‘seeing oneself while looking’: the subject who sees and the object seen never fully coincide, and the observing eye and the observed body remain structurally separate, preventing the subject from being both spectator and part of the image. An emblematic example of this perceptual condition applied to the context of shop windows is Hole in Space (1980) by Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway, in which the two artists installed two life-size screens, one in Los Angeles and the other in New York, connecting them in real time.

At the same time, the neo-phenomenological approach invites us to interpret the experience of glass as something more than visual, namely as an affective and situational experience, in which the intermediate space of the window display becomes a place of encounter and co-belonging between subject and environment, between interiority and the world. The experience of the shop window can be compared to Nanda Vigo’s perceptual experiments in the domestic sphere, such as the Casa Nera (Black House) project (1970)³, in which black reflective surfaces multiply and fragment the image of the observer, creating an unstable, changing, and never fully graspable presence. The reflective surface thus takes on an ‘aisthetic’ value [5], recalling the awareness of one’s own body in space and the inevitable embodied rooting of visual perception.

On the other hand, continuing with this ‘corporeal–affective’ interpretation [5]—‘the atmosphere always and above all affects the body’ [6] (p. 199)—the shop window has profoundly transformed the epidermis of Western cities since the 19th century, with roots already in Renaissance shops, reflecting the constant change in society. Famous visual evidence of this transformation can be found in art photography: from Eugène Atget’s ‘atmospheric’ shots, in which his ‘ability to imbue Paris with an uncanny atmosphere’ is remarkable [7], to the images of Berenice Abbott, who, with her unorthodox method, constructs multi-layered visual narratives within the single reflective surface of the shop window, and to Walker Evans, who transforms seemingly ‘aesthetically rejected’ subjects into a lasting vision of Americanism.

However, the concept of the shop window also lives in its contradiction, when it is denied—obscured, veiled, or opacified—preventing direct contact with what is happening inside. Such a condition redefines the relationship between the observer and the object on display: the visual experience becomes partial and mediated, highlighting the tension between the attraction and rejection of the gaze. From this perspective, the shop window is no longer a simple display device but a paradoxical perceptual mechanism, capable of generating incomplete visual pleasure in which access to the space is (partially) denied. The dialectic between the visible and the invisible has become a central theme in contemporary artistic and design research. The installations by Christo and Jeanne-Claude⁴ serve as examples, questioning transparency and transforming the very act of contemplation into an integral part of the aesthetic experience. In the field of Italian design, Ugo La Pietra experimented with this logic in 1971 in Rome for the Schön Boutique in Milan, where he rejected the shop window as a tool of commercial seduction by creating an ‘anti-shop window’: a continuous wall, interrupted only by narrow slanted slits that limited the view of the interior. With interventions such as these, the myth of transparency and visibility began to dissolve, opening up new ways of perceiving and narrating the exhibition space.

The works of Bertrand Lavier, such as Untitled, and numerous architectural projects, including John Pawson’s Cannelle Cake Shop⁵ with Claudio Silvestrin in London (1987–1988) and Toshiko Mori’s Issey Miyake Pleats Please store⁶ in New York (1998), take a different approach. In these examples, materiality and the display device become tools for negotiating between presence and absence, between what is shown and what remains hidden. The denied display window is therefore not a simple barrier but a critical device for perception, capable of generating a complex aesthetic experience on multiple levels, in which the desire to see and its denial coexist, producing new and unexpected meanings.

Ultimately, the very concept of the display case includes the possibility of its transgression, the moment when the device is broken or overcome, in the gesture of its overcoming and in the opening up to new forms of relationship between inside and outside. Glass, in fact, a material as precious as it is fragile, when broken, cancels out the distance between observer and observed, making visible the precariousness of the dream it embodies [8]. The continuous change in shop windows, which contribute to redesigning the urban visual landscape, can be interpreted as a reflection of the way in which society partly constructs its aesthetic sense and collective imagination through a multiplicity of languages. As La Cecla [9] (p. 26) states, ‘The point is that cities are both things, an interior, an identity of belonging, and an exterior, what they represent on a larger scale and the image imposed from outside’. This plurality does not always translate into a peaceful balance. Shop windows, in fact, have also been prime targets for protests. Breaking a shop window is equivalent to striking at the representation it offers of itself; violence expressed in public space thus becomes a symbolic spectacular gesture that denounces the gap between the image promised by the display and the shared perceived reality. The fragility of glass, therefore, is not only a question of material but also a cultural dimension.⁷ An emblematic example is Lynn Hershman Leeson’s 25 Windows for Bonwit Teller, in which a mannequin’s hand symbolically breaks through the transparent barrier to ‘touch’ passersby. In this gesture, which breaks the fourth wall of the commercial space, the boundary between inside and outside, spectator and exhibited object, dissolves. Even more radical is the Apple store in Chicago (2006), where an adhesive film metaphorically ‘breaks’ the glass, simulating direct access to the product and thus overturning the very logic of the display barrier.

2. Staged Atmospheres Between Experimentation and Temporality

In recent years, neo-phenomenological trends in aesthetics have opened up fruitful perspectives for reflecting on the design of commercial, exhibition, and interior spaces. This ‘atmospheric renaissance’ [10] or rather this increasing attention to atmospheric aesthetics is fundamental to redefining the perceptual and relational modes of spatial experience. Developed by Hermann Schmitz with the aim of ‘regaining a sensitivity for the nuanced realities of lived experience’ [11] (p. 134), neo-phenomenology finds one of its most significant expressions in the aesthetics of atmospheres, developed by Gernot Böhme and subsequently explored in depth by authors such as Tonino Griffero. In this perspective, the atmosphere becomes a sensitive and relational condition that connects matter, perception, and affection, operating transversally between architectural, spatial, and human scales. As Loenhart [12] (p. 69) observes, ‘such an expanded aisthesis of dense atmosphere is the tool that we need in order to grasp and handle the hidden interwovenness in its creative drawing together across different scales and categories’. Consequently, places at the centre of the design experience the way in which spaces ‘feel’, generating emotional states and perceptual dispositions. As Weinthal [13] (p. 164) observes, “phenomenology is important to the role of perception on the interior, it encompasses a way of thinking about our interaction with time, space, and objects that contribute to an atmosphere”, and it provides “lenses for measuring and gauging elements, whether visible to the eye or not”.

In this perspective, the shop window is no longer a simple transparent boundary between inside and outside, nor a functional tool for displaying goods. It becomes an intermediate space, a place ‘in between’ [14], in which an ‘aesthetic engagement’ [15] occurs that engages the senses and conditions the way the subject perceives and experiences the environment. The shop window is therefore an environment, a microcosm, and a sensitive habitat, capable of modulating perceptions, affections, and relationships between the individual and the interior.

Its effectiveness no longer lies solely in the content displayed. However, in the atmospheric quality it manages to generate: in the light that filters or refracts on the glass—which for Holl [16] represents one of the ‘phenomenal zones’ that contribute to the formation of atmospheric conditions—in the threshold that invites or repels, in the distance that separates and, at the same time, connects the observer and the object. The shop window becomes part of a process of widespread aestheticisation and spectacularisation that characterises contemporary life, in which every design element contributes to the construction of symbolic and identity value.

The atmosphere it produces thus becomes both the implicit subject and explicit objective of the design act: the glass not only shows but mediates; the space not only exhibits but exposes itself; the passerby’s experience is not limited to vision but involves sensory, emotional, and relational dimensions, because, as Zumthor [17] writes, ‘we perceive atmosphere through our emotional sensibility, a form of perception…’ (p. 13).

However, in the field of retail design, particularly in window display design, the concept of atmosphere remains largely unexplored or treated generically. This gap is also due to the persistent prejudice surrounding this sector, which is often considered marginal by designers and theorists [18], as it is associated with commercial logic deemed ‘low’ and, therefore, distant from the ‘committed’ cultural horizon of architecture and art [19]. However, it is precisely in this seemingly peripheral area that an autonomous design culture has developed over time, capable of elaborating languages, strategies, and aesthetic devices that have evolved beyond criticism and theoretical resistance. Far from the canonical centres of aesthetic reflection, window display design has continued to experiment in the everyday dimension of design, generating results that have often remained on the margins of academic debate but are nevertheless significant for understanding the atmospheric construction of contemporary spaces.

Furthermore, the ephemeral nature of window displays requires a constant process of renewal and adaptation to the urban context. Far from being a limitation, temporality becomes a strategic design resource, favouring practices based on experimentation and exploration. According to Polano [20], the ephemeral nature of the exhibit setup becomes an essential quality that allows it to convey, with an aura of power and persuasion, a unique glimpse into the spirit of the era and contemporary knowledge. Furthermore, lightweight techniques, reversible structures, and scenographic devices become an integral part of the design language, transforming the shop window into a temporary laboratory, where innovative spatial and perceptual languages can be tested [18].

It is no coincidence that this dimension attracted numerous protagonists of 20th-century visual culture. In the 1950s and 1960s, artists such as Andy Warhol, Jean Tinguely, James Rosenquist, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg found in shop windows a field of experimentation for languages and techniques that would later become central to their work; Salvador Dalí had already explored this area by designing shop windows for Bonwit Teller. These experiences confirm what Kiesler [21] had already theorised in his book Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display, in which he claimed the importance of integrating the principles of avant-garde art into commercial spaces, defining the shop window as a ‘silent loudspeaker’ capable of communicating to a vast and diverse audience.

In summary, the shop window has a limited scale and a strongly temporary nature, which gives it an intrinsic experimental character. It is a non-accessible space, which can afford “extreme” spatial configurations without having to comply with accessibility or safety requirements. Facing the street, the shop window engages a heterogeneous audience and serves as a direct testing ground for the display’s effectiveness and atmospheric perception. This is a lesson drawn from many designers of the past: due to limited resources, the absence of a consolidated public or clients, or a language still in formation, the shop window proved to be an ideal field of expression. Even today, it remains a domain that offers designers a concrete opportunity and a broad horizon of possibilities, especially for the design of atmospheres.

3. Atmosphere as Method: Three Readings of Historical and Contemporary Displays

Italian display culture plays a central role on the international scene thanks to a critical and sophisticated tradition that continues to influence contemporary exhibition practices. Reinterpreted in atmospheric terms—as Canetti would say, ‘if eyes could breathe’ [22] (p. 19)—this history reveals a constant attention to the perceptual and immaterial dimension of space. This common thread runs through the entire 20th century and fuels the most current experiments.

As Finessi [23] points out, this design culture is marked by an attitude that is ‘optimistic, sunny, communicative and beauty-loving’ (pp. 168–169), qualities that are reflected in an ‘Italian Way’ [24] of design capable of transforming shop fittings and window displays into truly atmospheric spaces, where aesthetics, storytelling, and interaction with the public merge into sensitive and engaging experiences. From this perspective, the interpretation of the shop window as an atmospheric device can be divided into three macro-categories that clarify its nature and evolution over time. The macro-categories emerge from the research’s methodological framework, which is based on a historical analysis of a theoretical–interpretive nature, oriented toward critical reading and the construction of conceptual frameworks rather than empirical verification. The criteria for case selection are intentionally broad and flexible. This initial analysis focuses on shop-window projects that are particularly original and experimental in relation to conventional retail design and that have contributed significantly to the historical development of the field. These are examined alongside exemplary national and international display practices, both historical and contemporary, chosen for their ability to represent the key concepts developed in this thesis clearly. The selected cases function as paradigmatic examples, visually articulating specific design attitudes.

The in-between shop window

Among the historical examples that best embody atmospheric principles in exhibition design, Giuseppe Terragni’s Vitrum shop (Como, Italy, 1930) stands out. In this project, the shop window is conceived as a liminal threshold between the incorporeal and the corporeal, between the immaterial transparency of glass and the tangibility of the crystals and ceramics on display. The name itself, Vitrum [Glass in Latin], reveals the intention to base the entire spatial layout on the different densities of the materials, articulating the interior in a sequence of distinct and complementary environments, i.e., an ethereal and immaterial front and a more concrete and material rear. Terragni’s idea for the shop window was to ‘create spaces defined by light–colour’, working on immaterial elements such as lightness, perceptual variability, and the almost illusory effect, rather than on matter and structural stability. The result is a crystalline diorama, a dynamic landscape in which architecture and objects interact and enhance one another. In this sense, even the most common products are removed from their ordinary dimension, acquiring an increased perceptive quality.

Numerous other examples from the history of Italian exhibition design contribute to outlining the evolution of the shop window as an atmospheric in-between device. These include small-scale interventions, such as the refined graphic work on the Parker shop window created by Edoardo Persico with Marcello Nizzoli in Milan in 1934 and minimal interventions by great masters of exhibition design such as Franco Albini, a master of atmospheres, who in 1945 designed a shop window for the Zanini fur shop in Milan that was slightly inclined with respect to the street level. This imperceptible but effective gesture guides the step inside the exhibition space.

However, among the most significant experiences from an atmospheric point of view are the Olivetti shops, in which Italian tradition has successfully interpreted the theme of the shop window as a space for narration, relationship, and suggestion. Leading figures such as Carlo Scarpa, Gae Aulenti, Franco Albini himself, and many others participated in these projects, helping to define a sophisticated and innovative exhibition language. Particularly emblematic is the recessed window display project created in 1954 in New York by the BBPR studio in collaboration with Costantino Nivola. Through a simple but effective stratagem (already experimented with by Leo Lionni in the Olivetti shops in San Francisco and Chicago), the glass wall was set back from the pavement line, creating a covered space immediately outside the showroom. Here, a Lettera 22 typewriter⁸ was placed on a stand, like a stalagmite emerging softly and sculpturally from the floor, at the complete disposal of passersby. In this way, the shop window not only surpassed its traditional function but also symbolically extended into the urban space, intercepting and interrupting the flow of pedestrians in a delicate and incisive manner.

The invitation to interact created by this device establishes a threshold of contact between the inside and outside, foreshadowing an atmospheric experience that actively engages the public even before they enter the commercial space. This project is one of the most significant examples of how a shop window can be transformed from a simple display surface to a relational interface, capable of arousing curiosity and wonder and generating new forms of sensory participation.

The performative shop window

The shop window, traditionally conceived as a neutral surface for the static presentation of products, has been transformed since the second half of the 20th century into a veritable stage inhabited by actions, bodies, and gestures in motion. In contrast to the immobility of the objects on display or the devices that dynamically mimic their presence, the space of the shop window itself becomes a living organism, capable of resonating with the gaze of passersby and establishing a dialogue in which the distinction between subject (living) and object (inanimate) is attenuated, almost to the point of disappearing. From this perspective, performance is not only an artistic act but a relational device that contemplates the presence of the audience and requires its active participation.

Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, performance art gradually infiltrated exhibition and commercial spaces, subverting their traditional functions and transforming them into sites of linguistic and social experimentation. Elio Fiorucci was among the first to conceive of his shops as venues for artistic, musical, and culinary performance [25], spaces open to ephemeral and participatory events. The shop in San Babila in Milan, in particular, became the scene of numerous happenings and performances, including the famous project by Alessandro Mendini (Alchimia group), Arredo Vestitivo (Fiorucci Store, Galleria Passerella 2, Milan, 1981), which staged the relationship between body, clothing, and space ironically and experimentally.

In these years and in the decades that followed, several artists used the shop window as a place for action and interaction, activating new forms of experience and relationship. Among the most emblematic examples are Role Exchange (1976) by Marina Abramović, in which the artist assumes the role of a sex worker, and Vitrina (1989) by Vlasta Delimar and María Teresa Hincapié, in which the body becomes a living and unpredictable presence in the commercial space. In these cases, the performance does not demolish the device of the shop window. However, it triggers a vital short circuit, transforming it into a space inhabited by time and human experience.

Until recently, this relational dimension has expanded beyond the boundaries of traditional performance art, also encompassing provocative and critical practices that challenge mechanisms of distance and social control. Martina Morger’s work Lèche Vitrines (2020), created during the COVID-19 pandemic, is an extreme example of this: the artist licks the windows of several shops in an attempt to re-establish physical and sensory contact with people, radically subverting the very meaning of the shop window as a barrier and surface of separation.

The hybrid shop window

In recent decades, the typically cultured and contemplative atmosphere of the museum and gallery space has merged with the more everyday, accessible, and immediate atmosphere of the commercial space, giving rise to an atmospheric hybrid in which art, communication, and the market intertwine and contaminate each other. This hybridisation has profoundly redefined the very nature of the exhibition space, transforming it into a porous and diffuse environment capable of activating new forms of perception and relationship with the public directly in the shared space of the city.

The shop window has thus ceased to be merely a place for displaying goods statically. It has become a complex atmospheric device through which multiple types of spaces (galleries, showrooms, cultural institutions, and museums) can expose themselves and tell their story to the outside world. It no longer limits itself to selling a product. However, it conveys ideas, images, identities and narratives, establishing immediate contact with passersby and involving them in a sensory and communicative experience that does not require physical access to the interior space. At the same time, the gallery space has gradually extended its presence onto the street, adopting the language and strategies of the urban and commercial environment. This expansion has made the exhibition threshold a place of atmospheric mediation between the inside and outside, where the distance between the observer and the work is reduced, and enjoyment becomes immediate, spontaneous, and participatory. Examples such as Edicola Notte in Rome or the numerous exhibitions at Spazio Bidet in Milan bear witness to this trend, namely more ‘informal’ and accessible exhibition spaces reduced to the surface of the shop window, where the exhibition is located in a border area between art and everyday life, while maintaining a link with the language and imagery of the commercial space.

One of the most emblematic historical experiments in this direction is Maurizio Cattelan’s Wrong Gallery in New York. Opened in 2002 and presented as ‘the smallest gallery in the city’, it consisted of a tiny space set into the wall of a building, visible only through a shop window–entrance door that remained constantly closed. The basic idea was to transform the window into a conceptual field of action in which the dynamics between public and private, visible and invisible, and accessible and inaccessible were constantly questioned.⁹

4. From Display to Diorama: The Atmospheric Experience of the Shop Window

In the culture of living, the window is much more than a simple architectural device; it represents the ‘eye’ of the house, a sensory and symbolic gateway through which the interior opens up to the outside world. In Human Space, Bollnow [26] looked at this element, analysing it also in its etymology, in which the original Germanic terms, such as augentor [Eye Door] or windauge [Eye of The Wind’], accurately convey the profound function of the window, designed to allow the gaze to expand, to go beyond domestic boundaries, and to measure itself against distance. Its frame, its uprights, and crossbars, cut out a portion of reality and transform it into an image, a fragment of the outside world made perceptible and contemplatable from within. Furthermore, in his poetic cycle Les fenêtres, Rainer Maria Rilke conceives of the window as a ‘mesure d’attente’, a measure of waiting, a device that suspends time and translates the formless excess of the outside into a geometric form accessible to the gaze. What can be seen through it is an isolated and elevated area. The window does not simply show the world but transforms it, idealises it, and removes it from the flow of everyday contingency to raise it to a level of visual and poetic quality.

In this perspective, the shop window is born as a mirror reversal of this logic. Suppose the window is a device that, from the inside, opens up to the vastness of the outside. In that case, the shop window performs the opposite movement, starting from the street, leading the gaze inwards, towards another space, artificial and narrative. Whereas the window frames the real landscape, the shop window frames a constructed world, an intentional microcosm designed to be looked at. It is a perceptual threshold that does not allow passage, but captures and directs the passerby’s attention, taking it beyond the surface of the glass to a scenographic and staged elsewhere. In his book, Il negozio conteso, Filippini [27] highlights a further change that takes place through the shop window. From the street front, the shop offers a spectacle, turning passersby into spectators (recalling Debord’s writings on the spectacle of commodities).

This reversal also implies a transformation of the role of the frame. While the window frame delimits and idealises a portion of existing reality, the shop window frame constructs a diorama: an artificial scene, a symbolic and atmospheric microcosm, in which objects are staged within a precise spatial narrative. In the diorama, the frame is no longer a tool for selecting reality but a design act that creates the appropriate habitat, offering itself to the gaze.

The window, therefore, is a device that removes reality from its chaotic flow to make it contemplatable; the shop window, on the contrary, produces a visual experience that did not exist before, offering a constructed and intentional scene. In other words, both act as mediators between inside and outside. However, while the window opens onto the landscape to transform it into an image, the shop window constructs an image to transform it into a landscape. Understanding the shop window as a diorama device means recognising it as a space capable of accommodating and constructing a landscape to be defined; an intentional environment in which to place objects and supports, a designed milieu and habitat that resonates with what it displays, vibrates with the passage of bodies in urban space, and involves passersby in an almost immersive experience. ¹⁰

The shop window and the diorama are two display devices which, although belonging to different contexts (the former commercial and the latter museum and scientific), have significant conceptual and scenographic affinities.¹¹ Furthermore, according to Elcott [28], the diorama (along with other visual devices¹²) ‘initiated the breakdown of traditional perspective’ (p. 43), introducing a mode of perception capable of overcoming the frontal and unitary vision of space. Dörner [29]¹³ extended this same environmental conception to the success of cinema, recognising its power in its ability to satisfy a new conception of space, composed not through linear perspective so much as immateriality, interpenetration, weightlessness, multi-perspectivalism, and dynamism. Rather than showing isolated objects, the diorama represents relationships and environments, acting as a medium of knowledge and experience.

A comparison between the two devices reveals a common tension: both are scenic constructions that delimit and organise the field of vision, creating intensely mediated experiences. While the shop window directs the gaze towards desire and consumption, the diorama guides it towards understanding and knowledge. In both cases, the audience is called upon to confront an image that is not neutral but the result of an invisible direction that decides what should be seen and how. In this sense, sight becomes ‘peripheral’ [30], a ‘nebulous’ mediation [31] (p. 51), allowing the window display to be read in a dioramic way as an atmospheric and relational space, in which perception becomes physical and engaging. Vision is no longer just frontal but environmental: the field of vision expands and becomes porous, and the viewer, while remaining outside the scene, becomes part of it, immersed in a shared spatial and sensory experience.

5. Towards an Atmospheric Paradigm of Window Display Design

Despite the central role that the shop window has assumed in the transformations of the contemporary urban and cultural landscape, theoretical and academic reflection on the subject remains surprisingly limited. However, in this seemingly marginal area, an autonomous and stratified design culture has developed over time, capable of elaborating highly effective languages, strategies, and aesthetic devices.

Far from the canonical centres of aesthetic theory, window display design has continued to experiment in the everyday dimension of design, generating results that have often remained on the margins of debate but are fundamental to understanding the dynamics of the atmospheric construction of contemporary spaces. To open up new perspectives for research, it is therefore necessary to develop an awareness of atmospheric sensitivity [32], a perceptive and design skill that has taken on an increasingly important role in recent years in theoretical discourse and design thinking.

From this perspective, the shop window ceases to be a mere commercial device and becomes a cultural medium—a place that produces narratives, constructs imaginaries, and generates meanings. It fits into the urban landscape as a communicative act, never neutral and therefore ethically responsible. Displays and shop windows thus take the form of spatial and sensory expressions, capable of establishing deep relationships with their context and audience—qualities that are increasingly in demand in an era marked by the radical transformation of commercial spaces and the so-called retail apocalypse [33].

It is precisely in this scenario of crisis and redefinition of the relationship between space, consumption, and visual communication that we find a renewed interest in the exhibition dimension, confirmed by the most recent exhibitions dedicated to the theme. Starting with the most prescient publication of all, edited by Rem Koolhaas, in the volume Harvard Design School Project [34], which was the first to analyse the shop and the shop window as central devices in the construction of the contemporary urban experience, we can now identify new examples that renew this reflection in an exhibition and cultural key, such as the exhibition Fresh Window: The Art of Display & Display of Art (Tinguely Museum, Basel, December 2024), which offered a new interpretation of the role of the shop window in modern and contemporary artistic creation, presenting it as a ‘subversive accomplice’ [35] (p. 4) of consumerism, supply, and sales, as well as of museum culture, which displays its ‘treasures’ to the public; similarly, the exhibition EXPOSURE. Art, culture, and fashion, both inside and outside the shop window (MUDEC, Milan, spring 2024), traced a path from the domestic shop window to the most recent retail design practices and contemporary works of art that explore its expressive and conceptual potential.

In light of this excursus, it is possible to recognise how the shop window, reinterpreted in an atmospheric key, acquires an expressive, affective, and communicative potential of great interest for contemporary aesthetic and design reflection. From a simple tool for display and sale, it can be transformed into a design laboratory to experiment with spatial, narrative, and relational strategies capable of activating experiences that engage the perception, imagination, and emotions of the public.

The atmospheric paradigm, particularly within the context of architecture, retail design, and exhibit design, does not present itself as a set of operational tools or a repertoire of rules or prescriptive design principles. Instead, it defines a design attitude. This epistemological and cultural orientation understands methods and techniques as coherent outcomes of an overarching project vision, rather than as normative principles imposed a priori.

First, this paradigm promotes a theoretically informed and critically aware design practice, aligned with contemporary environmental and ecological sensibilities. Within this framework, the shop window—conceived as a dioramic device—is addressed through an atmospheric approach, where space operates as a relational ecosystem in which all the elements contribute non-hierarchically to the construction of experience. This results in a horizontal post-anthropocentric stance, one that moves beyond the centrality of both the object and the designing subject in favour of an environmental and situated understanding of space.

Second, the atmospheric approach fosters a structural form of disciplinary transversality. Because atmosphere emerges from the interconnection of sensory stimuli, cultural references, and spatial conditions, the project takes shape as an open field, permeable to heterogeneous forms of knowledge. In this sense, the atmospheric paradigm exceeds the boundaries of architecture and exhibit design, assuming the form of a projectual posture that inevitably implies an existential dimension of design practice.

Ultimately, the atmospheric paradigm situates sensory and environmental perception at the centre of the project, thereby relativising the primacy of form and function. This shift releases exhibit design from predetermined formal and linguistic logics, encouraging open, situated, and experimental practices, in which sensory engagement and the plurality of experiences become primary design parameters. Proposing such a paradigm also implies a work of atmospheric literacy, capable of providing designers with an extended lexicon to connect the demands of ‘pure’ retail design with those of exhibit design.

The aim of this research was not to conclusively establish the theoretical basis of this sensitivity, but to outline its trajectories and possibilities, highlighting how window display design can represent a privileged field of experimentation for exploring the aesthetics of atmosphere in contemporary exhibition design, both of which share the exact dimension of ephemerality, like a breath on glass.