College students on the Italian college Politecnico di Milano have created an exhibition at Dropcity design centre that explores the political symbolism of the White Home by way of its inside design for Milan design week 2026.
The White Home: Home Propaganda contains fashions, furnishings references, visible archives, reconstructions, and diagrams produced by greater than 50 college students that discover “the White Home as a home inside and a political machine”.
The exhibition was curated and designed by the scholars of the Inside Design Studio on the Politecnico di Milano, which is led by Davide Fabio Colaci and Lola Ottolini.
“The exhibition explores how the White Home, past being a residence, has progressively grow to be a robust symbolic and anthropological machine,” mentioned the group. “A performative structure that intertwines intimacy, illustration, and media democracy.”
“It’s not solely a place of abode but additionally a machine of illustration able to staging an concept of society by way of its areas, objects, and rituals.”
The exhibition consists of seven most important installations dispersed all through the tunnel exhibition house at Dropcity. Every is targeted on completely different home components of the White Home, from the liminal areas inhabited by the service employees to presents obtained by US presidents all through historical past.
The initiatives are displayed on steel cabinets, unfold throughout the ground or positioned on plinths.
This contains the massive “oval carpet” within the centre of the house that reinterprets the leisure actions of every president and their household.
It interprets these hobbies into patterns or symbols with a purpose to create “a home floor”.
“Leisure Carpet reinterprets presidential leisure as an area of negotiation,” mentioned the group. “Contained in the White Home, the free time of the president and their household turns into a part of a political choreography.”
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“The set up takes the type of an oval carpet impressed by the Oval Workplace, remodeling the image of institutional decision-making right into a home floor.”
Unfold out on an extended desk, a hand-embroidered tablecloth explores the dietary habits of 13 US presidents with meals and well being insurance policies championed in the course of the varied presidencies.
On this occasion, motifs of meals, resembling ice cream, a hamburger, and beer, are contrasted with insurance policies and written phrases resembling Obamacare and phrases such because the Nationwide Minimal Ingesting Age Act, laws handed by President Reagan within the Eighties, which raised the authorized consuming age to 21.
One other set up investigates the White Home fences as “a defensive and symbolic machine” by way of photos, whereas a 3D-diagram explores the corridors and again rooms of the White Home frequented by “enslaved staff to modern butlers”.
In gentle of President Trump’s current proposed modifications to the White Home, resembling a big gilded ballroom, curator Davide Fabio Colaci advised Dezeen that the exhibition is supposed to deal with the structure itself, versus the Trump presidency.
“After we started the analysis, the obtainable info was (and nonetheless is) too restricted,” Colaci advised Dezeen. “We gathered some info and included it within the drawings of all of the transformations of the White Home.”
“Nevertheless, so as to not focus too closely on the Trump presidency, however on the White Home itself, we handled it on the identical stage as all different spatial transformations.”
“Subsequent yr’s analysis will focus particularly on the ballroom.”
Final yr, Dropcity showcased an exhibition centered on jail furnishings throughout Milan design week.
The Dezeen group lately rounded up twenty-one different unmissable exhibitions and installations for this yr’s honest.
The images is courtesy of Dropcity.
The White Home: Home Propaganda is on present from 19 April to 26 April 2026 at Dropcity, Milan, Italy. See Dezeen Occasions Information for extra structure and design occasions around the globe.
