Interior Landscapes: A Visual Atlas

Contemporary architecture is often characterized by the total interpenetration of interior and exterior configurations: the differentiation between these two dialectical poles has become indistinguishable, boundaries blurry and the result of any design process is a hybrid product, based on the superposition of different and heterogeneous layers.

The impossibility of separating interior and exterior permits a general re-organization of some topics internal to the territory of architecture, and also expresses the necessity of a systemic analysis of the most recent episodes. If at first glance this interest for a new kind of dialectics may appear as the most evident epiphenomenon of a wider and recent tendency, under careful examination one can observe that the tension between interior and exterior has always been present in architecture, differently articulated over the centuries, and expressed through several means of representation.

Starting from the 18th century, Interior Landscapes describes the nature of such a relation, in order to unveil those invariant forms, principles or concepts that crossed the History of Architecture, laid hidden underneath the events flowing, and periodically re-emerged to shape contemporary episodes.

Separation, inversion, interpenetration, dissolution — all of these categories periodically characterize the interior-exterior dialectics. By borrowing different interpretative elements — drawings, photographs, illustrations — Interior Landscapes is configured as a visual atlas, aimed to demonstrate how, through the contamination of interior and exterior, always-new architectural insights emerge.