Soggiorno All Inclusive

Interior architecture today seems to be undergoing a process of radical transformation; its horizons have broadened beyond measure, its influence spreading well beyond its own borders to penetrate the processes of urban growth. The customary hierarchical ordering of indoors and out, public and private, building and city has been overturned in a role reversal which we see giving rise to a polyvalent, unspecialized territory in which functions are not fixed once for all time. Thus interior architecture has lost its disciplinary specificity and takes on a new, more general condition of “indoor-hood”. That, then, is the stance of the essays in this paper; they try to place themselves outside the tradition of architecture as metaphor for history, seeking only to give some partial responses to an urban condition no longer defined by its morphological arrangement alone (distribution and positioning of services), but reconfigured as heterogeneous, transversal, multidisciplinary, diffuse, inward-turning and sometimes even intangible, with its corresponding specialist uses, perceptual stage-scaffolding, information networks, artificial climates, sales pitches, communication systems, &c. – all aspects contained within architecture, but not easily described using architecture’s own formal codes. The idea is to start again from the human scale to oppose to the urbanity chaotic a new idea of an interior, more reflective and thoughtful; to the expressionless magma of the urban scene, the spectacle of a project able to rediscover a dramaturgy that can represent the themes of contemporary civilization; to the speed of action, the slow motion of an action more meditative and attentive.