Redefining Paradigms. How Technology Shapes Interior Spaces in the Age of Drones and Flying Cars

Mobility technologies, since the discovery of the uniaxial wheel, have strongly shaped the forms and times of cities and buildings and their interiors. The paper explores how newly developed flying transports, such as drones, may in the future reshape and alter the interiors of the buildings we inhabit. Utopias about cities with flying cars are a literature full of examples and theories, such as Andrea Branzi and Archizoom’s No Stop City and Instant City and others, but also even more extensive cinematography such as Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact, the flying vehicles, by which people as well as goods will soon move, introduce a fourth dimension (time) and will allow access to buildings from the roof and facades. They will recover the distributional logic of an iconic and historical typology of Milanese architecture, that of the edificio a ballatoio, in which the distribution of spaces followed a private/public logic that would lend itself perfectly to the buildings of the drone city. The article will explore the transformations in plans, materials, facades, ways of living, and relationships that, this coming revolution, will introduce into the interior spaces of buildings and our existences.