BEAUTY AND COMPLEXITY

Reading again the defence of beauty, memory, and quality advocated by Roberto Pane gives us the opportunity to trace interesting planes of comparison with other disciplines that, like preservation, deal with the relationship between humans and their environments. Such a dialogue, initiated by Pane himself in an extremely pioneering and fruitful way with psychology, can be extended to the approach towards interior design that characterizes the Milan School and that Pane, for reasons of age, could not have known. According to Pane, aesthetic appreciation of public art and nature involves our inner life and its relations with imagination, historical stratification and memory. Therefore, the preservation of beauty should crosswise involve several areas, embracing landscape protection, monument restoration and ecology. Indeed, in his view, ecological conditions and people's psychic lives are mutually connected, so much so that any external change always also implies an inner reflection. Interestingly, some psychological studies highlight ultimately collective causes for a range of disorders and suggest that changing the external world can be just as therapeutic as changing the subject's feelings. A non-technicist conception of restoration, interior design applied to the design of urban interiors and a systemic psychological approach could find harmony today.