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 reorganisation 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 will describe 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.

Stefano Corbo (b.1981) is an Italian architect, researcher at ETSAM Madrid and assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture in Alghero, Italy (2011 2012). He received a MArch II in Advanced Architectural Design at ETSAM Madrid (Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura) in 2010, and is currently a PhD Candidate at the same Institute, with a dissertation titled: Archaeology of Infrastructures. A conceptual cartography . Some of his texts have been published on international magazines (Mark, CIRCO, CLOG, L Arca, Il Giornale dell Architettura, Dichotomy, Studio Magazine, etc.) and he lectured as a guest at ETSAM, University of Miami, and University of Wisconsin. He worked as a designer at Mecanoo Architects (Delft, Netherlands) and in 2012 founded his own office: SCSTUDIO (www.scstudio.eu), a multidisciplinary network practising architecture and design. His work has received several awards for international competitions in Italy, Russia, and South Korea; his projects have been published worldwide (Archinect, Archdaily, Accesit, Metalocus).