Inner Space is part of an ongoing research project into the construction of the architectural imagination, which the authors have pursued in the last decade through an online visual atlas an architectural practice and teaching activity. This essay investigates the space between inner and outer reality, looking for those moments in which the two realms interact most vividly. It defines imagination as the capacity to organise, structure and translate into other forms our own experience of the world. Such an experience may be direct, or it can be mediated by the encounter of a subject with imagery.
Inner Space looks freely into cognitive science and typology, atlases and digital culture, drawings and collections to expand “an unlinear journey through far away territories of human imagination”.

The publication is a prolongation of the thoughts and reflexions of the Natural Beauty exhibition. It constitutes in itself a content that can be looked at as a book and as a part of the exhibition.
On the one hand, the publication takes the form of a series of statements on architecture, construction, rationality and photography. On the other, it proceeds as a photographic essay, that gathers side by side constructive forms, taking advantage of the structure of a book.
These two parts are the two faces of the same coin that gives thematic readings on the specificities of the rationale of construction, leading to an understanding of the logics behind the construction of forms and how the rational nature of a construction can lead to a form of natural beauty.

The environmental predicament the world is now facing (climate change, peak oil, mineral and metal depletion, soil erosion, fresh water scarcity, biodiversity collapse, etc.) seriously challenges the ways in which human societies have developed since at least the industrial revolution. Our ways of procuring and managing basic resources, particularly food, fibers and energy but also of inhabiting and organizing territories (architecture and urbanism) will necessarily be deeply affected, and are key issues if human societies are to prepare themselves for the highly problematic decades ahead. In this context, our core hypothesis is that agriculture and architecture (which emerged as the twin fairies of the Neolithic Revolution some 10 000 years ago) forms a nexus, and that their respective concerns, after two centuries of progressive divorce and estrangement, should indeed be closely re-connected (i.e. rethought in conjunction to each other).

Are metropolises really the “manifest destiny” of humankind? Is the environmental predicament calling for more concentration and incorporation? Or is it conducive to some kind of urban exodus? By and large, what might be the principles and ethics of design in such a condition?
These are some of the issues that this book addresses.
Providing a rear-view mirror onto the parallel evolutions of agriculture, architecture and urbanism in the past centuries, its core hypothesis is that permaculture, which drew on vernacular and agrarian practices, and was framed 40 years ago as a design approach to the building and maintenance of resilient agro systems in times of energy descent, could deeply inspire architecture and landscape design today, and lead them into a new – and much urgently needed – “poetics of reason”.

What is Ornament? is a question which doesn’t need definitive answers but instead prompts a series of possible discussions. The book is organized as a reader: a collection of contributions, ranging from Vitruvius to the current day dealing, in different ways with the debate around ornament. The reader is the theoretical complement of the homonym exhibition, part of the 5th Lisbon Architecture Triennale ‘The Poetics of Reason’. The book reflects the narrative structure of the exhibition: looking at fragments and moldings as the occasion in which ornament is discrete and condensed into few precise points; considering columns as ambivalent structural elements; looking at cladding as a conscious project rather than the passive result; exploring patterns, intended as regularly repetitive arrangements reflecting the time and the society in which they are conceived; looking at information superstructures like texts, frescoes and screens, when they become the main instrument to compose a building; enlarging ornament to the whole urban environment, embracing the complexity of shared space and imagining it as a scene for the development of public life.