Constructing an Endless Interior

Manfredo Tafuri, writing on Piranesi’s prison etchings, contests that from the period of the Enlightenment, the understanding of the city-as-inside and nature-as-outside has been permanently altered: the built environment is now everywhere, and nature subjugated within its global system. Through a series of increasingly complex artificial habitats, this ongoing terrestrial project of global interiorisation has extended outwards, culminating in the extraordinary vernacular space architecture of the International Space Station (ISS). On the one hand, this nascent cosmic extension of Piranesi’s labyrinth represents the summit of Earth’s interiorisation—a process that extends to incorporate its orbital systematisation and the transposition of its instrumentalised environment. However, as this essay illustrates, the built environment’s access to outer space is not only the acme of terrestrial interiorisation but also the genesis of a potentially limitless, unbuilt interior project. This visual-based research essay deploys a series of hand-drawn illustrations that reference and pay homage to the engraved plates of the Carceri series and .mile-Antoine Bayard’s illustrations that accompanied Jules Verne’s proto-modern fiction. Concrete poetry mediates and informs the relationship between these illustrations and the written text. This doubly illustrative methodology seeks to synthesise and augment the abstract aspects of the essay visually. The purposeful ambiguity inherent in the referenced graphic style of the selected illustrators advances the viewer’s interpretation. As per its graphic precedents, it provides a tangible spatial reference for the progressive conceptual interiorisation of outer space as a consequence of the built environment’s expansion beyond terrestrial horizons.