The Mobile Interior as Sacred Device: Franco Raggi’s Tents and Roulottes
(2026) SAH HISTORIC INTERIORS AFFILIATE GROUP (HIG) EMERGING SCHOLARS SYMPOSIUM 2026 — Location: Virtual (30.September.2026)
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- In the broader postwar crisis of architectural authority, the reinvention of domestic space and debates on housing precarity produced a particular interpretation of the mobile interior: a theoretical device for questioning the symbolic, material, and political foundations of architecture itself. From Reyner Banham’s definition of architecture as the production of “fit environments for human activities” (Banham, 1960) to Archigram’s “plug-in housing” (Cook, 1963) and the caravan as an industrial prototype, the 1960s displaced the domestic interior from the domain of permanence toward that of adaptability, performance, and movement. In Italy, this debate found a particularly charged formulation around Italy: The New Domestic Landscape (MoMA, 1972), where projects such as Mario Bellini’s Kar-a-sutra proposed the vehicle as a “mobile human space” (Bellini, 1972). In this context, Franco Raggi, architect, designer and editor at Casabella under the direction of Alessandro Mendini, intervened in these debates with an ambivalent and incisive position. Bringing together distant models of mobile interiors, Raggi reimagined the Italian “new domestic landscape” as a territory inhabited by tents, as an ethnological and primordial form of shelter, and a roulottes, as an industrial and technological device for mobile habitation. Both are imbued with a sacred significance that evokes stability, a quality reinforced by their association with the archetypal figure of the temple. This paper focuses on two projects by Raggi: Tenda Rossa (Red Tent, 1974), first assembled in a field south of Milan and later reactivated by Cavart in the quarry of Monselice, and Tempio Roulotte (Temple Roulotte, 1974), initially conceived as an ink and pencil drawing and further theoretically developed in his Casabella column “Templi e Roulottes” (1974-76). Read together, these works articulate an architecture of radically different consistencies: the lightness of fabric and the heaviness of the vehicle body; the provisional shelter and the monumental artifact; the tent, the caravan, the house, and the temple. In Raggi’s hands, the mobile interior becomes a space in which architecture’s most stable categories — domesticity, monumentality, ritual, protection, and use — are combined and placed in motion. By reconstructing Raggi’s position as both designer and theorist, this paper suggests that mobility redistributes architecture’s symbolic charge across fragile, temporary, and technically mediated interiors. In the context of contemporary housing crises, in which the permanence of the house is increasingly contested, his work offers a critical framework for rethinking the interior as a mobile, precarious, and potentially sacred condition.
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Felicori, B., & et al. (2026, September 30). The Mobile Interior as Sacred Device: Franco Raggi’s Tents and Roulottes. SAH HISTORIC INTERIORS AFFILIATE GROUP (HIG) EMERGING SCHOLARS SYMPOSIUM 2026, Virtual. https://doi.org/10.2172/17120804