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Architecture is dust

, Rome


Architectural manifesto in the form of poetry composed on the occasion of the presentation of the House of Dust project in Rome




Architecture is dust.
Dust that becomes form,
Dust transfigured by the mind.

Dust is memory so dust is also death.
Ancestral memory of death,
Dust refers to the beginnings.

That modernity that disowns sediment,
That shaves walls, that sanitises space;
That modernity that disowns dust,
Disowns even death.

Deprived of memory,
And so slave to a credible youth,
Ignoring its end, it repeats itself;
Without end.

In this house classical orders
And golden proportions celebrate dust:
Angels and choirs have abandoned Heaven,
And Heaven has adorned itself with earth.

House of Dust

Antonino Cardillo, House of Dust, Rome, 2013.


Recitato

Voice and music: Paula O’Brien



Source

  • Antonino Cardillo, House of Dust, tr. Charles Searson, Rome, May 2013, p. 7.