Lecture
Antonino Cardillo
Twenty-one years ago, I started to program my homepage by myself. The idea was, how is it possible to refine an artistic identity within the architectural world? As a scholar in architecture, I began as a historian. The analysis of history led me to the idea that the discipline of architecture is a perceptual phenomenon. It does not exist physically but is a shared aspect of our collective imagination. As scholars of architecture, what we study is not accessible to our bodies; we reconstruct it through our imagination, through books and articles, in a literary manner. We have experiences of places we read about but never visit, like places in movies, novels, and fairy tales. This lecture explores how a homepage could be constructed as an architectural piece with a sense of historiography, featuring the interpretations of others on the main subject, organized in a scientific way. This approach aims to expose both positive and negative articles, as both contribute to refining the idea of my project in reality.
The idea of occurrence in the world means that architecture is not merely this physical building that you are experiencing. Architecture is like a dream. We don’t live the dream physically, but we still experience dreams. Usually, dreams get lost, but when we are able to save some memories, we feel as though we have experienced places that we never visited through our body, but they exist in our imaginations. And sometimes these places, these imaginary places, are stronger in our imagination than the physical places that we are used to living in every day. So this reflection leads to this idea of occurrence in the world of architecture. What does occurrence in the world mean? Do we have to be satisfied because we build something big, like a building or a dwelling? Is this architecture? I think not.
I think that the existence of architecture is more a consequence of historiography. It is the sum of the many interpretations that, over time, people give to this site, the site of architecture. And if you are able to stimulate these interpretations by others about your project, the project becomes richer and acquires an existence. It becomes a kind of universe.
So, this idea of architectural historiography becomes like a stratigraphy of interpretations. A geology created by these layers of memory by others: journalists, historians, critics, but also people who can create a kind of affection for the building, which creates resonances. And this is the point: if you develop this sensibility to perceive architecture as a bridge between the physical place and the collective imagination, you become more sensitive to refining a kind of architecture that is able to open this kind of dialogue. And this dialogue presents a psychological quality. So, the existence of work is related to this ability of architecture to become an interface. An interface that creates resonance between the imaginations and the physical existence of architecture.
By my body of work, I have tried to question the certainty that architecture exists when the building is finished being constructed. From my point of view, this is a lie. This is not architecture. You can complete a building, but this building does not yet exist. It’s just a mountain of dust and nothing else. The existence of a work requires some spirit to animate this building. And this spiritual quality, this soul of architecture, is constructed over time. Perhaps, a very long time. Most of us have never visited the Frank Lloyd Wright dwellings, but we still have imaginations of the Frank Lloyd Wright dwellings. We have affection for these spaces even if we have never owned them. So, in reflecting on this, we might be encouraged to rethink architecture, aiming to create this bridge in time and, for this reason, documenting the interpretations of others is part of a structural program to create architecture.
Nowadays, we are overwhelmed with news. We experience architecture as news. A building exists because it was completed. For me, it is not yet real. A building becomes real after its long existence in collective imagination. And perhaps a completed building will be forgotten because it’s boring, says nothing, it’s just an expression of power or money. But architecture is not there. It’s a mystery if architecture will be able to resist through time, to remain in memory. One of our jobs will be this attempt to document interpretations of others and from this idea, which is a historiographical idea, I began to build my website not just as a list of my projects, but in an anthological way. I started to collect all the interpretations about my buildings and at a certain point common topics arose, which were not in my original idea. After many years, I realized that this stratigraphy of interpretations was constructing a secondary level and this acted like a mirror. Like a maze of mirrors where I see my work reflected through the mirrors of others, this created a multiplicity, a complex, a small universe.
But this idea of documenting the interpretation is similar to the idea of documenting the dream. So it’s also a psychoanalytic method. If we learn to see interpretations as the dreams of others, we get a more complete picture of how our work functions in the imagination of people. Since then, it has been possible to build a kind of architecture of self-analysis. When you try to gather this material and compose this historiography, you see yourself in a mirror. This is both good and bad, because many people can also criticize your work. In my personal experience, I have received a lot of bad articles. For me, it was cathartic to expose these bad articles on my website; I did not want to conceal them. This was the point when I started to create this homepage more consciously, with more awareness about the importance of seeing myself in the mirror. Perhaps, I could also see what was lacking or missing in my research, because the first part of my project series was more narcissistic, more self-centered. After that, I started to develop a different quality of design work, like this house you’re in now, which is quite an invisible architectural piece from the outside. It is almost a conventional building. The challenge was how to build a special space without showcasing it outside, like a secret garden or a secret enclosure.
Once this kind of depth was defined in the homepage—my homepage is about three hundred pages—, it became a bit like a labyrinth. It represents a sort of discourse around the past. It is a form of archaeology through which it is possible to follow new paths that I may still be unaware of, but that users can develop like a multiplayer novel: an archaeology between senses and meanings. To make architecture real, we need architecture to evoke senses and meanings in people, not just within the architectural community, in order to reach the collective imagination. Senses and meanings are the ultimate goal of our mission, because it is an attempt to convert a mass of stones into something more spiritual, something more related to an idea of the soul. Not necessarily in a religious way, but in a psychological way.
Finally, we reach the concluding point: the uniqueness of time. In constructing this homepage, where articles written more than ten years ago are considered as important as those written a month ago, I want to challenge the arrogance of the present day, which focuses too much on current events without a sense of historical perspective. We grow up with this certainty that we are constantly refining new things. But without knowing history, including recent history, we lack the critical tools to understand if the things proposed by magazines are authentically new or just rebrandings of past ideas.
Thus, the entire path of my research is historically situated. There is no greater importance placed on the present or the past. It is the uniqueness of time that refines architectural quality into a single piece. This is an attempt to remember that time is not divided into the present and the past. This is especially true for architecture because, in the past, before the modern, the primary mission of architecture was to create a memory, to create messages for the future. It was not about refining something new, but about preserving memories of values and traditions. We are living in problematic times because we risk losing much of our civilization. Just as it happened in the Middle Ages, today we risk losing much information that is still accessible but may not be forever. Thus, any fragment of information, if enclosed in a more enduring frame like architecture, can become an important tool for creating a time machine. But not a time machine to go into the future; rather, it is about preserving the continuity of our existence on this planet, because we might become extinct or regress very quickly in the coming decades. Therefore, it is important to revisit this idea of architecture as a conduit of messages. Messages for the soul, messages for the psyche.
Students at California Polytechnic State University visit the House Elogio del Grigio. Photography: Brianna Ruland