Review
Christian Holl
All just rendered—and now? An Italian architect deceives the press.
Had this story been invented, one could be accused of commenting on contemporary architectural journalism in a rather crude manner. However, the story is not fabricated. Antonino Cardillo was described by Wallpaper* as one of the 30 most important young architects in the world. He was published in H.O.M.E, build interviewed him. In May, the deception was revealed: Cardillo’s published houses do not exist. They are just renderings. Der Spiegel compares him to the fraudster Felix Krull, the Viennese magazine Falter, which first exposed the deception, wondered if Cardillo actually existed. The NZZ is more direct: Pinocchio’s long lying nose is evoked, fraud is mentioned, and it is said that Cardillo told fairy tales. The NZZ may afford such moral superiority. Other journalists and publicists should be more cautious. However, it is too simple to generally condemn the media for craving everything new. Their business has become difficult, they have to compete against all the many information sources to which readers have free access thanks to flat rates. Competing with quality journalism is hard, and even then one is not immune to spreading false or half-true information because every statement, every source cannot be verified. One could argue that seeing the houses one writes about should be the minimum – but how many readers notice the difference, let alone care?
But also blaming the readers is too simple. The whole business works like this: publications about architecture, the basis of discourse, convey an understanding of architecture that reduces it to an idealised state, which it occupies for a brief moment between completion and occupation. The differences between wishful thinking and reality are fluid. And for some photo series, a removal van arrives, takes the users’ furniture outside, packs in expensive designer items, only to repack them in the evening and put the users’ furniture back in its place. Photos are edited to an extreme degree. An architect like Vincent Callabout finds himself in countless exhibitions about utopias, architecture and nature or climate envelopes, without considering how meaningful his designs of green giant luxury boats for the super-rich actually are. They simply look beautiful and let us hold onto a few cherished illusions. In the case of Cardillo, this screw was just turned a little further. The architect does not seem, if one believes his quoted statements, to feel guilty: he uses the market’s peculiarities to advertise his ideas. After all, all articles about him can be found on his homepage, even those accusing him of fraud.
Simple accusations do not help here. It is more useful to ask some questions. For example, how could it be made easier for young architects to actually build? Or how do we construct our reality from the material and the imaginary through the media today and what are the consequences? These are not simple questions, indeed. If the case of Cardillo now serves to at least seriously discuss one of these questions again, he may have done more for the architectural discourse than those who think they have always known the answer.
Antonino Cardillo, Purple House, Pembrokeshire, 2011.