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Concrete Moon House

Kew, Melbourne ,

The fifth instalment in the Houses for No One collection, this dwelling embarks on a voyage into the realm of fear and unconfessed desires. It engages with light to manipulate perception, proposing an exploration of diverse formal identities

Genres work
Series for no one
Themes forms vaults
Typology semi-detached house
Intervention types new construction
Stages interrupted unbuilt
Places melbourne

Work

Antonino Cardillo

Then I thought I could compose music that was very modern using digital architecture, while expressing a very primitive type of sound: I think it was used before Catholicism, sung in caves and oceans.

— John Foxx, The Quiet Man (2007)

Secretly, everyone is attracted to what he is afraid of and sometimes fear reawakens desires that cannot be confessed. We remain perturbed, recognising that in remote parts of our interior universe resides an apparent otherness.

We discover that the concepts of identity and difference are ambiguous, and often, paradoxically, difference becomes an instrument of investigation into our own identity. Two distinct parts of a dwelling here become a pretext for telling a story between two diverse formal identities.

Designed for a suburb of Melbourne on a rectangular plot, in plan the house is in two parts. One public which in elevation looks like the upturned keel of a boat or a funny concrete moon that emerges from the pool in front, whose design is characterised by a deviation from the straight pathway.

The other, private part takes the form of a long, narrow building set against the perimeter, which, through the progressive decomposition of its component parts, creates a portico open to the garden but closed to the car park.

In being created in space, each of the two geometric identities retains an echo of a presumed common origin. Thus signs of one often appear in the other, though elaborated according to different processes.

Though diverse, the elements have a relationship, and the sound of one resonates in the other; especially in the cave, where the achievement of this osmosis introduces doubt as to where identity finishes and where difference begins.

, London, 20 Nov. 2009

Concrete Moon House
Split asymmetric concrete vault: ribbon window of the cave and entrance portico
Concrete Moon House
Entrance: vault descending from the entrance and dining mezzanine towards the hall
Concrete Moon House
Duplex cave: upper floor at street level; ribbon window onto the sunken hall’s courtyard
Concrete Moon House
Cave: from above, two openings cut into the concrete wall, with the entrance on the left
Concrete Moon House
Cave: mezzanine set into the ribbon window; low windows to the north, high to the south
Concrete Moon House
Cave: under the mezzanine, stair and openings to the north courtyard; trilithon fireplace
Concrete Moon House
Curved concrete wall in dialogue with the linear, stepped beige building, in the afternoon

Data

  • Time: Design (Oct – Nov 2008); CGI (Nov 2009)
  • Place: 17 Molesworth Street, Kew, Melbourne, Australia
  • Area: 780 m² (three storeys)

Credits

  • Architecture: Antonino Cardillo
  • Patrons: Livio & Nadia De Marchi
  • CGI, text: Antonino Cardillo
  • Translation: Charles Searson

Poetics

2025 – 2013

This hermeneutic reading arises from conversations with Miriam Scotto di Santolo and approaches the Seven Houses for No One as imaginal architectures. Never built, yet received as real once published in the international press, they are read through Henry Corbin’s mundus imaginalis: an intermediate world where imagination is a faculty of knowledge and the image possesses metaphysical substance. They are not imagined houses but archetypal visions arising within the ʿālam al-mithāl, the world of visions of Islamic theosophy. Like Odysseus, who seeks not a dwelling but a return to origin, they are for no one because they belong to everyone: forms that ask to be contemplated rather than inhabited.

antoninocardillo.com, Eryx, (en, it)

This lecture articulates the architect’s craft as four questions – style, form, proportion, position – where the first asks who one is and the last where one is. The first is answered by the story of the Seven Houses for No One: bypassing the figure of the client, a corpus that seemed built and was a literary invention enters the dominant narrative of architecture as a ‘Trojan horse’, and becomes a form of subversion. In the second the houses are reconsidered: they sought a continuity with Frank Lloyd Wright’s residences, in a syncretic synthesis with the late antiquity of Rome, certain Eastern architectures and reinforced concrete.

La giovane architettura 4, Dipartimento di Architettura, Università di Palermo, Palermo, (en, it)

This lecture reflects on the manipulation of history, the illusion of professionalism, and the integrity of architectural creation. Of the Seven Houses for No One the speaker says he sees them as a bad answer to a good question: how to influence the closed system of a journalism tied to corporate practices. By creating the computer images of his own projects himself, he reintegrates an artificial division of roles; and those houses teach him to bridge the gap between the idea and its representation, in images that attempt a mythology.

Constructed Realities, Goethe‑Universität, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, (de, en, it)

Recorded inside the House of Dust in Rome, this interview returns to the architectures published as built and realised only on the computer. They are called an imaginary map of places, derived from the study of history, which the idea of architecture as imagery runs through entirely: Ledoux, Boullée, Sant’Elia, the early projects of Mies van der Rohe. The action is acknowledged as subversive, a breach in a wall without which nothing would have been built; the interview with Der Spiegel is the story about the story.

Radio3 Suite, RAI Radio 3, Rome, (en, it)

Historiography

2019 – 2010

The house has not just the profile taken from the moon, but also the subtle vibe.

re-thinkingthefuture.com, New Delhi, 10 August 2019 (en, it)

with

Cardillo has created a labyrinth of truths and illusions. It is a novella with multiple layers. […] There is no one truth – reality: it doesn’t exist. Antonino Cardillo has built it.

DEAR Magazin, no. 1, Berlin, April 2017, p. 84 (de, en, it)

Inspiration from Roman architecture, whether due to its monolithic nature or rounded shapes, is evident in the construction.

Projekt, no. 9/10, Prague, September 2010, p. 32 (cs, en, it)

Whoever says that Australia lacks culture hasn’t met the client who commissioned this exemplary home.

ShortList, no. 109, London, January 2010, p. 8 (en, it)

Exhibitions

2025 – 2010

Dipartimento di Architettura, Università di Palermo

At the invitation of Professor Antonio Biancucci, with Salvatore Oddo, Antonino Cardillo presented his works in the lecture ‘Style, form, proportion, position’, in the La giovane architettura 4 conferences series at the Dipartimento di Architettura of the Università di Palermo. In the sections ‘Style’ and ‘Form’ he argued the Seven Houses for No One series.

Palermo, (en, it)

Istituto Luce Cinecittà

At the invitation of curator Diego Grammatico, Cardillo talked about his relationship between video games and architecture in the lecture ‘From Zak McKracken to House of Dust’, part of a panel for the Rome Video Game Lab festival of the Istituto Luce at the Cinecittà Studios. He told the story of the Seven Houses for No One series: houses produced in virtual reality that for years many believed had been built.

Rome, (en, it)

Goethe-Universität

At the invitation of Professors Chris Dähne, Frederike Lausch and Bettina Rudhof, Cardillo screened the video Seven Houses for No One before the lecture ‘Faked reality’, part of the Constructed Realities series of the Goethe-Universität at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt. For almost ten minutes the images of the seven houses unfolded over the Prelude to Act I of Wagner’s Lohengrin, between his own words to Der Spiegel and an aphorism by Oswald Mathias Ungers on reality.

Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, (de, en, it)

Schweizerisches Architekturmuseum

The curator Hubertus Adam exhibited publications on the House of Convexities, of the series Seven Houses for No One, and mentions the ‘Cardillo phenomenon’ in the show Bildbau. Schweizer Architektur im Fokus der Fotografie at the Schweizerisches Architekturmuseum in Basel.

Basel, – (de, en, it)

Chelsea College of Art and Design

At the invitation of Professor Ana Araujo, Cardillo recounted his computer-generated images in the ‘Light and rendering’ lecture part of the Spaces & Narrations lecture series at Chelsea College of Art and Design. The Concrete Moon House appeared in the video of images that accompanied the lecture.

London, (en, it)

Publications

2025 – 2009

Work texts

  • , , ed. Angel Fanghsien Lin, Rome, Sept. 2010; rev. eds, May 2011, July 2011. Printed in c. 20 copies; web eds, Nov. 2011, .
  • , ‘’, Tasarim, no. 199, Istanbul, Feb. 2010, pp. 122‑127.
  • , ‘’, A+A, no. 12, Mexico City, Feb. 2010, p. 9.
  • , ‘’, Landscape Architect, no. 1/10, Dalian, Jan. 2010, pp. 2‑3.
  • , ‘’, worldarchitecturenews.com, ed. Niki May Young, London, 20 Nov. 2009.

Theoretical writings

  • , ‘Stile, forma, proporzione, posizione’, lecture as part of La giovane architettura 4, ed. Antonio Biancucci, Dipartimento di Architettura, Università di Palermo, Palermo, 25 March 2025; transcript published on , 1 April 2025.
  • , ‘’ [television programme], Artbox, interviewed by Eleonora Angius, La7, Milan, 6 March 2025; transcript published on , 6 March 2025.
  • , ‘Un percorso d’integrazione’, lecture as part of the encounter , part of the series of cultural events of the Museo Agostino Pepoli, Trapani, 26 May 2023; transcript published on , 20 Sept. 2025.
  • , ‘Reality does not exist’, live interview as part of Mitte/Rand Salon, interviewed by Tim Berge, Berlin, 21 Nov. 2017; transcript published on , 6 Oct. 2025.
  • , ‘’ [radio programme], Trailblazers Network Trapani Erasmus Generation, interviewed by Federico Chiarello, Antonio Mistretta, ZAK Radio, Trapani, 20 April 2017; transcript published on , 23 Sept. 2025.
  • , ‘Faked reality’, lecture as part of the Constructed Realities, ed. Chris Dähne, Frederike Lausch, Bettina Rudhof, Goethe‑Universität, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, 1 Dec. 2015; transcript published on , 12 May 2021.
  • , ‘’ [radio programme], Radio3 Suite, interviewed by Andrea Penna, RAI Radio 3, Rome, 6 June 2013.
  • , ‘’, interviewed by Andrea Massaro, Antonio Panzica, Alessandro Montemagno, Radio Panorama, Palermo, 17 July 2012.
  • , ‘’, B1 Magazine, no. 15, interviewed by Jakkrit Angsutti, Bangkok, Jan. 2009, pp. 94‑99.

Bibliography

2024 – 2009

Reception in press and internet

Reception in social media