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Crepuscular Green

Mondrian Suite, Rome,

Crepuscular Green is an interior reform project for an art gallery in San Lorenzo, Rome. Inspired by Richard Wagner, the design employs colours and textures to evoke a greenish dawn, transforming the space into a green-gold grotto with a rustic vault, rounded altar, arch bridge with mirror, suspended slab, and two black flutes

Genres work
Series grottoes
Themes colour fields forms gold green trilithon
Typology art gallery
Intervention types alteration furniture
Stages built
Places rome

Work

Antonino Cardillo

He must pronounce a curse on love, he must renounce all joys of love, before he masters the magic, a ring to forge from the gold.

— Richard Wagner, Das Rheingold (1869)

Crepuscular Green is an interior refurbishment of an art gallery. The use of colour and texture is inspired by the opening scene of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which describes a greenish dawn as seen from the depths of the river.

This work was made on a low budget with one builder. The poverty of means applied here relates to the idea of architecture being a faculty to transcend the ordinary. Like a green golden grotto, a rusticated vault envelopes the upper part of the room, rendering a trilithon schema on the backdrop.

Ahead, a rounded altar features a mirror arched bridge and a suspended slab above. On either side, two black flutes emit diffused lighting. Everything is painted in shades of green.

Words of the space relate to each other a cohesive narrative, which aims to unfold the imagination of the inhabitants.

Crepuscular Green
Symmetry of the event room by day: trilithon portal and counter with a mirror arch
Crepuscular Green
Colour fields: rustic gold of the vault and smooth green of the wall
Crepuscular Green
Long side of the room with an opening towards the exhibition room
Crepuscular Green
End of the counter in the foreground, a double elongated arch in plan, with black lamps
Crepuscular Green
Symmetry of the room by night: black lamps diffusing light onto the rusticated vault

Testimony

Often, we contemporaryists have a too rigid and ideological view of the subject, forgetting that contemporary is, first of all, what happens now and not necessarily what happens ‘as aesthetically’. In this sense, the architect Cardillo’s proposal is akin to an artistic installation, an out-of-context piece: precisely in its contrast with the total white of the rest of the exhibition space, it emphasises the possibility and hope that non-homogeneous languages, though sometimes with similar roots, might return to converse in an intellectual dialogue that can enrich contemporaneity with ferments and new ideas.

Now, the two rooms coexist in a philosophical dialogue. The new entrance hall spiritually welcomes the audience, prepares them, and arranges them towards the exhibition environment, which has deliberately remained white, as before. And it is precisely this difference, measured by a corridor with a skylight, that creates surprise and amazement. It invites the possibility, any possibility, of encounters between not just ‘the’ contemporary but rather ‘the’ many contemporaries, whom we could and should embrace.

[email], Mondrian Suite, Rome, 15 May 2014 [Italian]

Data

  • Time: Design (Feb – Mar 2014); Construction (Mar – Apr 2014); Photography (Apr 2014); Text drafting (Nov 2014 – Feb 2015)
  • Place: Mondrian Suite, Via dei Piceni, 41, Rome, Italy
  • Area: 40 m² (single storey)

Credits

  • Architecture, works supervision: Antonino Cardillo
  • Patron: Mondrian Suite (director: Vincenzo Petrone alias Klaus Mondrian)
  • Construction: Grigoriu Cicau
  • Furniture making: Stefano Coacci
  • Lamp making: Armand Darot
  • Bar counter design: Antonino Cardillo
  • Photography, text: Antonino Cardillo
  • Thanks to Paolo Bedetti

Poetics

2023 – 2016

This lecture traces a decade of research aimed at reintegrating psychology, anthropology, historiography and archaeology into architecture, a discipline fragmented by modern specialisation. Of Crepuscular Green, an events room at the entrance of the Mondrian Suite gallery in San Lorenzo, it recounts the radical idea of a green gallery, a colour many consider unfit as a ground for art. The work evokes the primordial dawn of Wagner’s Rheingold, the sensation of a grotto in the depths of the river: an altar-bridge crossed by a mirror, two black trumpets, the golden ‘door of the dead’ and the rusticated ceiling painted in green gold, resonating with the gildings of Rome.

L’antropologia nell’architettura, Museo Agostino Pepoli, Trapani, (en, it)

This lecture explores architecture as a symbolic and psychological act, where ancient archetypes and cultural opposites converge in spatial form. Crepuscular Green refers here to the opening scene of Wagner’s Rheingold, a dawn immersed in the Rhine in which gold is primordial nature: the upper walls and ceiling seem a cave of green gold, the arched altar surmounted by two black trumpets evokes a bridge over a river, and behind it stands a walled-up door, also covered in gold. For the alchemists, gold was the final stage of a spiritual process.

Dessauer Gespräche, Dessau Institute of Architecture, Dessau, (en, it)

This interview reflects on colour as a narrative device and architecture as a codex of protection and eroticism. Through projects such as Crepuscular Green, House of Dust and Colour as a Narrative, it explores the symbolic resonance of materials, the rejection of minimalism, and the pursuit of atmospheres that unveil the invisible. The grotto and the arch emerge as archetypes of the sacred, while prestige is redefined as the capacity to embody magic.

Bamboo, São Paulo, (en, it, pt)

Historiography

2018 – 2015

His understanding of space and balance has resulted in some of the most influential interiors of recent times.

atelierlumira.com, Sydney, 22 January 2018 (en, it)

The gentility of the perfectly selected verdant hues, delicately sheeting expanses of bare walls are layered deliberately over abrasive textures.

Mondo* Arc India, no. 15, New Delhi, July 2017, p. 51 (en, it)

The colors and textures in this Roman art gallery interior by Antonino Cardillo make us feel deeply weird. But we also love it.

sightunseen.com, New York, 22 April 2017 (en, it)

He is the most radical architect in my selection. It creates tension and a strong atmosphere. He has a sharp notion of interior design.

Bamboo, no. 61, São Paulo, August 2016, p. 33 (en, fr, it, pt)

Egyptian? Greek? Roman? It doesn’t really matter, because once these ancestral images are deposited in our unconscious they are emptied of their historical specificity.

Design Exchange, no. 12, London, August 2015, p. 109 (en, it)

With its rather modest 40 square metres, Cardillo has transformed the gallery into a sacred space, providing a bold contrast to the eternal White Cube.

designlines.de, BauNetz, Berlin, 24 February 2015 (de, en, it)

Exhibitions

2025 – 2019

C. G. Jung-Institut Zürich

As part of the seminar ‘Depth architecture – The aesthetic nature of the psyche’ at the C. G. Jung-Institut Zürich, a sequence of sixteen images conceived as imaginal chambers was presented as a silent and solitary exhibition, anticipating the seminar’s themes and the idea of ‘form as the task of the Spirit’. Of Crepuscular Green the sequence included a single image, the counter with the mirror arch.

Küsnacht, (de, en, it)

Museo Agostino Pepoli

Following an introduction by anthropologist Rita Cedrini, Antonino Cardillo presented his built works in the lecture ‘An integrative journey’, part of the encounter L’antropologia nell’architettura at the Museo Agostino Pepoli in Trapani. Crepuscular Green appeared under the title ‘Mondrian Suite Art Gallery’.

Trapani, (en, it)

Dessau Institute of Architecture

After an introduction by Professor Johannes Kister, Cardillo interpreted seven images of his architectural works during the lecture ‘A synchronicity of cultures and civilisations’, part of the Dessauer Gespräche series at the Dessau Institute of Architecture, Bauhaus Campus. Crepuscular Green illustrated the section ‘The guardians of gold’.

Bauhaus Campus, Dessau, (de, en, it)

Publications

2025 – 2016

Theoretical writings

  • , ‘Depth architecture – The aesthetic nature of the psyche’, seminar as part of the Training Programmes in Analytical Psychology, C. G. Jung-Institut Zürich, Küsnacht, 31 Oct. 2025; transcript published on , 31 Oct. 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.
  • , ‘A synchronicity of cultures and civilisations’, lecture as part of the Dessauer Gespräche cur. Johannes Kister, Hochschule Anhalt, Dessau Institute of Architecture, 13 Nov. 2019; transcript published on , 15 April 2023.
  • , ‘’, ODDA, no. 11, interviewed by Zurain Imam, New York, Sept. 2016, pp. 426‑427.
  • , ‘’, interviewed by Carol Junqueira, bamboonet.com.br, São Paulo, Aug. 2016.

Bibliography

2025 – 2014

Reception in press and internet

Reception in social media