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House of Twelve

Kew, Melbourne ,

The sixth instalment in the Houses for No One collection, this architectural project embarks on a journey into the ruins of ancient Rome. It engages with light to manipulate perception, proposing an exploration of the progressive mutation of contemporary ideas and those of late antiquity

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

Work

Antonino Cardillo

A kind of proliferation of word-characters, each with its own intense specificity, all imbued with a peculiar evocative power.

— Antonietta Iolanda Lima, Frank O. Gehry. American Center, Parigi (1998)

It was the ruins of ancient Rome that inspired this project, those unpredictable warps that in the eighteenth century appeared to European travellers on the Grand Tour as fantastic visions. Rather than the historic original, what fascinates still today is this state of progressive destruction that a millennial weather carves in the forms, unveiling obscure recesses.

So the ruin tells us of time passing, of slowly dying beauty, and in this its slow decay evokes a transverse narrative, as if trapped between the architecture and its definitive destruction. House of Twelve tries to invent a fantastic response to an interrupted story, following an empirical path made by progressive mutation of contemporary ideas and those of late antiquity, such as the theme of intersecting rings or the horizontal sequence of multiple spaces and forms, concatenated and directed according to a poetic, which unites works of Frank Lloyd Wright with the villa of the emperor Hadrian at Tivoli.

Collisions and juxtapositions, furthermore, distant echoes of the American Center by Frank Gehry, characterise the front and the public space of the house, whose roundnesses appear, from the road, to be deeply sculpted. As well as restoring thickness to the façade, these excavations make it permeable to the winter sun, which reaches to illuminate, with a grazing light, interpreted by the cavities, the courtyards at the rear.

In particular, the living space, with its vault in gold mosaic, the ripples of the mirrors of water at the edges and the consequent manifold reflections of light, appears from the main courtyard as a baroque room of light, here reinvented in an urban key.

, London, 23 July 2010

House of Twelve
Living space: gold mosaic vault reverberating with the water at the edges; trilithon fireplace
House of Twelve
Dining room with wine cellar: four black panels between two pillars; entrance on the left
House of Twelve
Kitchen: counter with two stools; ribbon window onto the courtyard
House of Twelve
First floor: main bedroom to the left, stairwell lit from the north to the right
House of Twelve
Bright opening to the study; wardrobe behind the wooden volume at the head of the bed
House of Twelve
Living space: from above, glass wall to the courtyard; trilithon fireplace under the vault
House of Twelve
Room of light: half-lunette over the lap pool; round building with bedroom and kitchen

Data

  • Time: Design (Dec 2008 – May 2009); CGI (May – Jul 2009)
  • Place: 17 Molesworth Street, Kew, Melbourne, Australia
  • Area: 500 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 – 2009

When the inspirations from ancient ruins and comprehension of the millennial architecture interact, a peculiar architectural language is evolved.

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)

Every building, every space that Ar. Cardillo lays his hands on becomes a masterpiece. […] Just like a poem that has been brought to life, the architectural piece stands, speaking volumes about the magnitude of effort the architect has put in it.

Surfaces Reporter, New Delhi, June 2011, p. 41 (en, it)

That sense of adventure brought him to Australia on one occasion to design a house in Melbourne, which offered its own challenges. […] In the end, this project gave me the opportunity to create a bridge between ancient Byzantium and contemporary Australian style.

DNA, no. 119, Sydney, December 2009, p. 105 (en, it)

Exhibitions

2025 – 2009

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 House of Twelve appeared in the video of images that accompanied the lecture.

London, (en, it)

ArtHertz

At the invitation of musician John Foxx, a print of Ellipse 1501 House and the video Tales of Light – featuring four projects later included in the Houses for No One series – were exhibited as part of a show dedicated to artists he inspired, held at The Horse Hospital in London. The House of Twelve was one of the four projects in the video.

The Horse Hospital, London, – (en, it)

Publications

2025 – 2010

Work texts

Theoretical writings

Bibliography

2024 – 2009

Reception in press and internet

Reception in social media