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Max’s House in a Small Lake

Nîmes,

The fourth instalment in the Houses for No One collection, this lakeside retreat embarks on a journey into the unpredictability of reality. It engages with light to manipulate perception, proposing an exploration of the transfiguration of a boat set against the wooded banks of a little lake

Genres work
Series for no one
Themes forms
Typology detached house
Intervention types new construction
Stages unbuilt
Places nîmes

Work

Antonino Cardillo

We are composed in equal measure of what has been and what might have been.

— Javier Marías, Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (1994)

Research, often, is a path orientated by incoherent choices, and yet the willingness to be permeated by the unexpected often reveals new keys to the comprehension of reality, which, being by its very nature constructed from a geography and from a relatively infinite time, is unstable and insecure.

Our present is just one of the possible outcomes of reality and its progressive fulfilment in history is perhaps casual. Every day of every life passed could have been different. Those thoughts stimulated the ideation of Max’s House in a Small Lake.

The house looks like the transfiguration of a boat set against the wooded banks of a little lake in the countryside of Nimes, in the south of France: a human landing stage on the edge of a natural border.

The building is made up of two entities contrasting over two levels: a compact basement in travertine comprises the hall and bedroom on whose terrace is set a high, luminous living room, articulated by a slender white metal structure. This at the same time designs the partito of the windows.

The landscape, from within, is thus broken up into quadrants and undergoes an analytical process of reconstruction. The arrangement of the metallic elements, then, regulates the sunlight: a brise-soleil screens it at midday, while deep containing walls, covered in teak and suspended a metre off the floor, partially occlude the morning and afternoon light.

Outside, to the south, the living area extends its planks so as to lap the pool. Beyond the mirror of water, in an ambiguous and inaccessible place, a portico measures the landscape.

To the north of the glass room, a textile parabola, stretched between the two edges of the building, shades the external dining area. Lastly, the eccentric collocation of a tower for the stairs determines oblique perceptions of the internal space.

, London, 29 Sept. 2008

Max’s House in a Small Lake
Slender living room on a compact base in the lake; façade with a trilithon entrance
Max’s House in a Small Lake
Living room: from above, entrance, passages to north and south terraces, containing walls
Max’s House in a Small Lake
Lines and volumes: portico in the lake, brise-soleil on the living room, base with inset tower
Max’s House in a Small Lake
South terrace: brise-soleil façade and portico in the lake overlooking the pool
Max’s House in a Small Lake
South terrace: seven-pillar portico beyond the pool, in counterpoint to the lake backdrop
Max’s House in a Small Lake
North terrace: textile parabola over an external table; white metal structure

Data

  • Time: Design (May – Jun 2008); CGI (Jun – Sep 2008)
  • Place: Nîmes, France
  • Area: 290 m² (two storeys)

Credits

  • Architecture: Antonino Cardillo
  • 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

2017 – 2010

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)

From the way it seems to float on a lake, you could easily mistake this structure for an avant garde ship. […] As in a ship, the double-decker edifice has its sleeping areas on the lower level and the recreational and public areas on the higher deck. […] Clearly, this is a pad where the party never ends.

Home, India Today, Mumbai, 12 January 2010, p. 47 (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. Max’s House in a Small Lake appeared in the video of images that accompanied the lecture.

London, (en, it)

Publications

2025 – 2008

Work texts

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.

Bibliography

2024 – 2009

Reception in press and internet

Reception in social media