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Purple House

Pembrokeshire,

The seventh instalment in the Houses for No One collection, this expressionistic abode of sculpture embarks on a voyage into the legacy of the Normans. It engages with light to manipulate perception, offering an exploration of history

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

Work

Antonino Cardillo

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

— William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1623)

Nowadays people seem to ignore the erratic unfolding of ancient fluxes which moulded Northern lands. Lost in their present, they forget the pathways leading from the past to our time. Just a few memories.

By the middle ages, between 1130 and 1194, England, and to some extent Wales and Ireland, shared with Sicily a Norman domain: Byzantine mercenaries and recognisers of Middle East cultures after capturing Sicily, these conquerors from the North Sea introduced a route between the Northern and Mediterranean shorelines. Making British history for the second time since the Roman era, they broke once more the islands’ isolation.

Introducing knowledge from the Middle East region, not least bringing back ancient Greek and Roman texts, they laid the foundation for the birth of the Modern age. But history is full of violence: the dominant possession of a submissive culture manages to disguise the larceny by carefully rewriting history; and where memory lacks, misunderstandings begin.

Learning from the past, might architecture heal history’s wounds? Might it have the power to awake the routes concealed behind day-to-day life, revealing the whole cloaked behind the gloomy curtains of ignorance?

Purple House represents an unconscious trip into the Norman legacy: exploring diverse elements, following paths empirically, re-evoking remote visions, aiming to find a common lost sense: what were the forgotten exchanges between England, Wales, Ireland, Sicily and Middle East?

Encircled by massive carved walls and coordinated by an interior symmetrical façade with crystal domes at the corners, the architectural forms investigate what unites us in this history. Compactly, complex, oppressive, expressionistic, the hollow interior of this cave sculpture inhales light: a light which swells the curves and the bulkheads, it coagulates at the corners and slips away, amid the interstices. It brightens up an adamantine vault, creating shades and dilating it. From dawn to dusk, its backlight changes the sense of space and the perception of the forms: at midday it dims the bulkheads curving in the living room. The light perforates the trapezoidal apertures carved in the heavy walls; close to the ceiling, the light transmutes itself into blades cut by a magnified brise-soleil. At sunset, however, the hall darkens. The parts, now obscured, counterpoint distant glares spread around and inside the hollowed-out base: below a burning cave, above a giant brazier glows into the vault. During the course of a solar day light and dark swap roles, interpreting the drama of an architecture monolithic and fragmentary, made of stone, cement and purple.

, London, 23 June 2011

Purple House
Stepped terraces on three levels under the two vaults; at sunset, a dark alcove above the glare
Purple House
Curved sculptural wall with brise-soleil against the trilithon mezzanine; glare from behind
Purple House
Mezzanine: sculptural wall with brise-soleil and a trapezoidal aperture; purple carpet
Purple House
Hall: at midday, blades of brise-soleil light on the bulkheads above the trilithon mezzanine
Purple House
Bedroom: curved striped headboard and bathroom glasshouse set between the volumes
Purple House
Stepped terraces on three levels under the half vault; inset bathroom glasshouse

Data

  • Time: Design (Dec 2009 – Jun 2010); CGI (Jun 2010 – May 2011)
  • Place: Pembrokeshire, Wales, UK
  • Area: 350 m² (three 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 image of the Purple House opens the first, style: ‘Who am I?’. Here the story of the Seven Houses for No One is told, a corpus that seemed built and was a literary invention, born of bypassing the figure of the client, from a formation marked by video games and by the encounter with Antonietta Iolanda Lima.

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 – 2011

The Purple House is an attempt to relate to the Norman legacy, re-evoking the history of England till the middle east, where the expressionist architectural elements approach towards healing the history.

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)

How do we construct our reality from the material and the imaginary through the media today and what are the consequences? […] 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.

german-architects.com, Stuttgart, 29 July 2012 (de, en, it)

Incidentally, architecture has always been ephemeral and virtual, he explains. From Palladio to Schinkel, from Sant’Elia to Mies van der Rohe, architects influenced architectural development and changed reality with ideas in the form of surrogates.

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, no. 164, Zurich, 17 July 2012, p. 40 (de, en, it)

An email inquiry pointing out that the architectural photos depicted or submitted are not photos but renderings, receives the terse response: ‘I am an artist and as an artist I manipulate reality! That’s it!’

Falter, no. 19/12, Vienna, 9 May 2012, p. 31 (de, en, it)

What cannot be ignored is the level of light and shadow that naturally flow over the house and create a sensation of time.

Ravenel, no. 6, Taipei City, August 2013, pp. 70‑73 (en, it, zh)

Differently from the [William Morris’] Red House in London which represents the search for a national British identity, Purple House tries to recall the forgotten routes between Mediterranean and Britain shorelines.

Inside Outside, no. 315, Mumbai, September 2011, pp. 147‑148 (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; an image of the Purple House opened the lecture.

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 Purple House closed the video of images that accompanied the lecture.

London, (en, it)

Publications

2025 – 2010

Work texts

  • , ‘’, L4_House Design, A&C Publishing, Seoul, 2012, pp. 102‑107.
  • , ‘’, worldarchitecturenews.com, ed. Siân Disson, London, 23 June 2011.
  • , , ed. Angel Fanghsien Lin, Rome, Sept. 2010; rev. eds, May 2011, July 2011. Printed in c. 20 copies; web eds, Nov. 2011, .

Theoretical writings

Bibliography

2026 – 2010

Reception in press and internet

Reception in social media