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The Inexact Quality

野村工務店, Takarazuka,

The Inexact Quality is a two-storey house in Takarazuka, Japan, featuring a timber structure, whitewashed walls and a sloping roof. The irregular geometry of the seven-sided living room on the first floor and the versatile openings engage with the light, evoking the inexact quality of medieval Italian piazzas

Genres work
Themes
Typology detached house
Intervention types new construction
Stages built
Places takarazuka

Work

Antonino Cardillo

House on two levels of medium size built on a hill on a trapezoidal plot in Takarazuka, in the Hyōgo Prefecture, overlooking Osaka bay. Timber structure, whitewashed walls, sloping pitched roof.

Sleeping area on the ground floor – three bedrooms with bathroom and entrance hall genkan – and living area on the first floor – wc, kitchen, patio, dining area, sitting room and Japanese room washitsu.

Formally, in plan, the two longer, non-parallel sides of the plot define two right-angled systems which find their formal connection on the third side, on the road, defining in elevation an incisive, faceted shape. Its diverse surfaces mutate the intensity of the light according to the incidence of the sun.

Inside, on the first floor, a large polygonal living room with seven sides possesses the inexact quality of certain medieval Italian piazzas, on whose sides the openings – now windows, now doorways – describe multiple directions of aspect and travel. The irregularity of the geometry, therefore, crystallises in the shape a willingness for dialogue among the parts which make up the whole.

Finally, at the rear, the narrow space created between the kitchen and the Japanese room picks out a small patio, whose windowed sides gather the afternoon diagonals of the sun on the tatami flooring of the Japanese room and reverberating blues inside the kitchen cavity.

These two rooms give onto the living room through two low doorways cut into the white sketch of a high wall. Almost rationalised grottoes, these bedrooms made of independent light engage with the large polygonal room: dark and azure in the morning, light and warm in the afternoon.

, London, 29 March 2011

The Inexact Quality
The Inexact Quality
The Inexact Quality
The Inexact Quality
The Inexact Quality
The Inexact Quality
The Inexact Quality
The Inexact Quality

Testimony

We are greatly honoured that our model house has been featured. Built through repeated discussions with Antonino, it has become one of the works we cherish most. And I think that it is a dwelling in which Antonino’s charm has been drawn out. On this occasion I feel I truly learned from Antonino’s exacting care and his sense of design.

[email], Representative Director of 野村工務店, Osaka, 10 June 2011 [Japanese]

Data

  • Time: Design (Jul – Oct 2009); Construction (Nov 2009 – Mar 2010); Photography (Feb 2011); Text drafting (Mar 2011)
  • Place: Takarazuka-shi, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan
  • Area: 150 m² (two storeys)

Credits

  • Architecture, construction supervision: Antonino Cardillo
  • Client, construction company: 野村工務店 (Nomura Koumuten Corporation; director: Kenji Nomura; local architect: Yukinori Nagao; site supervisor: Takeshi Suenaga; interior coordinator: Ayumi Taniguchi; Italian-Japanese translator/interpreter: Luca Balestra)
  • Photography, text: Antonino Cardillo
  • English translation: Charles Searson
  • Thanks to Luca Balestra

Poetics

2023

This lecture traces a decade of research aimed at reintegrating psychology, anthropology, historiography and archaeology into architecture, a discipline fragmented by modern specialisation. It opens with The Inexact Quality, the first built work, in Takarazuka: asked for an ‘Italian’ house in Japan, it answers with a synthesis between the syntax of Japanese minimalism and the form of a medieval Italian piazza, polygonal and irregular. The seven-sided main room carries an urban imagery of underpasses and workshops indoors, and within one of its openings a room with a tatami floor hosts the tea ceremony.

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

Historiography

2017 – 2011

with

The only finished house that Antonino Cardillo has built to date is the Nomura House in the Japanese city of Takarazuka; a second residential property is due to follow this summer on Lake Garda. […] The house in Japan remains a bizarre chapter in all of this – does it exist?

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

Over the bay of Osaka, Japan, Antonino Cardillo recently realised a single-family house that aims at a dialogue between European and Japanese spatial traditions.

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

In the realization phase, a process of sign distillation and method systematization occurs, making the language clearer and stronger.

L’architetto italiano, no. 42, Rome, April 2011, p. 31 (en, it)

Exhibitions

2023 – 2012

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. The Inexact Quality appeared under the title ‘Nomura Koumuten House’.

Trapani, (en, it)

Associazione Italiana di Architettura e Critica

The curator Giovanna Solito exhibited the work, then named Nomura 24 House, among thirty Sicilian practices under forty in 30 giovani architetti siciliani under 40, part of the second congress Architects meet in Selinunte, whose catalogue was published by Lettera 22.

Parco archeologico di Selinunte, Castelvetrano, – (en, it)

Publications

2023 – 2010

Work texts

Theoretical writings

  • , ‘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.

Bibliography

2017 – 2010

Reception in press and internet