Dipartimento di Architettura, Università di Palermo, Palermo,
Antonio Biancucci introduces the lecture Style, form, proportion, position, part of the La giovane architettura 4 series at the Dipartimento di Architettura of the Università di Palermo
Antonio Biancucci
Welcome. Today we are here for the last meeting of this year’s cycle of lectures on contemporary design for young architecture, and I welcome the architect Antonino Cardillo.
A particular greeting to Professor Antonietta Iolanda Lima, an important point of reference in the Department of Architecture in Palermo, a historian of national and international standing but also a designer who has committed herself to the field in person. I want to recall a small book of hers on Palermo, which was fundamental to me as a student in understanding the dynamics of this city: among the very many things she has written, it is a most useful document for anyone beginning the study of architecture.
With today we close the cycle of talks intended to show our students the possible approaches to the profession of architect, understood in its broadest and highest sense. It was a pleasure to invite Cardillo to close it, because he is a figure of absolute singularity in the Sicilian panorama. We are almost coevals, and I want to make clear that ‘young’ here does not refer to age but to an approach of experimentation, curiosity, research and innovation, which I believe he has embodied in exemplary fashion.
He is a Sicilian architect trained in this school, who has nevertheless built his working life, nemo propheta in patria at least at the beginning, by building relations on the international stage, with an extraordinary recognisability that we rarely find in comparable situations here in Sicily.
One thing that intrigued me is that at the beginning of his career the work was made by building an imaginary landscape of unrealised architectures, which let a possible vision be glimpsed, a transformation of the state of the art. Among the first, he experimented at a high level with digital representation, and so with the construction of a virtual world that could mirror everyday reality, or offer an alternative vision of it. As a young architect he developed, carefully and professionally, a series of imaginary projects that gave him very great international visibility, so much so that this proposal of his, provocative if you like, cultural promotion but also enquiry in the field, pushed him into a series of exchanges that helped and encouraged him: from those projects came commissions abroad, among them a house in Japan.
Then there is another reason for interest. In his path he begins by experimenting on the themes of the organic and the contemporary, and as time goes on there has been almost a kind of sciacquare i panni in Arno: an enquiry into themes that come earlier, with references to the classical, to a certain system of rules. Another theme we have in common is the passion for Soane: he has intervened inside Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, one of the most extraordinary architectures there are. Some of his works have been published and others will appear next month in Casabella.
He is also bound to the Trapani area, where he has built important works: Mammacaura, which many of you know. From this point of view I was interested in his relation between the global and the local, in how he has managed to inflect the theme of identity within the general cultural scene in which we move. Architecture is always the expression of the time we live in, and our time is rather confused: it has to manage to provide answers, and that is not always so simple. I invite you to know his work through the two publications as well, and at the end we shall have a discussion with our colleagues. I hand over to you, thank you again, Antonino.
