Ideal drawings

Johannes Kister

Architects always like to make plans, and the Dessauer Gespräche had a plan for this year too: an Italian summer in the winter semester. The theme was cultural exchange, which is an inspiring thing for every art and for society.

I think there has always been a special relationship between Germany and Italy, and not only in football. As you know, the Romans conquered parts of Germany, and I come from Cologne, which is a Roman foundation. Over the centuries the Alps were a barrier, so it was always interesting to go south, and the other way round, because there is something there, a desire, I would call it. And in the times of no Google and no photographs, there was the culture of making drawings.

I had originally wanted to open these Dessauer Gespräche with a lecture on Schinkel’s journey to Italy. Those who travelled there at that time were astonished, and they drew, and those drawings give an imagination, an inspiring effect. Unfortunately that lecture did not take place last week, so we shall hear it at the end instead. That was my plan, and plans like to fail.

What does not fail is our first guest: Antonino Cardillo. Welcome. I had seen publications of his buildings, and in these very days there has been a discussion, not only in architecture but in politics too, about what is real and what is fake, and about what reality is for an architect. At first I thought his work might be built; then I understood that his subject is to make ideal architecture, the architecture of what he sees.

This is a theme I find very interesting. Some of you students, later, in real offices, will say: I would like to make something fine, but I am obliged to do this instead, because the clients are not interested. And yet architecture has its own tools to express what it wants to say. It has always been part of the history of architecture to have ideal architects and ideal drawings: you remember famous names such as Ledoux, Boullée, Schinkel and others. They created their ideal image of what they wanted to express, and I think there is something serious and problematic in drawing with the tools of today, which can genuinely leave you in doubt as to whether a thing is built or not. But that is not the point. The point is the conceptual idea Antonino Cardillo wants to express.

He comes from Trapani, on the west coast of Sicily. He studied in Palermo and has given lectures at the AA and other schools. Earlier this evening he was saying that he would like to come back to Sicily rather than be in London, and that this matters to him. Welcome, and we would like to hear your lecture.

• Johannes Kister, ‘Introduction’, spoken introduction to Antonino Cardillo’s lecture A synchronicity of cultures and civilisations, Dessauer Gespräche, Hochschule Anhalt, Dessau Institute of Architecture, 13 Nov. 2019 [English]; transcript published on antoninocardillo.com, 5 Aug. 2026.