My name is Antonino Cardillo and I was born in Erice, in 1975.
In 1984, my father founded a small software house in Trapani, I was nine years old but I have a clear memory of those giant computers without keyboards, beige and black monitors and enormous floppy disks. That was a magical and futuristic world made of computer languages, devices and other strange things. All this stuff had an effect on my imagination. From there I started to dream of the future, but it was a future different from our present. The computer world of the ’80s was both naïve and underground, very different from today’s. I spent my early life in those landscapes made of black screens, big pixels and videogames such as Ultima IV on my Commodore 64. I still have memories of those places, as if I had really been there.
When I was 17 I came across this phrase: ‘Italy without Sicily leaves no image in the soul: this is the key to everything’. Goethe wrote it on 13 April, 1787 in his Sicilian travel diary during his stay in Palermo. For years I have tried to understand the reason for such a neat yet at times surprising affirmation. I was walking in Palermo searching for a sense of all that pain, looking for the reason for that dying beauty. Unlike other cities which boast cleanliness and order, Palermo seems forcibly to demand what is the ultimate sense of time, the sense of history. In Palermo I breathed possible futures which never materialised, futures which remained on the contrary latent in stones, in the ground and in bodies. As in literature, I believe that architecture is a critical act over the reality that surrounds it and at the same time an act of interpreting history. Architecture is more than function, which is just a casual pretext that gives life to it. Definitely, the essence of architecture resides in its narrative, which structures time in space: great architecture, the city in fact, is like an endless novel, in which the personal experience of the protagonist, seen from his viewpoint, continually modifies the sense of the work of time. Aside from this human, historic and geographical dimension, architecture is destined for technological obsolescence and premature ageing.
Living in Palermo I studied architecture at Palermo University under Professor Iolanda Lima. Through her I began to love history. It may sound unbelievable but the more you study the history the more you avoid designing existing stuff. Accordingly the more you study, the more free your imagination. Of course the way of studying is also important. I was lucky to meet my teacher Iolanda Lima in Palermo. Perhaps my path of life would have been different without Iolanda Lima.
In 2004 I founded my architectural practice in Rome. Why Rome? Perhaps for voluntary exile. To create I need silence and distance. But I would say it is more a kind of historical-aesthetic interest. I think its urban essence is more interesting and communicative than other cities because Rome has a fragmentary structure, given by an extremely wide and complex historical stratification. It could seem a paradox, but this ancient city, even if it is devoid of skyscrapers, curtain walls, exposed concrete and other fetishes of modernity, offers a story that is uniquely in line with contemporary feeling. More than any other city in the world, it reveals itself through a multiplicity of meanings presented in a disorganised and not very classical fashion.
In 2009 I was selected among the thirty best new young architectural practices from around the world in London’s Wallpaper* magazine.
I believe that architecture is identified in light. Light is to architecture what sound is to music. The building constructed is an instrument that makes light vibrate, forming that luminous web that we call architecture. Thus architecture is not manifested just in solid material, but through the interpretation which it gives of the light.
Some years ago I was at Sarnıç, a hypogeal restaurant in Istanbul derived from a Byzantine cistern. I was so fascinated by that space that I realized a building is great when its spaces are eloquent inasmuch as they can resist the changes of their primary purpose. I affirm one more time: function is a pretext. Architecture should be able to convey values transcending time and the day-to-day.