Antonino Cardillo’s Seven Houses for No One are not mere exercises in architectural fantasy, nor utopian designs destined to remain unbuilt. Though never constructed, these houses were perceived as real following their publication in the international press, generating a phenomenon of simulated reality. Yet their power lies not in simulation, but in revelation: they belong to an intermediate world that Henry Corbin defined as the mundus imaginalis, distinct from both the sensible world and the purely intelligible.
In this ontological space, imagination is not fantasy but a faculty of knowledge. Images are not unreal; they possess metaphysical substance. It is here that the notion of ‘imaginal’ architecture emerges: a form not born of the will to build, but of the necessity to manifest. The ‘Imaginal Houses’ – as they are named here in a hermeneutic reading of the work – are not imagined houses in the conventional sense, but archetypal visions arising from depth, appearing within the ʿālam al-mithāl (عالم المثال), the ‘world of visions’ in Islamic theosophy (Suhrawardī, Ibn ‘Arabī), from which Corbin derived his ontology of imagination.
This intermediate world, the ʿālam al-mithāl, is a real – though invisible – region where forms manifest as archetypal likenesses. It is neither mental nor sensory, but a third mode of being, where the image becomes epiphany. In this sense, the Seven Houses for No One are not conceptual projects, but architectures that inhabit the ‘imaginal’ realm: places that do not exist in the physical world, yet act within the realm of deep perception, generating real effects in collective consciousness.
Like Odysseus, who in his journey seeks not a physical dwelling but a return to origin, these houses are for no one because they belong to everyone: forms without a recipient, yet with a universal vocation. They do not ask to be inhabited, but to be contemplated. And in that contemplation, architecture becomes myth, and myth becomes space.
Thanks to Miriam Scotto di Santolo
Notes
- ^ Henry Corbin, ‘Mundus imaginalis, ou l’imaginaire et l’imaginal’, Cahiers internationaux de symbolisme, no. 6, Bruxelles, 1964, pp. 3‑26.
- ^ Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq [1186], ed. Henry Corbin, Institut Franco-Iranien, Tehran–Paris, 1952; Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam [1229] (The Bezels of Wisdom, trans. R. W. J. Austin, Paulist Press, New York, 1980); L.W.C. van Lit, The World of Image in Islamic Philosophy: Ibn Sīnā, Suhrawardī, Shahrazūrī and Beyond, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2017.
- ^ Douglas Frame, The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1978; Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1979.
