Cardillo

architecture

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Crepuscular Green

Rome,


Project for the Mondrian Suite art gallery on Via dei Piceni in Rione San Lorenzo with golden green rough plaster and arched mirror altar with black trumpets lamps




Crepuscular Green


Work

He must pronounce a curse on love, he must renounce all joys of love, before he masters the magic, a ring to forge from the gold. — Richard Wagner


Crepuscular Green is an interior refurbishment of an art gallery. The use of colour and texture is inspired by the opening scene of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which describes a greenish dawn as seen from the depths of the river. This work was made on a low budget with one builder. The poverty of means applied here relates to the idea of architecture being a faculty to transcend the ordinary. Like a green golden grotto, a rusticated vault envelopes the upper part of the room, rendering a trilithon schema on the backdrop. Ahead, a rounded altar features a mirror arched bridge and a suspended slab above. On either side, two black flutes emit diffused lighting. Everything is painted in shades of green. Words of the space relate to each other a cohesive narrative, which aims to unfold the imagination of the inhabitants.




Data


  • Time: Feb.–March 2014 (design), March–April 2014 (construction), April 2014 (photography), Nov. 2014–Feb. 2015 (text)
  • Place: Mondrian Suite, Via dei Piceni, 41, Rome, Italy
  • Area: 40 m² (one storey)
  • Typology: art gallery


Crepuscular Green

Crepuscular Green

Crepuscular Green



Credits


  • Architecture, construction management: Antonino Cardillo
  • Client: Mondrian Suite (director: Vincenzo Petrone alias Klaus Mondrian)
  • Constructor: Grigoriu Cicau
  • Furniture making: Stefano Coacci
  • Lamp making: Armand Darot
  • Bar counter design: Antonino Cardillo
  • Photography, text: Antonino Cardillo
  • Thanks to Paolo Bedetti




Reference


  • Richard Wagner, Das Rheingold, WWV 86A, Königliches Hof und National Theater, Munich, 22 Sept. 1869; En. ed. Andrew Porter, The Ring of the Nibelung, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1976, p.17.






Anthology

2018–2014



Lumira favourite works

Annie Carroll


His understanding of space and balance has resulted in some of the most influential interiors of recent times.


atelierlumira.com, Sydney, 22 Jan. 2018. (en)




Saturday selects

Monica Khemsurov


The colors and textures in this Roman art gallery interior by Antonino Cardillo make us feel deeply weird. But we also love it.


sightunseen.com, New York, 22 April 2017. (en)





New generation (PT)

Pierre Yovanovitch


He is the most radical architect in my selection. It creates tension and a strong atmosphere. He has a sharp notion of interior design.


Bamboo, no. 61, São Paulo, Aug. 2016, p. 33. (pt)




Give us every day our daily enchantment

Ana Araujo


Egyptian? Greek? Roman? It doesn’t really matter, because once these ancestral images are deposited in our unconscious they are emptied of their historical specificity.


Design Exchange, no. 12, London, Aug. 2015, p. 109. (en)




Twilight of the Gods in Rome

Jeanette Kunsmann


With its rather modest 40 square metres, Cardillo has transformed the gallery into a sacred space, providing a bold contrast to the eternal White Cube.


designlines.de, BauNetz, Berlin, 24 Feb. 2015. (de, en, it)





Client’s testimonial (IT)

Klaus Mondrian


Often we contemporaryists have a too rigid and ideological view of the subject, forgetting that contemporary is first of all what happens now and not already ‘as aesthetically’ happens. In this sense, the proposal of the architect Cardillo is like an artistic installation, an out of context: precisely in its difference with the total white of the rest of the exhibition space, it emphasises the possibility and the hope that non-homogeneous languages, but with sometimes similar roots, return to talk to each other in an intellectual dialogue that can make contemporaneity rich in ferments and new Now the two rooms coexist in a philosophical dialogue. The new entrance hall spiritually welcomes the audience, prepares it and arranges it towards the exhibition environment that has deliberately remained white, as before. And precisely this difference, measured by a corridor with a skylight, creates surprise and amazement. It invites to the possibility, to any possibility of encounter between not already ‘the’ contemporary but rather ‘the’ many contemporaries, whom we could and should dispose of.


email, Rome, 1 April 2014. (it)







Publications

2019–2014 (selected)