The sixth instalment in the ‘For No One’ collection, this architectural project embarks on a journey into the ruins of ancient Rome. It engages with light to manipulate perception, proposing an exploration of the progressive mutation of contemporary ideas and those of late antiquity
Work
Antonino Cardillo
A kind of proliferation of word-characters, each with its own intense specificity, all imbued with a peculiar evocative power. — A.I. Lima
It was the ruins of ancient Rome that inspired this project, those unpredictable warps that in the eighteenth century appeared to European travellers on the Grand Tour as fantastic visions. Rather than the historic original, what fascinates still today is this state of progressive destruction that a millennial weather carves in the forms, unveiling obscure recesses. So the ruin tells us of time passing, of slowly dying beauty, and in this its slow decay evokes a transverse narrative, as if trapped between the architecture and its definitive destruction. House of Twelve tries to invent a fantastic response to an interrupted story, following an empirical path made by progressive mutation of contemporary ideas and those of late antiquity, such as the theme of intersecting rings or the horizontal sequence of multiple spaces and forms, concatenated and directed according to a poetic, which unites works of Frank Lloyd Wright with the villa of the emperor Hadrian at Tivoli. Collisions and juxtapositions, furthermore, distant echoes of the American Center by Frank Gehry, characterise the front and the public space of the house, whose roundnesses appear, from the road, to be deeply sculpted. As well as restoring thickness to the façade, these excavations make it permeable to the winter sun, which reaches to illuminate, with a grazing light, interpreted by the cavities, the courtyards at the rear. In particular, the living space, with its vault in gold mosaic, the ripples of the mirrors of water at the edges and the consequent manifold reflections of light, appears from the main courtyard as a baroque room of light, here reinvented in an urban key.
Apart from the involuntary irony that Der Spiegel appears in both impostor stories, once as a prosecutor and once as an accused, they differ fundamentally.
Cardillo has created a labyrinth of truths and illusions. It is a novella with multiple layers. […] There is no one truth—reality: it doesn’t exist. Antonino Cardillo has built it.
DEAR Magazin, no. 1, Berlin, April 2017, p. 84. (de, en, it)
After the representations were revealed as desired pictures, he replied: “Just see it like a literary narrative, […] a fairy tale. It is also not important that things actually happened.”
Konstruierte Realitäten, Goethe‑Universität, Deutsche Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, 1 Dec. 2015. (de, en, it)
In fact, Cardillo is right here at its core, because as this essay also wanted to show, images of unrealised and utopian architectures can become an integral part of architectural history and not insignificantly influence it.
iacsa.eu, vol. 4, no. 1, Basel, May 2013, p. 11. (de)
Cardillo, who meticulously lists all these press reports on his website, only holds up the mirror to the architectural media and refers to a fundamental problem: How should young architects get to a builder without having published beforehand?
Or how we are constructing our reality from the material and the imaginary through the media today and what consequences this has. No simple questions, really. If the Cardillo case now served to seriously discuss at least one of these questions again, it might have done more for the architectural discourse than those who think they always have the answer to them.
german-architects.com, Stuttgart, 29 July 2012. (de)
Incidentally, architecture has always been ephemeral and virtual, he explains. From Palladio to Schinkel, from Sant’Elia to Mies van der Rohe, architects influenced architectural development and changed reality with ideas in the form of surrogates.
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, no. 164, Zurich, 17 July 2012, p. 40. (de)
When Felix Krull was young, he thought for a long time about whether he should see the world small or big. According to his ‘nature’, he then respected the world for a great and infinitely tempting appearance in his later life. He became the happiest impostor in literary history.
Der Spiegel, no. 27/12, Hamburg, 2 July 2012, p. 121. (de, it)
Every building, every space that Ar. Cardillo lays his hands on becomes a masterpiece. […] Just like a poem that has been brought to life, the architectural piece stands, speaking volumes about the magnitude of effort the architect has put in it.
Surfaces Reporter, New Delhi, June 2011, pp. 36‑41. (en)
Liliana Adamo, ‘FAKEcollage. Non credo ai miei occhi!’ (pdf), in Dossier Collage, cur. Fabio Cappello, Rossella Ferorelli, Luigi Mandraccio, Gian Luca Porcile, Università di Genova, Genoa, July 2022, pp. 35, 39.
Carolin Höfler, ‘Hyper desire’ (pdf),[↗] paper presented to the Wunsch, Technische Hochschule Köln, Cologne, 1 June 2016.
Carolin Höfler, ‘Modelle in Wirklichkeit. Die digitalen Bildversprechen von Antonino Cardillo’, paper presented to the Constructed Realities, ed. Chris Dähne, Frederike Lausch, Bettina Rudhof, Goethe‑Universität, Deutsche Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, 1 Dec. 2015. https://www.antoninocardillo.com/en/anthology/on-the-architect/mirrors/models-in-reality/
Antonino Cardillo, ‘Faked reality’, paper presented to the Constructed Realities, ed. Chris Dähne, Frederike Lausch, Bettina Rudhof, Goethe‑Universität, Deutsche Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, 1 Dec. 2015. https://www.antoninocardillo.com/en/anthology/of-the-architect/articles/faked-reality/
Carl Zillich, with Fabrizio Gallanti, Lars Krückeberg, Volkwin Marg, Wolfram Putz, Peter Reischer, Andreas Ruby, Tobias Walliser, Thomas Willemeit, ‘Causa Cardillo: “Geht’s noch ohne Hochstapelei?”’,[↗] bkult.de, Berlin, 10 Sept. 2012.
Peter Reischer, ‘Grandiose Luftschlösser’ (pdf), Am Sonntag, no. 32, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich, 5 Sept. 2012, p. 35.
Antonino Cardillo, ‘Values transcending time’ (pdf), build Das Architekten-Magazin, no. 4/10, ed. Ralf Ferdinand Broekman, Olaf Winkler, Wuppertal, Aug. 2010, p. 43.
Antonino Cardillo, ‘再现远古的经典——12号住宅’ (pdf), Landscape Architect, no. 4/10, Dalian, July 2010, pp. 34‑37.
Antonino Cardillo, ‘Not exactly a dime a dozen…’,[↗] worldarchitecturenews.com, ed. Siân Disson, London, 23 July 2010.
Antonino Cardillo, ‘House of Twelve’ (pdf), Schön!, no. 5, ed. Marietta Constantinou, London, March 2010.
