The cave and the garden

House of Dust is a transitional state between civilisation and culture. A work that seeks to integrate disciplines orbiting around architecture: in particular, anthropology, archaeology and historiography. Ten years after its conception, it now reveals itself as a political response to the present. The intent was to reintegrate instances, elements and desires traceable in the architecture of the past—even in that of ancient Rome—translating them into a language of the present, capable of evoking without simplifying. Above all, it aimed to realise them through a feasible architecture, compatible with the resources made available by the client.

The latter, Massimiliano Beffa, a notary by profession, made the work possible. For several years we shared time and places: Romanity and travels along the southern shores of the Mediterranean—Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia. We were driven by the desire to recover the atmospheres experienced in those lands. Why was this important? Because, as analytical psychology teaches, modern architecture—from the Enlightenment onwards, if not earlier—has sought to understand the world by dissecting and classifying it. It has adopted an ordering attitude. Not by chance, the computer, apex of such civilisation, is also called an ‘ordenador’. All this corresponds to an apotheosis of control: the illusion of eliminating evil and constructing a society of good.

What, then, is House of Dust? It is an attempt to integrate into the consciousness those errors, that sediment of what is censored and repressed. Work on a plane of acceptance of the darker sides—those parts we tend to project onto others. This attitude shares affinities with historiography, which is often the result of a projection: that of the historian and the collective he embodies. Here, architecture becomes a process that integrates darkness.

Spaces immersed in a dannunziano gloom, which does not celebrate Dante’s paradise, nor the blue sky, nor the starry vault of Giotto’s chapel. This space celebrates the idea of the cave. And what is the cave? It is the primordial image of the Anthropos originario, where architectural space itself began. Architectural history studies only a few millennia of conscious architecture, but forgets that for over a million years humanity inhabited archaic places.

The collective unconscious, according to analytical psychology, is still animated by archaic images. Freud, in an earlier period, had intuited their presence, calling them ‘archaic residues’, though without fully grasping their psychic nature, which he still interpreted in cultural terms. In modern architecture, such material is either not integrated or is superficially recovered as trend. House of Dust seeks instead to celebrate it—to integrate what is censored, repressed, hidden. It is not an architecture of accessibility, but of being unveiled. Because truth is not a given reality: it is the act of discovering it.

Abandoning the certainties of the ‘Crystal Palace’—a paradigm of modernity that would expose everything—the house seeks an alternative dimension. A truth behind things, behind errors, behind anguish. All this has to do with the erotic. Thus, the house is composed of compressions and dilations, narrowings, secret passages and distances. Rooms like seasons, like stations of narration.

The hall—the first room encountered after passing through a lowered vestibule—is an allegorical representation of earth, dust and cave. The floor plan already evokes a sacred space: an enclosure with a backdrop that takes on the nature of a small ambo, or a chapel, illuminated by a wound of pink light emerging from the concrete floor.

What, then, is this backdrop? It is the embodiment of the idea of a tombstone, a grave slab. It occludes and conceals the space intended for food preparation: the so-called kitchen. As if the house were suggesting: who decided that a house must necessarily have a kitchen? The space of productivity might not be there at all. The displacement of the wall is a going beyond—a crossing of the tomb, embodying a psychological figure: accepting that behind every wall another world may exist. Learning to believe in the existence of secret passages.

Thus, the house is configured as a constellation of allegories, of possibilities. A form of poetry made real through sensitive words, generating a code eager to inherit the semantic richness of a language from the past.

The room of intimacy, by contrast, alludes to an abstract garden operating solely on the chromatic plane: pink, cream and malva green. It presents itself in a rectangular floor plan and is characterised by three elements. The first is a dark enfilade, reminiscent of a city gate: two arches, one larger and one smaller. The latter is also lower, as it is accessed by descending, accentuating the idea of compression.

This figure recalls what we have lost in our perception of the city. Once, the city was a closed body, entered through gates. The city was a spatial projection of the human body. With the industrial revolution, this body exploded, losing its walls and its gates—psychological figures of its raison d’être. Today we no longer enter cities: we find ourselves within them suddenly, without noticing.

In my interpretation, this dissolution may physically represent the neurosis that agitates modern society. The loss of gates is the loss of a measure of containment. Once containment is removed, identity explodes, dilutes, fragments. What should have been a process of liberation has, over time, revealed itself to be its opposite.

Yet there are two other elements in the room that refer to the project’s sensitive nature. Apparently borrowed from brothels—the sink and the shower—here they return transfigured into two figures of beauty: a porphyry monolith and a textile Ionic column.

One of the project’s foundations was to explore a domestic typology that would emancipate itself from the bourgeois notion of the ‘bedroom’. Curiously, this censorial attitude also characterises architectural modernism, which systematically avoided the theme of the erotic. The dominant concern was the functional division between sleeping and eating. But life is much more than that. Indeed, a Baroque church is paradoxically more erotic than a Bauhaus house.

House of Dust poses a question: why has this aspect been lost? Why, while Freud was reintegrating the erotic into the psyche, were the architects of the Modern Movement removing it from architecture? What did this removal signify? And what consequences has it had on our perception of dwelling?

In this small work, I sought to explore how such material might be reintegrated on a reduced scale, restoring it to a processual dimension. Evoking a possible rituality through a simple passage: from cave to garden, through the double-arched threshold, which establishes a possibility—sacral element that invites attention.

This historical material points to its archaic roots, such as the anthropomorphic arch forms in the necropolis of Banditaccia. Modernity has deemed these ‘residues’ erasable, while analytical psychology has shown that such forms are inalienable. They belong to the constitutive character of the psyche. And their semantic removal may well be a symptom of the collective neurosis that agitates our present time.