The ‘Crepuscular Green’ is an interior reform project for an art gallery in San Lorenzo, Rome. Inspired by Richard Wagner, the design employs colours and textures to evoke a greenish dawn, transforming the space into a green-gold grotto with a rustic vault, rounded altar, arch bridge with mirror, suspended slab, and two black flutes
Text
Antonino Cardillo
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, Das Rheingold (1869)
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.
Images
Antonino Cardillo
Testimonial
2014
The client
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 necessarily what happens ‘as aesthetically’. In this sense, the architect Cardillo’s proposal is akin to an artistic installation, an out-of-context piece: precisely in its contrast with the total white of the rest of the exhibition space, it emphasises the possibility and hope that non-homogeneous languages, though sometimes with similar roots, might return to converse in an intellectual dialogue that can enrich contemporaneity with ferments and new ideas.
Now, the two rooms coexist in a philosophical dialogue. The new entrance hall spiritually welcomes the audience, prepares them, and arranges them towards the exhibition environment, which has deliberately remained white, as before. And it is precisely this difference, measured by a corridor with a skylight, that creates surprise and amazement. It invites the possibility, any possibility, of encounters between not just ‘the’ contemporary but rather ‘the’ many contemporaries, whom we could and should embrace.
[email], Mondrian Suite, Rome, 1 April 2014. (en, it)
I regard my work as an inquiry into forgotten significances of the past, akin to a codex primarily based on notions of protection and eroticism. […] Consequently, these archetypes continue to inhabit our subconscious, admonishing us that there is more than the commonplace visions imposed by society.
Ed. Carol Junqueira, bamboonet.com.br, São Paulo, August 2016. (en, it, pt)
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, August 2015, p. 109. (en)
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 February 2015. (de, en, it)
Publications
2019 – 2014 (selected)
Antonino Cardillo, ‘A synchronicity of cultures and civilisations’, paper presented to the Dessauer Gespräche ed. Johannes Kister, Hochschule Anhalt, Dessau Institute of Architecture, 13 Nov. 2019. Transcript published on antoninocardillo.com, 15 April 2023.
Antonino Cardillo, ‘Vaults, grottoes, arches and polychromy’, conference part of the ArchitekTOUR Kongress, Heinze, Station Berlin, 22 Nov. 2017. Transcript published on antoninocardillo.com, 27 May 2020.
Mrinalini Ghadiok, ‘Elemental’, Mondo* Arc India, no. 15, New Delhi, July 2017, pp. 6, 50‑51, 58‑59.
