Cardillo

Seven Houses for No One

2011 – 2007

A documented study of the project Seven Houses for No One, presenting poetic images of imagined dwellings conceived for cities such as Barcelona, Melbourne, Nîmes, Parma, Pembrokeshire and Rome. Though never built, these houses—envisioned as imaginal architectures—were perceived as real following their publication in the international press, generating a phenomenon of simulated reality

Introduction

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.

(Text assisted by Copilot), antoninocardillo.com, 12 Sept. 2025.

Notes

  1. ^ , ‘Mundus imaginalis, ou l’imaginaire et l’imaginal’, Cahiers internationaux de symbolisme, no. 6, Bruxelles, 1964, pp. 3‑26.
  2. ^ , Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq, Aleppo, 1186  (year of composition). [Henry Corbin, Institut Franco-Iranien, Tehran–Paris, 1976]; , Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam, Damasco, 1229  (year of composition). [The Bezels of Wisdom, Paulist Press, New York, 1980; tr. R.W.J. Austin]; , En Islam iranien: aspects spirituels et philosophiques, vol. II, Gallimard, Paris, 1971.
  3. ^ , The World of Image in Islamic Philosophy: Ibn Sīnā, Suhrawardī, Shahrazūrī and Beyond, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2017; , Corps spirituel et terre céleste: de l’Iran mazdéen à l’Iran shîʿite, Buchet-Chastel, Paris, 1960.
  4. ^ , The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1978; , The Best of the Achaeans: concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1979.

Where memory lacks

Pembrokeshire, 1 June 2011

The ruins as visions

Melbourne, 1 May 2009

Between two identities

Melbourne, 1 November 2008

On the edge of a border

Nimes, 1 July 2008

A curved wall jokes with the light

Barcelona, 1 March 2008

The silence of a nave

Parma, 1 January 2008

In the shape of a tower

Rome, 25 March 2007

Publications

2025 – 2007 (selected)