Introduction
Antonino Cardillo
Sometimes architecture is all the more interesting, the more invisible or concealed it is. When it is not only made up of that which can be seen and touched, but rather that which suggests and leaves the rest to the imagination. In some ways architecture is not just lived-in space but also imagined space. Inside it space is not crossed with the body alone but some of its parts become meaningful precisely because they are unknown to the body, thus becoming places of the mind, open to many readings: how else can the sense of certain unreachable places be explained? Like the dark ravine of a cathedral or as, by means of a different interpretation, for the ruins of the Villa Adriana, where the unknown is more powerful and evocative than the documented truth. Architecture fascinates when it contains in itself remote places, where the separation, rather than physical, becomes an expression of the unknown, of the unreal, in short of dreams. The distance stimulates in everyone unexpected associations that, mutating the original nature of the building via a slow sedimentation in the collective memory, determine its representation in history.
This text was first published in Tasarim (pdf), no. 194, Istanbul, Aug. 2009, pp. 90‑91.
Purple House
Pembrokeshire, 1 June 2011
Where memory lacks
House of Twelve
Melbourne, 1 May 2009
The ruins as visions
Concrete Moon House
Melbourne, 1 November 2008
Between two identities
Max’s House in a Small Lake
Nimes, 1 July 2008
On the edge of a border
House of Convexities
Barcelona, 1 March 2008
A curved wall jokes with the light
Vaulted House
Parma, 1 January 2008
The silence of a nave
Ellipse 1501 House
Rome, 25 March 2007
In the shape of a tower