CARDILLO 2013: House of Dust, Rome

Scenario

In this house classical orders and golden proportions celebrate dust. A grey base supports a ceiling of rustic plaster of the colour of the bare earth: craving for primordial caverns, for Renaissance grotesques, for baroque nymphaeums in Doria Pamphilj, for faintly Liberty façades in the streets off Via Veneto.

Antonino Cardillo, House of Dust, Rome, 2013. Photography: Antonino Cardillo

A sequence of compressions and dilatations makes up the space of the house. On the walls, passages and windows appear, now dug out of the base, now like carvings in a baguette.

A series of arches, memories of Trecento Italian painting, disguise doors and cupboards.

Among these, one studded with a pink glass doorknob introduces the intimate rooms, which too are distinguished by the palest pink on the walls: yearning for dawns and flowers, the colour of beauty, the colour of beauty that dies.

House of Dust

Poem by Antonino Cardillo, 2013

Architecture is dust.
Dust that becomes form,
Dust transfigured by the mind.

Dust is memory so dust is also death.
Ancestral memory of death,
Dust refers to the beginnings.

That modernity that disowns sediment,
That shaves walls, that sanitises space;
That modernity that disowns dust,
Disowns even death.

Deprived of memory,
And so slave to a credible youth,
Ignoring its end, it repeats itself;
Without end.

In this house classical orders
And golden proportions celebrate dust:
Angels and choirs have abandoned Heaven,
And Heaven has adorned itself with earth.

Pasquale Marino (direction), Valentina Belli (photography), The House of Dust [short movie], in Dezeen Movies, London, 2013.

Furniture design

Antonino Cardillo, Triumviro Table, single-piece, emperador dark marble, Rome, 2013. Producer: Marmi Ghirardi — Antonino Cardillo, *Triumviro Table*, single-piece, emperador dark marble, Rome, 2013. Producer: Marmi Ghirardi

Data

Time: June 2012–March 2013
Place: Ludovisi, Rome, Italy
Area: 115 m² (one storey)
Typology: flat

Credits

Client: Massimiliano Beffa

Idea of ‘Dust’ from a conversation with Ana Araujo at St Paul’s Cathedral of London

Architecture design and construction management: Antonino Cardillo
Furniture design: Antonino Cardillo
Photography: Antonino Cardillo
Text: Antonino Cardillo
English translation: Charles Searson and Vittorio Valenta

Building contractor: Galliani & Giorgetti
Masonry: Ripan Michele
Plaster: Julian Paraschiv
Logistics: Giorgio Giorgetti
Painting: Petrica Rotaru
Electrical system: Luca Camai
Plumbing and clima system: Emiliano Proietto

Cement: Elio Martorana and Michele Martorana
Parquet: Style Maison
Stones: Marmi Ghirardi
Handle: GIL (via Handles Rome)
Lamps: Armand Darot
Chair: Kazuhide Takahama
Sofa: Piero Lissoni
Bookcase: Giuseppe Bavuso
Shower curtain: Pasquale Lo Guercio

Thanks to Ava Cappelletti, Gioia Guerzoni, Pasquale Marino, Paula O’Brien, and Auronda Scalera

References

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DOMENICO MISCIAGNA, ‘Antonino Cardillo, House of Dust e Zak McKracken’, lucasdelirium.it, Rome, 27 May 2019.

ANTONINO CARDILLO, ‘Da Zak McKracken ad House of Dust’, paper presented to the Rome Video Game Lab, ed. Diego Grammatico and Giovanna Marinelli, Istituto Luce Cinecittà, Rome, 11 May 2019.

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ANTONINO CARDILLO
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PAULA O’BRIEN, House of Dust [audio], lyr. Antonino Cardillo, Bradford, Apr. 2013.