House of Dust

ROME, Italy — 22 March 2013

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.

Poem

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.

The House of Dust short movie. Director: Pasquale Marino. Photography: Valentina Belli. Featured on Dezeen Movies, 2013.

Poem

Triumviro Table