House made of dust

Light filtered through small windows, faded colours on the walls, and a centimetre-thick layer of dust on the ceiling: a recently renovated apartment in Rome looks as if it has been abandoned for years. However, it was not the ravages of time that left their mark here, but one of the country’s most promising architectural talents—a play between dream and reality.

In 2004, the young Italian architect Antonino Cardillo moved from Sicily to Rome, and what has happened since sounds like and perhaps is a fairy tale: magazines have portrayed him, and Wallpaper* named Cardillo in 2009 as one of the thirty most important young architects in the world. The boundary between fiction and reality is blurred in Cardillo’s work: whether one of his projects was actually realised or not remains unclear—and even the built houses have something of a mirage, which could disappear at any moment. But the apartment in Rome does indeed exist!

The apartment exudes an almost sacral calm, likely due to the pale colours paired with the play of light and shadow. The upper sections of the walls and the ceiling are roughly plastered in brown. The lower boundary line of the plaster conjures up the ‘Golden Ratio’—an ideal proportion used in ancient architecture. Below the dividing line, the walls are smoothly plastered and dipped in pale colours—combined with the rough texture of the mortar, creating an almost surreal atmosphere. Deeply recessed windows, reminiscent of old castles, further isolate the apartment from the surrounding city. Antonino Cardillo sees the references for his design idea primarily in the past, referring to “the caves of early humans, Renaissance painting, and the faded facades of Via Veneto.”

The windows and passages between the living spaces end at the artificial horizon, with only the hanging lights and the installation of a shelf crossing the line; otherwise, the place appears divided in two. Some of the doors are arched and lie flush with the wall, so that the contour is merely a thin line. Only one door is equipped with a knob—pink—and hides the main bedroom behind it. For the architect, the self-designed openings are another homage to history and are meant to recall 14th-century Italian paintings. The two bathrooms—the only rooms without roughly plastered ceilings, instead painted in a pale pink—follow Cardillo’s minimal-fantastic furnishing language: simple objects like concrete sinks and a cylindrical shower installation, wrapped in a white curtain, appear simple in their materiality. On the other hand, they possess something mystical in their—especially lighting—staging. For the architect, architecture becomes interesting where it “becomes invisible or hides something” and exists on the border “to the dream”—with his House of Dust he has precisely realised this into reality.