Cardillo

architecture

Concrete Moon House

Melbourne,


The fifth instalment in the ‘For No One’ collection, this dwelling embarks on a voyage into the realm of fear and unconfessed desires. It engages with light to manipulate perception, proposing an exploration of diverse formal identities




Concrete Moon House


Work

All I wanted was to get closer to that particular atmosphere, but because of the echo I couldn’t get it anywhere other than the church. […] I realised that when you sing in those spaces there is a delay, a refraction that you can harmonise with your voice. […] A sort of ‘architectural music’. […] Then I thought I could compose music that was very modern using digital architecture, while expressing a very primitive type of sound: I think it was used before Catholicism, sung in caves and oceans. — John Foxx


Secretly, everyone is attracted to what he is afraid of and sometimes fear reawakens desires that cannot be confessed. We remain perturbed, recognising that in remote parts of our interior universe resides an apparent otherness. We discover that the concepts of identity and difference are ambiguous, and often, paradoxically, difference becomes an instrument of investigation into our own identity. Two distinct parts of a dwelling here become a pretext for telling a story between two diverse formal identities. Designed for a suburb of Melbourne on a rectangular plot, in plan the house is in two parts. One public which in elevation looks like the upturned keel of a boat or a funny concrete moon that emerges from the pool in front, whose design is characterised by a deviation from the straight pathway. The other, private part takes the form of a long, narrow building set against the perimeter, which, through the progressive decomposition of its component parts, creates a portico open to the garden but closed to the car park. In being created in space, each of the two geometric identities retains an echo of a presumed common origin. Thus signs of one often appear in the other, though elaborated according to different processes. Though diverse, the elements have a relationship, and the sound of one resonates in the other; especially in the cave, where the achievement of this osmosis introduces doubt as to where identity finishes and where difference begins.


This text was first published on worldarchitecturenews.com,[↗] London, 20 Nov. 2009.




Data


  • Time: Oct.–Nov. 2008 (design)
  • Place: Kew, Melbourne, Australia
  • Area: 780 m² (three storeys)
  • Typology: semi-detached house


Concrete Moon House

Concrete Moon House

Concrete Moon House

Concrete Moon House

Concrete Moon House



Credits


  • Architecture: Antonino Cardillo
  • Clients: Livio, Nadia De Marchi
  • CGI, text: Antonino Cardillo
  • Translation: Charles Searson




Reference

John Foxx, John Foxx. The Quiet Man,[↗], ed. Marco Bercella, ondarock.it, Rome, May 2007.







Anthology

2019–2007



The architect as a storyteller


Apart from the involuntary irony that Der Spiegel appears in both impostor stories, once as a prosecutor and once as an accused, they differ fundamentally.


competitionline.com, Berlin, 17 Jan. 2019. (de, en, it)




Architecture and truth


Cardillo has created a labyrinth of truths and illusions. It is a novella with multiple layers. […] There is no one truth—reality: it doesn’t exist. Antonino Cardillo has built it.


DEAR Magazin, no. 1, Berlin, April 2017, p. 84. (de, en, it)




Models in reality. The digital image promises of Antonino Cardillo


After the representations were revealed as desired pictures, he replied: “Just see it like a literary narrative, […] a fairy tale. It is also not important that things actually happened.”


Konstruierte Realitäten, Goethe‑Universität, Deutsche Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, 1 Dec. 2015. (de, en, it)




On the mediated representation of architecture


In fact, Cardillo is right here at its core, because as this essay also wanted to show, images of unrealised and utopian architectures can become an integral part of architectural history and not insignificantly influence it.


IACSA Newsletter, vol. 4, no. 1, Basel, May 2013, p. 11. (de, en, it)




Can we do without deception?


Cardillo, who meticulously lists all these press reports on his website, only holds up a mirror to architectural media and points out a fundamental problem: How can young architects find clients without having been published?


bkult.de, Berlin, 10 Sept. 2012. (de, en, it)




All just rendered—and now?


How do we construct our reality from the material and the imaginary through the media today and what are the consequences? […] If the case of Cardillo now serves to at least seriously discuss one of these questions again, he may have done more for the architectural discourse than those who think they have always known the answer.


german-architects.com, Stuttgart, 29 July 2012. (de, en, it)




Fantasy and reality


Incidentally, architecture has always been ephemeral and virtual, he explains. From Palladio to Schinkel, from Sant’Elia to Mies van der Rohe, architects influenced architectural development and changed reality with ideas in the form of surrogates.


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, no. 164, Zurich, 17 July 2012, p. 40. (de, en, it)




Impostor: Roman ruins


When Felix Krull was young, he pondered for a long time whether he should view the world as small or large. According to his “nature”, he later in life “considered the world to be a great and infinitely alluring phenomenon.” He became the happiest impostor in literary history.


Der Spiegel, no. 27/12, Hamburg, 2 July 2012, p. 121. (de, en, it)




Beautiful cloning


An email inquiry pointing out that the architectural photos depicted or submitted are not photos but renderings, receives the terse response: “I am an artist and as an artist I manipulate reality! That’s it!”


Falter, no. 19/12, Vienna, 9 May 2012, p. 31. (de, en, it)




Sameness and otherness (CS)


“In contemporary architecture, a lack of idea is often masked by the use of overwhelming materials. I am not interested in today’s architecture,” says the architect. “I am fascinated by old architecture that we cannot fully understand and thus stimulates our imagination.”


Projekt, no. 9/10, Prague, Sept. 2010, pp. 28‑37. (cs)




Minimalist mansion takes inspiration from the moon


Whoever says that Australia lacks culture hasn’t met the client who commissioned this exemplary home.


ShortList, no. 109, London, Jan. 2010, p. 8. (en)







Publications

2024–2009 (selected)