House of Dust
In 2013, in Rome, near the Villa Borghese park, Antonino Cardillo began construction of his aesthetic manifesto, the House of Dust. Lending to the space a classical form through this work, he reintroduces the themes of the grotto and the arch in the architecture of the present, experimenting with interrupted valences of past in a cohesive whole, rich in meanings. Chosen as one of the fifty works that recount the history of Italian interior architecture at the XXI Triennale di Milano, curator Beppe Finessi said of it: “There are interior designers who magically sweep away all established practice and make a name for themselves with a project destined to became a milestone. We have seen this recently with House of Dust.”
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. 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, disguises 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.
