Casa Cattiva
A parametric house in the urban dissemination of the Veneto suburbs.
The vast pulverization of the Veneto’s city takes on its own character in the sad leveling of building that has generated it since the 1960s. A professional jungle for the disinterested operators, it appears today as a catalog with homogeneous features where the only diphthongs concern obsessed samplings of projects glimpsed in the ambit of an equivocally interpreted modernity.
The design exercise has produced a hieratic container in which rare breaches measure distances and relationships between inside and outside, volumetric instrument, imperturbable, absolute and configured by that almost forgotten way that studies space and its figures.
The solids, in their volumetric or structural versions, repeated according to a hypotactic cadence, are a device for reaching a further, oppositional position, within the contextual fragmentation, an «aspiration to recover a rigor that is liberating with respect to rampant empiricism» as Costantino Dardi said.
The basement is the principle of the building, through which it relates solidly with the earth, fragmented into three different volumes, separated by spaces which by absence represent other hypothetical volumes. The basement, as in a work from the past, is contaminated by the earth and from it draws the hardness and physicality of the stone, it adorns itself with its own independent formal identity, whether expressed by an enigmatic black color on the outside or by worked concrete inside of.
The upper floor is in the solid, indifferent and opposite to the whole, resting in points on the underlying masonry. The parallelepiped, with a square section, does not glide but rests on the base, touching it like a menhir, to demonstrate its extraneousness to earthly things or, perhaps, to want to tell only itself with respect to all the rest.
Recessed at the top is a secret garden made of a paved stone, a lawn and a cedar tree, with the task of expanding towards infinity that house which on the floors below remains constrained by the liaison dangereuse with its context. The hanging garden, fifth elevation, technical waste aimed at expanding the living space, as at the top of the Guinigi Tower, is a place of mediation, isolation and celebration, an unexpected territory of wonders.
After all, this house is not just a house, a fortress or an ark, but perhaps just the umpteenth search for a form of representation of architecture, or already an affirmation of its immanent vocation to become a solitary piece of a new possible rival landscape.
