House of Convexities

By Ar. Antonino Cardillo

If architecture is music in stone can its “limbs” dance?

Architecture only remains still in pic­tures. In real life its natural state is one of tran­sition. Both man and light move within it.

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Inside a house among coarse Mediterranean glades and corrugated stone walls, a slanting light, pierced by innumerable narrow repeated blades, inscribes and describes the walls with its imper­manent, mutable hand. How many possible sto­ries will this light tell over the course of a year?

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A curved wall jokes with the light. The light bathes the wall, but reaches the moment and the place in which, going beyond the curve, it takes a tangent, deciding what will be lit and what will be dark. And this movement suggests the indefinite, mutability, shading, ineffability. Thus architecture becomes light interpreted through the “limbs” of the architecture. Like shadows of flesh on flesh, whose forms are both definite and defining.

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Here, as in a Flamenco dance, the body breaks up, invading the space moving through its po­tential articulations without, however, defin­ing the void, or, interpreting the many possibili­ties of moving within it: fleshy and sensual, but equally incisive and precise. Secret but luminous. Closed but open to a multitude of possibilities. A body inside another body. Compressed, suspend­ed and continuous in its curvilinear trajectory…

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And yet, as in a Flamenco dance, the develop­ment of movement, its indefinable ardour, is made real by the successive instant. That sol­emn, still instant that seems to challenge eternity.

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Thus, smooth, tall and still, a wall opposes silence. And such stillness paradoxically supports the preceding movement, giving sense to its being.

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