In yesterday's post we looked at architecture in Godard's Le Mépris. Let's continue the cinema/architecture thread with another post by looking at two further installations from the 14th Venice International Architecture Exhibition (both located in the Arsenale section).
The first one is entitled "The Architecture of Hedonism - Three Villas on the Island of Capri". The installation - by Marino Stierli and Hilar Stadler with artistic contributions by Nils Nova and (the by now insufferably ubiquitous) Francesco Vezzoli - focuses on Capri as a site of hedonistic enjoyment for many different people, celebrities and politicians included.
Several pictures included in the installation look at Capri as a place for alternative and lascivious lifestyles where politics and power establish an elitist social order. The project mainly centres on three villas: the antique Villa Tiberius, Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen's Villa Lysis, an early centre of queer culture, and Casa Malaparte in Godard's film.
Presentation-wise the inflatable panel dedicated to Antonioni's Sardinian Villa in Costa Paradiso by Will McLean with an essay by Niklas Maak is more minimalist but also more original.
The panel tells the story of how Michelangelo Antonioni's villa was built by architect Dante Bini. Born in Castelfranco Emilia in 1932, Bini developed his interests in three different disciplines – architecture, design and technology.
During a game of tennis in a snow-covered indoor dome, Bini came up with an innovative idea - building with air. The inflatable panel of the installation referes to Bini's building system developed in the '60s, dubbed "Binishell" and consisting in reinforced shell structures, lifted and shaped by low air pressure. Bini raised 1,600 Binishells in 23 countries and launched several patented systems - the Binishell, the Binistar, the Binishelter, the Binix, and the Minishell.
Bini's villa for Antonioni and Monica Vitti was built in the late '60s on the rocks of Costa Paradiso, a quiet tourist village on the Western shores of Sardinia. The structure consisted in a futuristic two-story high semi-helliptical concrete Binishell asymmetrically perforated and hidden behind red rocks and winding paths.
The Villa could be entered from two sides and one of its most striking features was the cantilevered staircase formed out of rough rock that twisted up through the living spaces. Antonioni insisted on having the rock cut but not levigated so that its smell could mix with the smell of the plants and the sea. The staircase was also conceived as a sculpture and a set designed for Monica Vitti to make her delicate way down from the bedroom while Antonioni sat downstairs in a chair, his attention on the performance.
Like Casa Malaparte, this villa was therefore also conceived as a setting with stairs that Vitti could descend bare foot, performing an endlessly retake for her partner. Antonioni was actually fascinated by the stage-like staircase in Malaparte's house and there are actually scenes in his film La notte inspired by Godard's Le Mépris.
Casa Malaparte is anyway different from this villa since it combined the modern and the classic, the natural and the artificial, and symbolised the extreme exposure of the body to nature. Bini's villa for Antonioni was instead an observatory, a shell that enhanced the sound of the sea and a love nest that sheltered its inhabitants.
When the couple split, the villa was sold and now it lies abandoned and ruined, its derelict dome a testament to its past glories.
Bini's systems were instead recently relaunched by his son Nicolò and you can discover further about Bini's story from this lecture at the Architecture Association in London or from the video embedded here.
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