Inspirations can come from the most unlikely or unusual places: architect Sophie Dries for example was fascinated with Can Lis, a villa designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon (famous for the Sydney Opera House) for his wife Lis.
Located on the Spanish island of Majorca and completed in 1971, the villa consists in four sections or pavilions united by walls and courtyards.
The building, made of rough materials such as stone, pine and ceramics, was used for years by the architect and his family, but recently the Danish Architectural Foundation in collaboration with the Utzon Foundation started making the house available to architects wishing to stay there for periods of at least one month.
Dries did a research trip there in 2015, but, rather than studying the more obvious features of the villa such as the geometries characterising the building, she focused on the rough surfaces of its stone walls.
Tracing its imperfections with charcoal on paper and highlighting the marks of the manually sawn stone, Dries tried to reapply their effects to a wool and silk rug created for the Nilufar Gallery in Milan, and designed bearing in mind the empty spaces inside the villa with its fixed masonry furniture.
The charcoal sketches were turned into ghost patterns and applied to a 300 x 400 cm rug produced using a traditional Persian knot descending from Mogul weaving skills and mainly employed in the regions of Northern India and in the city of Agra.
The manufacturing process was very slow: it takes indeed one month to weave one square meter of such a piece, a rich wool from the Himalayan foothills and Chinese silks.
Once the weaving process is completed, the surface of the carpet is washed and radically altered, obtaining different volumes that reproduce a sort of visual relief.
Through this technique the textile ends up looking worn out as the silk is revealed on the base of the matte and hollow wool, and the carpet assumes an eroded look, revealing a faded ghost-like memory of the walls at Villa Can Lis.
The carpet is accompanied by a blown glass sphere-shaped pendant light, designed by Dries in collaboration with Basel-based Matteo Gonet's studio. The glass incorporates mica fragments that help forming a cratered lunar-like surface on the sphere (an effect that is directly linked to the eroded carpet surface) and the lamp is attached to a minimalist light fixture structure evoking Cubist jewellery.
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