Architecture of Pleasure and Pain
There are houses that are embodiments of emotions, relationships and thoughts. Nowhere is it as obvious as with houses built for or by artists and architects. They exist on a line between artefacts and habitats, permanent or temporary. Either way, they remain as a remembrance and a testimony. Sometimes it’s a vision of unfulfilled dreams. Especially when it’s a custom creation for a particular client, instead of something devoid of character and personality. Accomplishments like this require an intimate knowledge of the owner and his lifestyle. It’s the ultimate gesture of affection, providing someone you appreciate with something so vital. Which is definitely more than simply four walls and a roof. That’s not architecture but engineering. Which is why these places fascinate me so much. They’re so much more. A presence and self-fulfilling prophecy.
Michelangelo Antonioni: La Cupola
A perfect example is Dante Bini’s experimental creation La Cupola, built in the 1960s for the celebrated Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni and his girlfriend, the actress Monica Vitti.Built in Costa Paradiso, a tucked away corner of Sardinia, almost touching the cliff above the sea, its shape suggests intimacy and warmth. Bini made his name through using concrete, domed structures in several different ways, from military architecture to civic use. This is his most beautiful piece of work consisting of a series of spaces with a staircase made of stone slabs, introducing the outdoors inside. It creates an aesthetic dialogue that exacerbates the qualities of both sides of the wall. You could almost say that it’s a portrait of Antonioni and his metaphorical aesthetics. The couple never moved in, splitting up before the house was finished. A house meant for love that was never to be, left to fight the sun, rain and wind alone.
La Cupola is essentially a shelter which could seemingly do double duty as a movie set. Hopefully one day a director will recognize its potential which can be a significant asset as a frame to art of any genre. It is a statement piece, a wet dream of magazines like Architectural Digest. Maybe that’s the whole point: a suggestion and a possibility. Almost like a physical form of wishful thinking. It’s a vision of serenity that’s rarely achieved since it is in our nature to expect too much. Instead, we remain disappointed standing inside that beautiful space which could have become many things, yet it turned out to be too big of a bite, emotionally and physically.
Antonioni and Vitti became an item after his 1960 vehicle L’ Avventura, where she plays a femme fatale in an affair with her missing girlfriend’s lover. Just like Rivera and Kahlo, their partnership also had a creative dimension, since she starred in several of his movies, like Night from 1961 and Eclipse with Alain Delon, in 1962. Some have described the former as reflection on architecture and its effect on our life. That’s an apt challenge when considering places like the Cupola or Casa Azul: what they tell us about ourselves and the difference between our reality and aspirations. Space is like a language: each new one subconsciously creates a different mindset. That’s why hotels can feel like an out of body and mind experience. We leave our truth behind and briefly become someone else.
Frida Kahlo: Casa Azul
Others were inspired by love too. Mexican artist and architect Juan O’ Gorman built the twin houses of the legendary couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. They have long since become icons way beyond the confines of visual arts. Those unfamiliar with the importance and size of their legacy, both individually and together, might recognize them from Salma Hayek’s film Frida. In it she embodied the titular character, a visual artist who used her own genius as a lifeline she firmly held on to during her physical suffering due to a near-fatal accident that left her permanently stuck in a stiff corset, inspiring many of her most famous self-portraits.
Her tumultous relationship with Rivera might have been the root of Gorman’s design: something simultaneously toxic yet codependent. The vivid colors of Casa Azul turn its boxy shape into a vision of positive energy. Though that might be the very thing that was sorely lacking inside, due to her poor health and Rivera’s overbearing, uncompromising personality. In spite of all that, she couldn’t let go as if he was a drug she was addicted to. There might be a void between the two buildings, but the architect created a connection, that one bridge between them that never truly burned down. This makes it stand out among other artist studios: palpable passion.
Due to the nature of her condition, Kahlo’s house became a physical extension of her incapacitated body. Her bed served as an easel as well, a broken heart trapped in a broken body was looking for a way to expand beyond its limits. Her prolific body of work bears witness to the fact as there’s so much to see and research. But she’s not a martyr, rather a fighter. What others might see as a restraint, she treats as a celebration. It is in these darkest places of her soul where she finds the sun that lifts her up. As we get to see in her paintings, she’s not withholding anything, even her insides are exposed. Her bones, her heart and its inhabitant: Diego.
In the perfectly color-curated world that social media has imposed on us, mismatched and chaotic spaces like Diego Rivera’s studio are a delight. In our label-obsessed discourse this definitely doesn’t meet the stylistic prerequisites for one of those man-caves you see on home makeover shows. Because everything is light and breezy: large windows contradict the idea of the creation as a solitary, enclosed experience and the mystery disappears, apart from the one in the tip of the artist’s paintbrush where your answers meet their question marks. If there were translucent paper screens, you might mistake it for a Japanese pavillion.
Rivera’s own character was so overpowering that the difference in size between the two houses was a given probably from the very beginning. Fenced off by phallic cactuses, it suggests a modernist machine for living rather than a cozy love nest. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, a roof over your head also provides you with a space where the conscious and unconscious blend into a unique omnipresent entity. Since the Mexican artist worked here, the line separating his daily life from the studio was a thin one. This subtle tension could be a source of revelations, yet even the most arduous mind sometimes needs breathing space in order to grow.
Juan O’ Gorman: the house in Pedregal
Gorman put his signiture on other works that few people outside the architectural field connect with him. In 1931, he proposed the design of the UNAM Library building in Mexico City. The proposition was rejected, but the gigantic mosaic covering the building is his most important work to date. In 2007 it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List and remains one of globally recognizable buildings in Mexico. Grand proportions are an opportunity for boasting and letting your fantasies go wild. Be it as it may, housing remains the one form where their creative spirit leaves its most significant marks. He left his own at the house he designed for his family in Pedregal in 1954, a cave-like structure richly covered with mosaics. Elements of the interior look like a subconscious homage to Dante Bini.Its decorative features also evoke associations of Gaudi’s Parc Güell, due to its sparkly, colorful morphology. There’s something primordial in this womb-like architecture, yet so comfortable. I can’t imagine spending winter here, but it’s makes for a perfect cocoon to hide from the heatwaves of July.
Jagoda Bujić: Kolorina
Gorman’s organic structure mirrors Kolorina, the residence of the famous Croatian visual artist Jagoda Bujić in Dubrovnik. Hers is also in a perfect structural symbiosis with its location. This is the very antithesis to contemporary practice where function is simultaneously embraced and smothered by form. When reduced to bare the minimum, life shifts from a lifestyle into the art of living. This is where lucky ones find fulfillment. Hers is situated on a rocky slope originally used as the resource for the construction of the nearby fortress Lovrijenac. What makes it special is the shape of the site and the housing unit, which consists of several interconnected 12th century stone cabins cascading down towards the sea.
I’ve been a fan of her work ever since I can remember, and the sculptural tapestries she was known for. Richard Serra’s visual language is mutually intelligible with her own, especially in her heavily texturised, raw pieces. They provoke a reaction due to the imposing size and tactile nature of the material. I know how to behave so I keep away from touching exhibits and so should you. There was once a woman at a gallery that pinched the arm of the famous ballerina statue by Degas just to see what it feels like. And then the security guy pinched her arm so she had to leave. You could find Bujić’s work all over the country in the past, and sometimes I wonder what happened to it after the rough and tumble of the war years was over.
Although her real estate portfolio also included places in Venice and Paris, it’s Kolorina she’s mostly associated with. Even more so because it seems to be a natural improvisation instead of an architectural design. If there’s anything inentional that can be recognized here, it’s invisibility, with the complex nestled between pines and aloe vera bushes acting as a natural membrane pierced by the light evening breeze that feels so balmy on your skin in springtime. This is where all the tacky stereotypes about the Mediterranean come together in a sunny, vivacious mosaic bursting with thick swathes of green, blue and gold. I used to swim at the little beach underneath the house in 2013. We were staying at a convent of Saint Mary of the Crucifix nearby and it was a fine challenge for an atheist like me.
Curzio Malaparte: Casa Malaparte
Houses inhabited by creativity do indeed posess this intrinsic quality of metaphysical narratives equally performative and practical. Malaparte’s villa on Capri is arguably the most famous example, perched on an isolated rock in Capri, floating above the sea. In the meantime, its dramatic roofline became such a landmark that it’s prominently featured in everything from movies to fashion editorials. The white, curvy crown on Malaparte’s house vaguely resembles the gentle curve of Bardot’s back and buttocks. Designed by Adalberto Libera in the 1930s, the design was rejected by the author and later completed by Adolfo Amitrano, a local stonemason. It rarely happens that this creates added value instead of a mockery. But there’s an exception to every rule, which this bold move turned out to be.
Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 cult classic Contempt was based on Alberto Moravia’s book and partially filmed at the house in Capri. Scenes like Bardot sunbathing on the roof firmly enshrined it in the canon of the French New Wave cinema. Although the book has its own qualities, the movie might be the most accomplished remake in history. It’s seductive, visually pleasing and the director succeeded in something impossible: making the house look like a character in itself. The barely accessible cliff is provided with a distinct identity of its own. Some houses would feel out of place anywhere else which is rarely as palpable as here, high above the waves. The monastic simplicity of his studio inside sums it all up.
Quite appropriately, the author described it as “a house like me” but this one is a different kind of self-portrait. Instead of a simple excitement trigger, it’s closer to the solemn silence of ancient mastabas. The complicated approach exacerbates his intention. It can’t be reached by boat unless the sea is calm, and it’s even more difficult on foot. Not unlike Gorman, fate also had a different plan for Malaparte’s own legacy: today, the fame of the building surpassed the one of his writing, largely due to the continuing admiration of the world’s greatest architects. It was Godard’s own words that define the relationship between the house and its creator the best: “too much sea, too much sky for such a small island and such a restless soul”. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to be: a house like me.
