House of Dust

Intermediate Unit 2 Open Lecture – all welcome

Hot on the heels of our Sicilian love affair, Intermediate 2 presents an evening to transport us once more to the stone island's spectacular sensuous atmosphere and rich cultural syncretism.

The House of Dust takes its influences from primordial caverns, renaissance grottos and nymphaea at Rome's Villa Doria Pamphilj. Materiality, colour and light evoke an archaeological architecture – a ceiling of rough plaster is the colour of bare earth and the palest pink light evokes dawn and flowers – the colour of beauty that dies. The House breathes light through spaces in a balanced sequence of compression and dilations.

Born in Sicily, Antonino Cardillo is an itinerant architect based in London. Practising internationally, his works have also been widely exhibited, including the 4th International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam, Artindex of St-Petersburg, and the London Design Festival at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Through his works Cardillo explores the boundaries between ancient and modern languages, his architectonic spaces are a syncretic synthesis, attempting to reconcile different world views, beliefs, traditions and cultures.

Film screening 

Luchino Visconti 

The Leopard (Il Gattopardo)

starring Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale, Burt Lancaster

185 minutes, colour

The Leopard is an elegiac story of a dying aristocracy struggling to maintain its culture against a harsh Sicilian landscape of 1860s Risorgimento. Based on the eponymous novel by Lampedusa, Visconti's translation documents the passing of power into the ambitious grip of the new rich. Visconti's film breaks away from Italian neo-realism towards a more classical yet lavishly flamboyant storytelling. The climatic scene is the sumptuous forty-minute ball, often cited as one of the most spectacular sequences in film history. Awarded the Palme d'Or in 1963, The Leopard is considered Visconti's masterpiece.