Villa Capri
Casing cement very complex, located in Itri, a small town in the province of Latina, is purchased by our client who asks us to build a house, taking into account the seniority of an untouchable backbone to be taken as secure element inside the building. The request is also to conceive of something that could be sold to any buyer maintaining a conceptual continuity with the neighboring house, the white ceramic bunker house, but trying to use language that was inspired, in some way, to classic elements so to meet the taste of a wider audience.
Re-interpretation of the classic is a question that often is done us, a simple and difficult question at the same time, a question which shows how a common idea and figurative of the architecture often reassure those who commissioned thinking of something that can be shared by many people. We must try to answer with narrative power in a very insidious request because it causes to respond yielding to the temptation of academic rhetoric.
There was a tank in reinforced concrete. A skeleton of concrete rather incomprehensible, articulated on two levels and, consequently, with a series of very large and intricate spaces between exterior and interior. The request was also to make a single building, a Single Family villa of approximately 250 sqm interior, 435 sqm of terraces, a pool of 40 square meters and 2300 square meters of old olive groves to be restored.
We had to alter in any way the landscape consists of a beautiful stone terracing and green, keep more or less the same position the outline building, without changing the stairwells but conceiving a separate connection between the master bedroom, the living area with guest rooms and the annex. Trying to unify everything, sprang an odd shape that lent itself to being closed and opened from the windows of various shapes leaving triangles, prisms, growths, shelters and more of anticlassical that tied the old rustic to its defined image.
We decided, then, to work on the osmotic alternation between inner and outer using stone, plaster, stone yet, still plaster, adding to the circles of the openings eyelashes decorated with blue or white ceramic tiles. These remembered Gio Ponti but also Ettore Sottsass in an impossible marriage that there had seemed charming.
To all this, a once completed, it was associated with a slender order and squat together, built by pergolas and columns obtained with large plastic tubes which stood slender and crisp white metal profiles.
It was the squat of Capri column dear to Alberto Savinio. Here it turns into a planter where many bougainvillea climbing around multiple racks.
Our research, then, welds the two apparently antipolar images of the bulwark and the frame as symbols of a Mediterranean classicism by the Dadaists tones.
The set looks like a village, apparently symmetrical and played on succession of open and closed stairways, rooms, halls, corridors, horizons and terraces, water and vegetation. Within just the old skeleton and a series of rooms built around the "square" of stay and concluded by dreamy ceilings.
The very long views, the relationship with the neighboring building, the common and unusual language are the outcome that we love most in this unique classicism on request.
