Gambardellarchitetti’s House of bright stalactites, as its name suggests, is anything but a minimalist interior. Cherubino Gambardella and Simona Ottieri continue here their decade long research on the role of geometry, light and color as the fundamentals of domestic interiors that can trigger emotions.
The house is a flat of just 52 square meters, that thick bearing walls divide in three small-scale main rooms – a bedroom, a living room and a dining room – complemented by the required servant spaces – a bathroom with anteroom and a kitchen. These are “the ingredients of a bourgeois cottage”, which is then completely reshuffled, challenged in its aesthetics by a masterly “Mediterranean and Corbusian game”.
Variously reprocessed memories of Gio Ponti and the Mare Nostrum, of Bernard Rudofski and Pompei suggest to turn each room into “a tub covered with Vietri sul Mare’s ceramic tiles”, each time of a different color – cyclamen for the bedroom, coral red for the living room, sea green for the dining room and so on, according to the sequence defined by Ottieri. From the same memories stems the monumental interpretation of thresholds as propylaea and the narrative of the room’s sequence as a promenade architecturale.
What about the stalactites, then? They surface from the ceiling as geological concretions and become luminous. In Ottieri’s words, “they are similar but changeable geometries like those of a cave that we liked to abstract to unite everything under a white sky, a kind of clear corollary to this photonic storm to inhabit”.
- Project:
- House of bright stalactites
- Program:
- private house
- Location:
- Naples, Italy
- Architects:
- Gambardellarchitetti: Simona Ottieri Gambardella
- Project team:
- Alessandro Marotti Sciarra, Antonio Capolongo, Francesca Filosa, Antonella Mollo, Luigi Arcopinto
- Sketches:
- Cherubino Gambardella
- Construction manager:
- Simona Ottieri Gambardella
- Contractor:
- D. & G. Costruzioni
- Completion:
- 2021