Melbourne’s Elusive Moon of Concrete

Italian architect, Antonino Cardillo’s unusual new piece resembles the moon with its curvaceous contours and mysterious proportions. The apparent ambiguity of its form is a vital component of its complexity and highly appealing nature, which flirts with motifs common to modern life, namely identity, otherness and fear of difference.

A suburb of Melbourne is the setting for Cardillo’s ‘Concrete Moon’, which is a private home divided into two clear sections. The plot is rectangular in shape and the home is designed to have one area representing a public domain, and one private area, comprised of a long straight and narrow building with a walkway that leads into the garden section.

Each of the two parts of the house share common traits, similar angles, and seems partially related in design, but treated by Cardillo using different processes. Inversions of shapes and a surprising lack of definition between the walls and ceilings produce an intriguing and entrancing experience for visitors and eventual inhabitants.

The theme of elusiveness is effectively communicated to visitors through the building’s contrasting form that juxtaposes curves with straight vertical lines, wide shapes with narrow shapes. The result is disorientating but satisfying, and echoes the ever more frequent questioning by contemporary society of preconceived models, structures and sights.

Cardillo’s building successfully and powerfully enacts the expressive role architecture can play in altering our perspective of today’s urban and rural landscapes, thus shaping the world around us.

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by Albertine Fox
Gloobbi Architecture

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