Tuesday 1 May 2007

Villa Malaparte - Adalberto Libera and Curzio Malaparte


The home for two decades of writer Curzio Malaparte, designed by Adalberto Libera

it "underwent a strange metamorphosis when the writer changed the architect's orginal plan." A site giving Malaparte's biography has this description:
Malaparte's house in Capri, sited on a promontory overlooking the Mediterranean
Sea ... has been called the most beautiful house in the world. Casa Malaparte, 28 meters long and 6.6 meters wide, was built on the windy and barren cliff of Massulto. As a manifestation of modern achitecture, it rejected the popular "Capri style." Malaparte worked busily with his house project between 1938 and
1942, and in November 1942 he announced that "the house is about finished..." Actually, it was not. One of his friends later told that Malaparte was always broke, because there was always a wall, or a bathroom, or a window to redo.
Jean Luc Godard, who set his film Le Mepris at the house, declared:
Rome is the modern world, the West. Capri represents the world of antiquity, of
nature before the advent of civilisation ... In short, the title of Le Mepris
could have been Remembrance of Homer.
The shot of Brigitte Bardot on the roof of the villa comes from Godard's film.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm going to stick my neck out and state that this sucks - especially the interior!

http://www.westfordconnection.com/Photos/Italy/malaparte/index.htm

Imagine sipping a beer on that roof! On a sunny day, the damn thing would reach boiling point 10 seconds after you took it out of the cooler! On a windy day you'd be lucky not to be blown off the roof.

Frankly, I've seen prettier looking coastal forts. Ones that would offer equally stunning open air views for Brigitte Bardot at a lot less risk!

e.g. http://www.nps.gov/archive/prsf/coast_defense/third_system/fort_point/ftpoint.htm

Anonymous said...

O/T. Could you consider enabling full text on the comments feed plz?
Since comments are short anyway it's really annoying.

As far as I know it is just a matter of changing the current feed -- http://pc.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default to http://pc.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/full

Anonymous said...

Robert, if they want to do a swap I think I can come up with a way to keep the beer cool and stay off the roof in a wind.

I do both now.

Peter Cresswell said...

Yeah Robert, but what the fuck would you know. ;^)

Okay, yeah, the interior sucks. I'll give you that. But just think what OSH would make of those monumental steps!?

And don't you see that pre-Homeric primitivism at all? Doesn't do it for you?

Anonymous said...

Look I agree that the location is magnificent and that those steps are brilliant. But the house... Cripes it's awful.

It looks like a tick stuck on the back of a magnificent horse. I keep thinking back to the coastal house Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to design for a coastal-property in San Francisco. It never got built but it's in that book Treasures of Tallisen (sp?).

That one looks like it grew out of the bluff it's built on.

I think they've wasted the site. Imagine even if they'd built about something ~like~ the Villa Gaeta, (Lake Como, Lombardia, Italy) there instead of that flat-backed red-brick gun-emplacement?

http://www.topstudionet.com/fotosito//santabbondio02.jpg
http://www.corrieredicomo.it/img/VillaLaGaeta.jpg
http://www.inflayak.com/laghi/foto/lagocomo-villa-small.jpg
http://images.google.com/imgres?img