When i discovered this house i learned a lot about the relationship between architecture and philosophy. Maybe it is not the perfect way of construct in nature and in the landscape, maybe now i would consider this a bad design; but I think it´s very interesting anyway.
Curzio Malaparte built for himself between 1937 and 1943 on the Island of Capri. Known as Casa Malaparte or ‘A House Like Me” it is described as a self-portrait realized in stone with the help of master builder and local stone mason Alfonso Almitraro.
In the romantic language of the time he writes “I now live on an island, in a melancholy, austere house, which I have built myself on a solitary cliff by the sea. The image of my longing” That’s a pretty intense take on the idea of a holiday house but then Malaparte lived through tumultuous times and was a powerful writer in a politically charged world.
For Malaparte the villa is emphatically personal and connected to his deportation and subsequent incarceration on the Island of Lipari north of Sicily by the Fascists in 1933 and his experience of imprisonment and the house that emerged from it is described in the novel “The Skin” in 1949. “Cell 461 remains in my soul as its secret character. I feel like a bird that has swallowed a cage. The cell is within me like a child inside a pregnant woman.”
During construction the house was moulded like a sculpture and although some plans were drawn originally by the Italian architect Libera much of the final form was the work of Malaparte himself. The placing of the entrance, the shape of the sculptural curving wall on the roof terrace and the colouring of the external walls were all changed several times before Malaparte was satisfied (finally Pompeian-red). For a war correspondent stationed in Finland the role of architect required active correspondence and telegramming as well as lengthy visits to the site.
A perpetual enigma, he still confounds nearly all who care to look. Actor, novelist, poet, filmmaker, soldier, playwright, journalist, political figure, prisoner, composer, charmer — inventor and revealer of truths — Malaparte associated with Mussolini and Stalin, vilified Hitler, and admired Mao. He was a journalist in London, a collaborator with the Surrealists in Paris, and a war correspondent in Berlin and on the Russian front. “Casa come me,” he called the building — “House like me” — inviting perpetual speculation as to what meaning lay within.
Much as Picasso, Breton, Pound, Eliot, and Godard discovered the house and its legendary owner earlier in the century, such international personalities as Robert Venturi, Emilio Ambasz, Willem Dafoe, Steven Holl, Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman, Arata Isozaki, Louis Cha, Carla Fendi, James Wines, and Karl Lagerfeld have created a special portfolio embodying unique insights into the controversial artist and his provocative home.
