The project is a residence located in Southampton, New York.

The Centrifugal Villa is arranged around a hollow center, as if the heart of the house had somehow fallen outside its body. The string of subsequent spaces in its interior provide a comprehension of the whole by sacrificing their individual geometric cohesiveness to the fractured configuration of the entire composition.

The experience of the interior is characterized by constantly shifting vanishing points, at the place of their collision in each crease of the plan, large openings cutting dormer scoops on the roof, centrifugally release the views out to the surrounding landscape.

As far as young talented architects go, Antonino Cardillo has displayed (excuse the use of a cliché) 'a maturity in his craft that is well beyond years'. Last year, he impressed our team with his 'House of Convexities' built near Barcelona, and today we got a pleasant surprise through this house that he has just designed in Melbourne, Australia.

Cardillo seems to sculpt his space, inside and out. The three-dimensional free flow merges walls and ceilings to form intricate, yet cohesive spaces. We do not see the textured treatment of the surfaces that made House of Convexities so special, but the volumes resulting from the interactive integration of the all the curvilinear and strait surfaces did yield some interesting results.

This end of terrace Victorian two-storey over basement house in south Dublin required modernization and additional space for the needs of the clients’ growing family.


The brief was to provide additional multifunctional living space and bedroom accommodation not provided for within the original house. The existing two-storey return was at a scale not befitting such a large house with cramped internal dimensions making the spaces unusable.


The design creates a rear return more suitable in scale and playful in nature with an orthogonal emphasis reflecting that of the original terrace.

Of the multitude of structures built across the country each year, few ever become elevated to a level considered the “art of architecture” by architectural critics and/or historians. The vast majority of these houses and buildings remain mundane, held to a design level that will appease the taste of that great middle group or, as Frank Lloyd Wright referred to us: “the great mediocrity.”


Architectural critics judge the impression of a building in the immediate sense, before the building has had he chance to prove itself. Historians, on the other hand, have the benefit of hindsight, advising of the building’s architectural qualities after the second, third of fourth generation has passed. Seldom is a classic realized at the moment.

All photographs courtesy of Bill Timmerman

The architects organized this introverted residence around an open courtyard, the core of which is inhabited by a body of water, intended as a central element that connects, either physically or visually, the different areas of the house.

A peripheral wall that encompasses the residence defines the shape of the project. While enclosing the open court, it opens up westwards towards the neighboring thicket. This ‘compact skin’ provides the desired privacy for the house while the southwest opening brings in desirable natural elements, such as the southern sun and the western air.

The house is sited within the scenic surroundings, in the Dinner Plain, Victoria overlooking Mount Hotham. It integrates itself to the neighboring landscape, through use of natural material, locally available and that has traditionally been used local construction.



The house embraces in its shape the typological archetypes traditionally used by country-men and cowboys that lived in the area. A combination of stone, wood and metal was used both for structure and finish.

Another neatly crafted little house from Bates Masi + Architects. This 2-level house, referred to by its' Owner as his "tree house", is situated in a dense grove of pines and hollies with a view of the bay from the second level.

The approach by a raised wooden walkway arrives at a walled deck and glass entrance. Two guest bedrooms, bath and guest deck are on the first floor with a steel stair leading to the living, dining, kitchen and Master Suite on the second floor.

As a prototype for future salvaging and recycling efforts, the Big Dig House reuses this discarded infrastructure as building components. These materials were not cut or altered in any major way in an effort to prove that infrastructure can be reused ‘as-is’ as well as to keep labor costs at a minimum. The result was a rough framing duration that lasted 3 days as opposed to 3 weeks if standard materials and techniques had been used.

You might be familiar with Boston’s Big Dig, a megaproject that rerouted Interstate 93, the Central Artery that runs through the heart of Boston, into a 3.5 mile (5.6 km) tunnel under the city. Often overlooked is the massive amount of waste that accompanied construction at this scale, namely the dismantling of the existing and temporary roadways.