design for an hotel in the wood at San Michele, Capri

Capri (Naples)

Bernard Rudofsky

Competitions, projects, proposals

The Mediterranean taught Rudofsky, Rudofsky taught me.. This is how Gio Ponti described his collaboration with Bernard Rudofsky in the forties. Rudofsky had just designed, together with Luigi Cosenza, the most beautiful Mediterranean architecture in Italy (before the house on Capri designed for Malaparte by Libera), the Villa Oro in Posillipo, in 1936. Ponti's and Rudofsky's ideas come together in the project for the San Michele hotel on Capri: a spontaneous hotel, made up of separate houses/rooms scattered through a wood, each with its own patio and name; from the rooms many paths/corridors converge on a tiny village, the heart of the hotel and residence of the manager (or rather, the gentleman who manages the place). Rudofsky's Mediterranean is white, Ponti's colored. The names of the rooms (room of the angels, room of the doves, room of the sirens) are Ponti's. The idea of the bath basin sunk in the floor, surrounded by walls, a cool watery grotto inside the house, is Rudofsky's; and so is the idea of the masonry stairs with colored ceramic risers,and the idea that guests, on arrival, should leave all their clothing in a closet and use sandals, hats, and umbrellas designed by the architects (a Japanese idea: Rudofsky discovered Japan, still in a pure state, before the contemporary Japanese). Ponti and Rudofsky designed a great deal together, but none of the designs was built. They were linked by the idea of architecture without an architect. Rudofsky was to develop it further in his travel books (journeys through countries, journeys through museums), his primers for Americans. In the fifties and sixties, messengers/interpreters of other people's cultures, like Steinberg, Eames, Wirkkala, Sottsass, and William Klein, would also travel in this way, taking photographs, making drawings, and writing -and the pages o/Domus were to reflect all this. Gio Ponti travelled only in the country of Gio Ponti, under construction.