During the workshop hold by the architect Marcio Kogan (MK27) we were asked to design an hypothetic house for the one character of the movie “Persona” by Ingmar Bergman. The house name is “A built free choice”, because, sometimes, choices must be taken in the right places. The house, is for a guy of my age, when indecisions and choices darken our mind with a fog of anxiety.

The young commitment, once pure and open to the people and later on corrupted and misogynist, has to take a decision about living or not living in society. He is Gregoji Pecorin with a chance. The house must be on the water, away from everything, an island in the island, difficult to reach, difficult to escape. There’ll be two parts, a conventional part and an exceptional part.

The first one is the image of light, opening, comfort and conventional life style, it faces the island as a mute observer on society. The second one it’s mass, it’s stone, a blind cave, with only two openings, one on the roof and the other on the infinity of the see. The house is the built idea of dichotomy, it’s schizofrenia and ataraxy, light and shadows, lightness and heaviness, it’s the formal possibility to take a decision.

This text is the «poetic» description that Marcio Kogan asked us to write before the start of the design, in order to clarify the our design intentions and which kind of image we had in our mind. The design it’s the consequence of a subtractive compositional operation, designing the voids and the spaces I was able to understand with kind of spatiality I wanted for this house.

Basically there’re two parts, with two completely different identities: the house and the cave. This was made to make the client choose, if we wanted to join again the society or to deny it, becoming an hermit. The house space is strongly archetypical, a two slope roof ceiling in a two slope roof shape, digged in the rock, I wanted to unify the image of the hut and of the cave dwelling. Every functional room is carved inside the wall to leave as much free space as possible. The two big rooms of the house are opened on the island, so it’s possible for the client to watch the village and to remember how society is (something like the green light in the Scott Fitzgerald book).

The cave is opened on the ocean and is the meditative space, where the client can explore with his mind and watch with his eyes the infinity of the ocean. I wanted this space to not be regulated by any sort of geometrical rules of norms, to be completely different from the the other part of the house. Having this strong dichotomy, I’m trying to help the guy from the movie to take his final decision.