Stone House | John Pawson Studio

From the colonnade of the Università degli Studi di Milano’s Cortile Settecento, the installation read as a simple, house-shaped structure, centrally located on an existing diagonal path. Other perspectives, however, revealed incisions through both ridge and mid-section, opening the interior to the changing play of sunlight and the vagaries of the weather. These incisions allowed those passing through to experience the reassuring thickness of the walls and roof pitches surrounding them, at the same time as they fractured the sense of enclosure and protection. At night, sources of illumination incorporated within the structure transformed the openings into blades of light.

When the English architect John Pawson discovered Lithoverde® by Salvarori, he immediately fell in love and wanted to use it for the installation at the Interni Think Tank exhibition.

Indeed, no one could have interpreted the material better than he did.

“For a long time I've thought how wonderful it would be to be able to use all the off-cuts you see lying around in quarries and stone yards, but no one had come up with a way of doing it. I love the fact that Lithoverde is about making something beautiful and practical out of something which was previously simply waste. I also love the idea of a natural material which gives you scope to make your own patterns” said John Pawson.

A construction at once linear and captivating that deploys a play of contrasts and juxtapositions to create discontinuous surfaces, lights and shadows. What is most striking about the project is how it instantly transports the viewer to the imagery of childhood, to the archetype of the house as drawn by children.

The reassuring and protective aspect and the sense of intimacy are subverted, however, by the cuts along the edges of the structure, as if the components of the house were not touching one another. These fissures, along with the opening in the central section, enable sunlight to enter and create wonderful and intriguing chromatic interactions with the materials, betraying the ancestral notion of ‘dwelling’.