BRIGANTINE ISLAND HOUSE, ATLANTIC CITY, NJ, USA

THE PROJECT BASIC IDEA : the house is an architectural object that by an "unitary movement" symbolically both identifies the building and links its requisites and its complexities.
VOLUME : It is a three-level compact volume, where the two upper levels, developing a dynamic competition, partially divide themselves and vertically slide into opposite directions until one wins. It draws itself up enlarging its volume, dealing out tension, taking away matter to the other volume and generating an empty space between them.
Both the two upper levels grow up from a podium: the ground level.
Their being sometime conceptually or sometime physically separated from the ground level, gives them either free agility or belonging.
SOLID BODY: A lithoid, stiff, archaic solid that changes, fits, stretches in order to be compatible or subdued to nowadays instances concerned with sensoriality, network, electronic equipment, multifunctional spaces, but also concerned with the client's requests: meditation, contemplation, "otia".
THE "DRAMATIC" EPISODE of the house happens in the empty space between the two winding walls, containing the stair and covered by a huge skylight.
However this one is just one episode among wider paths and routes coming from the sea crossing the house by silent and moderate (compared to the disruptive and vibrant one of the winding walls) system of stairs and terraces from the ground level to the roof one.
It comes out a complex system of primary and secondary themes, of dialogs between dramatic broken events and hidden, noiseless but dynamic ones. This continuos movement that develops following solid paths, like in an episodic story the building' s elevations. The elevations intentionally allude to architectural Mediterranean features, north European one and others that after being refined, thinned from their own dialects and peculiarities.Like a faintness ghost the building gradually gives up to the growing volume of technological net, but holding them like in a case.
"The emotional architecture and the regionalism conceived by Barragan had as his constant concern to build "enclosure" for emotions, where a wall had to guarantee inside the interior spaces the necessary intimacy to research beauty, arcane meditations and poetry(Louise Noelle, Dilatazione emotiva degli spazi, Testo e Immagine).
The age of Globalization (not certainly the only one we find in the story), of the Network, of the "translated symbols" is an age of "lonely people", enclosed inside simulacra, sheltered by hidden identities, linked to the "Global Net" by spatial and no-spatial screens, peripherals.
During the age of Internet, architecture don't necessary need to express the shapes, the materials, the sensations of fluidity or transparency or to imitate mathematical-scientific processes organizing technologies they contain.
The real stars of this age are the nets.
They often phagocytize who enjoys them or they order layouts, processes, functions, a sort of buffer between un-spatial electronic world and the physic world also grazing secondary, temporary, mayfly, roles or some others more symbolic researching lost or forgotten identities through citations and recovering theories.
The speed acceleration we find nowadays in the each cultural fields, might be lead to think we need efficient translator for complex identities, more than uniforming languages.