The ability to regain possession of the profession in a free way, favoring an open format to rethink by chasing curiosity and, why not, obsessions and thorns in the side. Among the architects of the young Italian generation who were most able to assert their critical originality, the independent research group Parasite 2.0 – aka Stefano Colombo, Eugenio Cosentino and Luca Marullo – stands out for the versatility with which, since 2010, it has been able to deal with heterogeneous and interdisciplinary projects, far from the classic tools of the architect’s trade such as the design of a building or an interior. We tell them through an overview of their projects.

Being an architect without building (or renovating) houses. The experience of an architecture that goes beyond the built is dear to Italian history, if we think, for example, of the radical season of the 60s and 70s. Today, this drive is renewed by entering into a relationship with the new scenarios that define a virtual, fast and evanescent society, and by changing the tasks and fields of action of the discipline and the profession. The many projects that Parasite 2.0, a sui generis think tank operating with offices in Milan and Brussels and activities on an international scale, has put together in the last ten years are an example to rethink a possible new “extended architecture”.

Is it an excess to think that your business contributes to rethinking the patterns of the discipline, we ask? “Rethinking discipline is a huge job”, they reply. “Let’s say that the continuous changing of the contemporary condition forces any professionalism to a continuous change. We certainly believe that training as an architect gives a lot of flexibility to move in different fields. The management of a project, therefore the answer to questions and needs through devices, can be applied to many things. Designing an architecture is not very different from designing a book, a graphic medium, an object or a recipe “.

When a great director meets a great architect, a unique, extravagant dream home can only be born. If you then add that the director is Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of Italian cinema, and the designer is Dante Bini, the result is extraordinary, a love nest in the heart of the wildest Sardinia.

We are talking about Binishell, the reinforced concrete dome invented by the famous Modenese architect Dante Bini, in 1969, and made famous by the love story between Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti.

A haven of love, close to the sea and immersed in the wilderness of the most authentic and fascinating Sardinia. A movie house built near the sea in the north of the island, Costa Paradiso, facing the Gulf of Asinara. A particular charm, that of Sardinia, which seduced Antonioni during the shooting of one of his films.

The filmmaker was in fact in the beautiful pink beach of Budelli to shoot the dream scene in the film “The red desert” with Monica Vitti, when he fell in love with the wild landscape of the Costa Paradiso and decided to hire the architect Dante Bini to build (and immortalize), in an amazing and unique way, his love nest.

Instead of one, Dante Bini created two domes: the first was to be the love nest of the director and his partner Monica Vitti and, not far away, a smaller dome (the one we explore here), commissioned by the neo-expressionist Bolognese painter Sergio Vacchi, master of the Informal and protagonist of the Italian pictorial art of the late twentieth century.

We let ourselves be guided in the exploration of the Bini Dome by the architect Matteo Sacchetti, professor at the Politecnico di Milano and interior architect who deals with set-up and museography, which he followed, with colleagues Luca Basso Peressut and Cristina F. Colombo of the Faculty of Architecture, the thesis of the students Marta Damia, Marta Ferrario and Gemma Galassi which analyzes the possibility of creating an underground, underground museum in the stretch of cliff between the domes and the coast, to host the work of director Michelangelo Antonioni.