Europe - Italian Architecture, Domestic Architecture, Italy - Individual Buildings & Designs, Brutalism, Formalism & Post-War Modernism - Architecture

Malaparte : A House Like Me

Name: Malaparte : A House Like Me
Author: Michael Mcdonough, Tom Wolfe
ISBN: 9780609603789

by Michael Mcdonough, Tom Wolfe

Write a review

Overview

Malaparte: A House Like Me offers an extraordinary look at Malaparte, the man and the house. Often called the most beautiful house in the world, Casa Malaparte in Capri, Italy, is dramatically sited on a promontory overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. It was home to Curzio Malaparte (1898-1957), the Italian writer who designed the building. A perpetual enigma, he still confounds nearly all who care to look. Actor, novelist, poet, filmmaker, soldier, playwright, journalist, political figure, prisoner, composer, charmer — inventor and revealer of truths — Malaparte associated with Mussolini and Stalin, vilified Hitler, and admired Mao. He was a journalist in London, a collaborator with the Surrealists in Paris, and a war correspondent in Berlin and on the Russian front. "Casa come me," he called the building — "house like me" — inviting endless speculation as to what meaning lay within.

Much as Picasso, Breton, Pound, Eliot, and Godard discovered the house and its legendary owner earlier in the century, such international personalities as Robert Venturi, Emilio Ambasz, Willem Dafoe, Steven Holl, Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman, Arata Isozaki, Louis Cha, Carla Fendi, James Wines, and Karl Lagerfeld have created this special portfolio embodying unique insights into the controversial artist and his provocative home.

A work of art in itself, Malaparte: A House Like Me includes a series of photographs produced especially by the renowned Italian photographer Mimmo Jodice, archival materials and documents, poetry, original art, letters, memoirs, commentaries, and an original musical score. Organized and edited by noted architect,designer, and writer Michael McDonough, this remarkable book ultimately celebrates Casa Malaparte's enigmatic contradictions, seeing it as a "living literary work, an autobiography, and a mysterious tabula rasa; a house that lives in myth."

About the Author, Michael Mcdonough, Tom Wolfe

Award-winning architect and designer Michael McDonough has realized projects in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and has lectured internationally on architecture, design, and art. He was a member of the faculty at New York University from 1978-1981, and a visiting critic at the University of Pennsylvania and the Casa Malaparte Foundation. He is currently a faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York, where he has taught since 1984, and Director of the International Bamboo Design Research Initiative at Rhode Island School of Design.

McDonough has exhibited at such galleries and museums as Grey Art Gallery, Holly Solomon Gallery, the Pacific Design Center, and the Musée du Louvre. His work is in the permanent collection of the Berlin Museum and the Corning Museum, as well as private collections. He has written on architecture, design, and the related arts for The New York Times, Industrial Design, and Metropolis, and is a contributing editor and writer at Metropolitan Home. McDonough holds a Bachelor's Degree in English from the University of Massachusetts, and a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in New York City.