THE ABANDONED "SPACESHIP HOUSE" (Italy)

Some time ago I had the honor of being able to visit an abandoned villa located in the municipality of Fregene in the province of Rome, a unique house of its kind that for years has been a metropolitan legend of my part, the spaceship house of the architect Perugini.

It was the end of the Sixties when the manor took shape and, since then, legends, mysteries and questions have flourished around the Spaceship House.
Being in the midst of many other normal inhabited villas, it stands out strongly as its architecture was conceived by an eclectic artist whose traces have been almost completely lost.
The first stone was laid in 1968, the era of the flower children, of a youth who wanted to break all molds. Perugini too was infected by that nonconformist wind. Rynaldo's father had landed in Italy in the 1930s to become a sculptor, a dream that he had to put aside over time.

Initially the idea with another couple of my colleagues was to shoot a short film inside it, and we managed to get in touch with the son of the well-known architect, who gave us the approval and the keys to be able to visit the entire building. .
Each letter engraved on every single block indicates that it can be dismantled and reassembled like the lego bricks.
Now the house weighs on the shoulders of Raynaldo, the 69-year-old son, who struggles to hide the weight of the legacy of the work. Of extraterrestrial today the house has only the forms. The manor shows deep wrinkles and should be saved from decay. The walls are full of ripples, the garden is a carpet of garbage and cans of beers, the walls are smeared with writings.

Few materials were used for the construction: reinforced concrete, glass and steel, the son told us. Perugini father rejected traditional building materials preferring reinforced concrete, which fully fulfills the function of supporting / supporting the volumes that enclose the various rooms of the house, arranged in a random order in the eyes of the layman.

Some rooms are distributed in the park surrounding the house, such as the meditation room, characterized by a concrete sphere that I personally struggled to make sense of, or the swimming pool located under the house which is clearly visible from inside making the all even more dreamlike.

On the net I found various articles about it, in particular I was struck by a paragraph read on the republic that quotes:
"I hope to find a financier for the restructuring - Raynaldo Perugini says to Repubblica (famous daily journal in Italy) - I would like to be able to organize cultural events". "It hurts me when they call it abandoned, because in reality I try to defend it - continues the former architecture professor - of that house I remember my evenings spent playing with friends in the 'ball', where there is a ' very special acoustics and my father's work table. He drew everywhere ".

There seems to be an immediate intention to start a project for the recovery, enhancement and restoration of the complex. Recently it seems to have aroused the interest of two architects, Patrick Weber and Sabine Storp, who have started a photographic and three-dimensional scanning project to preserve the structure, at least digitally.

Unfortunately, the project we had at the construction site died slowly, without giving us the opportunity to create artistic videos that would enhance the whole, the architect's son unfortunately disappeared from our radar leaving us with a bitter taste of infinite potential. , my only hope remains to trust in this recovery project, leaving me only the pleasure of the memory of the days spent inside it, which enriched my imagination by reminding me that there are always special people around the world, you just have to look for them.