“Within reach” at Casa Ponis
The Touching Proxemics of Alberto Ponis’ Architectural Practice
Alberto Ponis’ extensive project on Sardinia began early in his career, in 1963, and stretched over the next decades. There are now nearly 300 homes scattered and nestled into the rocky outcroppings of Punta Sardegna and Porto Rafael and Costa Paradiso. Families come on holiday, fewer live year-round. Alberto designed the houses, but more than that, considered the lives which might be expressed in them.
The rooms of Casa Ponis are themselves animated by the dense evidence of this thinking-feeling life, where everything has the potential to interact with everything else. This synergy is, no doubt, nourished by Sardinia itself. Annarita explains how they have loved the freedom and natural setting of Sardinia; Marta adds that “opening a door to the sea” was always a part of her childhood. And expanding that thought metaphorically, Alberto adds: “my memory is an enormous drawer full of things, and I open it”.
Of course, the sea is also clearly visible from inside Casa Ponis, but the house was not built to brag a sweeping panorama. Instead through Alberto’s architecture, the rocks and sea also exist within reach. They are not a view surveyed from a distance, any more than Alberto’s first drawings. Like the drawings that initiated every project here, that are at hand.
