Villa Malaparte studied by Amanda Kah Yee Siaw and Sarah Najm

Sarah and Amanda have redrawn the Villa Malaparte. After a brief introduction on Malaparte and his career as one of the last Italian Intellectual Dandy, they've shown a serie of diagrams representing "Intimacy Zones", hidden rooms, secret passages retreat area in the villa.

Here is an excerpt from a beautiful text on Curtzio Malaparte, written by Lawrence Russell:

Malaparte & Adalberto Libera

|| Many commentators see the Casa Malaparte as Malaparte's greatest work, surpassing even his superb writing. Certainly the project fits well with the Futurist idea of the Artist as Creator... a megalomaniacal notion also adopted by the French avant-gardist poet Antonin Artaud for his notion of a new theatre (Theatre of Cruelty). The stylistic contradiction -- is it rationalist or anti-rationalist -- fits perfectly with the surrealist dualism of conscious and unconscious expression. The rationalism comes from the original architect Libera (1903-63), who was published in an early issue of Prospettive a.k.a Perspective (1937-52) "an international journal of culture and the arts" that Malaparte produced and edited following his release from confinement. Libera was a favored architect with the fascist ruling elite, a hot item following the construction of his design for a new central post-office in Rome. The clean, simple arcade style of the post office's massed arches reconciled classicism with modernism, an integral precept of fascist aesthetic theory... and also seemed to play on the melancholy "Nietzche Autumn" atmosphere of the Italian surrealist/metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico, also published in Prospettive (strangely, de Chirico never mentions Malaparte in his elegantly paranoid Memoir). Libera's original design was so linear and rational it was institutional in the most basic sense, with nothing to distinguish it from a primitive Mediterranean stucco box, and could easily be mistaken for a prison or a military bunker. In this sense, it was merely a drawing in progress, a positioning of a shape in space.



No matter -- Libera and Malaparte fell out during the initial stages of construction, and Malaparte was left to continue building in whatever direction his contrarian mind led him. The dangerous siting and unregulated aesthetic -- this is no house for kids -- is viewed both as religious and classical, a sort of retro-pantheism worthy of the anthropomorphic world of the pre-Christian Romans. Close to the sun, close to the sea... close to Death. Casa Malaparte is a dream of flying, a dream of falling.

In his masterpiece, The Volga Rises In Europe (1943), Malaparte describes visiting a Finnish observation post during the brutal siege of Lenningrad. This "picket-post" is within 200 yards of the Russians, a simple bunker of stacked pines, mud and snow, manned by a single sentry -- the vartio, the "dead man", he who walks the point. Malaparte's sympathy for the man assigned to this suicidal location is enormous, so he leaves a couple of paks of ciggies behind as consolation. The description of the visit is grim and clairvoyant. Malaparte concludes: "As we trudge in single file along the narrow path a stray bullet whistles past my ear and lodges with a ping in a tree trunk. But I scarcely notice it. I am haunted by the memory of that wrinkled, tear-stained face, I cannot forget that weeping man standing alone in the forest." Describing himself? or the archetype of Man in a hostile universe? Casa Malaparte is a picket-post on the edge of Nowhere. As the architect Robert Venturi asks, "Do its steps lead to infinity?"

Libera’s intial design saw the ground floor organized along a lateral hallway along which all the spaces into the house are distributed. 

The two short facades are windowless, rather these views are reserved for the terrace on the upper level. 

The services and private rooms are on the ground level and the public zones are on the top level with the entrance in the building via series of stairs on the ground. 

Predominantly private zones fill the planning of the internal Villa. 

Hidden rooms such as the study on the top level, the unkown room and the entire cellar level seem to be specifically designed for Malaparte.

The obvious public zones leave no ambiguity as to their function and openness providing a release into the surrounding nature

All circulation contained to the mountain side of the building.  Hidden and interwoven within the contours of the steep cliff circulation occurs over several planes