Photograph: courtesy of Scheidegger & Spiess

Photograph: courtesy of Scheidegger & Spiess

Photograph: courtesy of Scheidegger & Spiess

Photograph: courtesy of Scheidegger & Spiess

Il Girasole
Christoph Schaub and Marcel Meili

DVD of the original Italian edition, with subtitles in English, French, and German (17 min., colour), in hardback cassette with a booklet with contributions by Sochitl Forster, Katja Lässer, Marcel Meili, and Christoph Schaub (in English and German), Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess Verlag, 2010, 48 pages, 12 colour and 11 b/w ill., CHF 39.90
ISBN 978-3-85881-906-2

For a film about the world’s most famous rotating house, Christoph Schaub and Marcel Meili’s documentary Il Girasole (1995) is astonishingly static. In fact, the camera hardly moves at all in this beautifully crafted seventeen-minute documentary, and neither does the house. Measured against that golden standard of architectural documentaries, Stan Neumann and Richard Copans’ series Architectures (1996–2005), Il Girasole offers perhaps less factual information than those films of similar length, but engages the viewer in different ways. The deliberate absence of camera movement forces us to grasp the spatial sequences of the house via the thoroughly considered composition of each image. The film’s beautiful and emotionally rich imagery illustrates the makers’ careful exploration of the contrasting tools and qualities of film and architecture.

Designed in 1929 to rotate a full 360 degrees, Il Girasole (not to be confused with Luigi Moretti’s 1947 Casa Girasole in Rome) is perched high in the vineyards of Marcellise near Verona. The engineer Angelo Invernizzi began construction in 1931 and finished it 1935, in collaboration with mechanical engineer Romolo Carapacchi, interior decorator Fausto Saccorotti, and architect Ettore Fagiuoli.

Trained as a railroad mechanic, Invernizzi had opened a successful civil engineering practice in Genoa. In 1940 he would build the city’s tallest skyscraper together with Marcello Piacentini. According to his daughter, Lidia, whose recollections provide the spoken commentary for the film, the family used the house for summer vacations and weekends. It sits on fifteen wheel sets on top of a massive three-storey substructure, partially built into the hillside, which contains the entrance, garages and a covered loggia. A concrete spiral staircase and elevator at the centre lead up to the actual villa, whose two wings contain a dining room and kitchen on the first floor and bedrooms and bathrooms on the second, with all major rooms facing the terrace between them.

As soon as the rotating mechanism was operated for the first time, the house’s lightweight concrete began to settle. Invernizzi covered the outside walls with thin aluminum sheets and the inside with brown canvas to hide the emerging cracks. The house itself—a moderate version of the modernism that the Gruppo Sette and others had promoted in Italy since the 1920s—has remained remarkably untouched. Each room still contains the modernist furnishings from the 1930s. The rotating mechanism still works perfectly today, but a deep fissure in the roof of the substructure prevents the house from completing its full circle. When put into motion, the house moves glacially, imperceptibly slow; it is designed for a full rotation in nine hours and twenty minutes (a restaurant on top of a television tower might complete the full circle over the course of dinner). ‘Few were the days,’ Lidia Invernizzi recalls, ‘when Papa would decide to make the house turn. I think he was content to know that his house had something which no other possessed. Just the capability of turning gave to everything, to each space, to each window, to the furniture and to the trees a special light.’ When moved at all, apparently the house did not follow the light like a sunflower, as its name suggests; Invernizzi designed it to either turn away from the sun to keep rooms from overheating, or to frame certain views. It shares this panoramic relationship to its surroundings with Palladio’s nearby Villa Rotonda, whose four identical facades offered as much a perplexing view from outside, as four perfectly framed views from the inside.

As Chad Randl demonstrated in his book Revolving Architecture (2008), rotating houses were not a new idea by 1934. They had emerged after the turn of the century, usually either in connection with tuberculosis sanatoria or as garden huts. Edison’s first film studio, the Black Maria, sat on a turntable in order to retain steady northern light, and George Bernard Shaw famously used a prefabricated revolving cottage as a writer’s retreat at his estate in Hertfordshire. (The weight of his books quickly rendered it immobile.) Invernizzi’s familiarity with locomotive turntables probably helped him to conceive—and perhaps also limited—the central concept. Quite unlike other rotating structures before or after, the house does not circle around a central point of gravity, but rather pivots at the apex of its triangular footprint in the centre of the support platform. As it only occupies a triangular slice of the circle, the remaining three quarters always have to remain empty, awaiting the building’s occasional circular motion.

Christoph Schaub is a Swiss filmmaker with several architectural documentaries to his credit, such as The travels of Santiago Calatrava (1999) and Bird’s Nest – Herzog & de Meuron in China (2008); Marcel Meili is an architect and professor at the ETH Zurich. The interview that accompanies the DVD reveals the great care with which the architect and director explored the relationship of film and architecture for this project. They were intent on making the house’s scale palpable and presenting its spaces as containers of life and narrative. Long, suggestive segments, beautifully filmed with the static camera of cinematographer Matthias Kälin, depict the villa over the course of a day in sequential montages that help to reveal its spatial depth and complexities. The noises of life in the house and the rain and birds outside alternate with the moody clarinet soundtrack by Michel Seigner (played by Hermann Bühler) and the voice-over with Lidia Invernizzi recollections, which the film seeks to illustrate. Late in the evening, for instance, the large dining table shows traces and leftovers from a casual dinner party. A couple of actors in period costume calmly inhabit the villa’s spaces in the background, pensive and melancholic, perhaps in anticipation of darker days to come on the eve of the Second World War.

Dietrich Neumann
Brown University
Providence, RI – USA

The film is available online.