Patronage as Collaboration. Dante Bini’s Villas in Sardinia

In 1970 on the rugged coast of Costa Paradiso on the Italian island of Sardinia, the encounter between one of the most renowned Italian film directors, Michelangelo Antonioni, and an architect with an engineering vision, Dante Bini, produced a holiday villa that was defined by Rem Koolhaas as one of the best buildings of the last hundred years. The reason for its exceptionality can be understood at first glance by merely considering its shape, a semi-sphere, resulting from inflating concrete and free of any internal structural partitions, which was why it was renamed La Cupola (The Dome). This article’s main argument is that the collaboration between Antonioni and Bini was instrumental in the creation of La Cupola and led to a surprising hybridization of architectural language within and beyond this building. La Cupola is the starting point to tell the story of the other villas designed and built by the same architect, in the same years, in the same region and exactly by means of Antonioni’s patronage. These can be understood in fact as the products of specific economic and political conditions that had an impact on architectural production in post-war Italy.