Weathered concrete shapes peer out from among dense Italian pines in Dom French and Andy Tye’s photograph of Giuseppe Perugini's and Uga de Plaisant's mysterious Casa Sperimentale
Fregene wasn’t always a resort; in fact, until the 20th century it didn’t really have a beach, starting life in the 3rd century BC as a small port for nearby Rome. In 1666, Clement IX planted a pine forest on its shores to help soak up the silt from the Tiber’s mouth, but it was Mussolini’s epic drainage project in the 1920s that transformed this marshy coastline. By the 1960s, Fregene was a playground for Rome’s bohemians and elite – Fellini hosted Pasolini and Mastroianni among others at his villa.
Two such bohos were architect couple Giuseppe Perugini and Uga de Plaisant. Their Casa Sperimentale, a strange concrete structure nestled in the pine groves, was a conceptual ‘treehouse’ raising questions about what architecture is and the nature of habitation. Built in-situ over the 1970s as a summer house, it is still owned by the creators’ architect son – abandoned, overgrown and definitively unfinished.
Dom French and Andy Tye were asked to photograph the building as part of a project by the Bartlett’s Sabine Storp and Patrik Webers to digitally document its current state. Clambering in, around and about it for three days, French says it was ‘extraordinary,’ unlike any commission they’d done: ‘It doesn’t really make sense inside or out but there’s clearly conceptual rigour. It has no living spaces to speak of, as it was designed part-open to the elements.’ Its condition has made it host to new guests – graffiti artists, influencers and ravers, who seem to align with its sublime decay. Has it ever been squatted? ‘Squatted?’ he says. ‘Technically, there isn’t really anywhere to squat in…’