There was the contradiction. The bigger, more "blank" and unornamented the building, the more you tend to pay attention to elements like light. And light is architecture's dance partner.

Back to the Italian hillside, where this private ellipse house glares out at the shy clutch of pines. "Is it arrogant? Is it vacuous?" Matt asks us.

True, you'd have to be sedated or have an ego the size of Trump to be comfortable moving through all that concrete mass and tension. But you could also be an endless daydreamer and be happy here. The view of the sky and the changing light and shadow on the interior are anything but arrogant. Despite the grand thickness, the obvious exercise in math and shape, the building plays with light. It functions as observatory. It makes slides of the moon. It considers the Earth's place in the universe.

Cardillo, a 36-year-old architect from Rome, has always played with mass and volume, and I suspect he has always been fascinated with light. His first design was for an aquarium; the fish, one might say, had little to do with it, though water's refractory qualities must have.

Is this house arrogant? I'd say it could be justifiably accused. You could argue Cardillo is just being Italian, like Berlusconi's double-breasted suit or the penetrating hood of a Ferrari. Or like a futurist, the original version: The futurists of early 20th-century Italy, with their muscular forms and full-chested energy, are his mass-loving ancestors. Forget the fact (if you remember) that futurism had a certain affinity with fascism. Just think of the aesthetic: As with futurism, there is something very organic, unstatic, dynamic, and male about this house. The house has the swagger of a concrete bull. In the living room area, the ceiling bellies down the span of the room until it narrows into an oblong and penetrates the groove of the window. Certainly that's intentional, as opposed to "meeting" or "intersecting."

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