The Villa as Paradigm Author(s): James Ackerman Source: Perspecta, Vol. 22, Paradigms of Architecture (1986), pp.

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10

The Villa as Paradigm James Ackerman

1
Roman relief showing town and suburban villa, Avezzano, Italy

Introduction

A villa is a building in the country-or at least outside the city - designed for its owner'senjoymentand relaxation.Though a villa may also serve as the center of an agriculturalenterprise,the pleasurefactor is what essentially distinguishesthis kind of residencefrom the farmhouse. Similarly, a villa estate differs from the farm.' The farmhousetends to be simple in structure and to perpetuateformal solutions that do not requirethe interventionof a designer. The villa, typically the productof an architect'simagination,asserts its modernity. Since it was first fixed by the patriciansof ancientRome, the basic programof the villa has remainedunchangedfor more than two thousandyears. The villa is therefore unique as a paradigm;other architectural types- the palace, the place of worship, the factory-have changed in form and purpose as the role of the ruler, the characterof the have liturgy,the natureof manufacture and often changed, frequently radically.The villa has remainedsubstantiallythe same because it fulfills a need that never alters. Because it is not materialbut psychological and ideological, this need is not subjectto the influences of evolving societies and

technologies. The villa accommodatesa fantasy impervious to reality. The villa cannot be understoodapartfrom the city; it exists not to fulfill autonomous functions but as the antithesisto urban values and accommodations,and its economic situation is that of a satellite (fig. 1). The villa may be built and supportedwith monetary surplusesgeneratedby urban commerce and industry;or, when it is sustained by agriculture,the villa may be justified by urbancenters' need for the surplus it will produce. Consequentlythe fate of the villa has been intimatelytied to that of the city; villa culturehas thrivedin periods of metropolitangrowth (as was true in ancientRome, eighteenth-andnineteenthcentury Britain, and the twentiethcentury throughoutthe West) and has declined with urbandecline - indeed, to the point of extinction as urbanlife witheredfrom the fifth to the eleventh century in the West. But this generalizationis invalid for two moments in Westernhistory: the apogee of the republican city-statein classical Greece and the communes of central Europe and Italy in the period 1000-1300. Perhapsin these moments of communalidealism those whom the political institutionsmost benefitedfelt no need to escape the city; or it may be that life in the country was still too rugged and unsafe for anyone not raised to endureits rigors.

As satellites, villas have not always been near the cities on which they depended. Some colonial agriculturalcenters-such as those in Gaul, Britain, and Africa in Roman times and in the southernUnited States in times -were established pre-Revolutionary in areas almost devoid of urbandevelopment and became in themselves industrial and culturalcenters, importingthe values of urbanculture. They often grew to be large in scale, and their dependenceon the institution of slavery was due in partto their isolation. I shall exclude from what follows examples designed for rulers. While only persons of wealth, and usually of prestige and power, have been able to afford a villa (at least until the nineteenthcentury), the idea of a country dwelling is a bourgeois concept, responding to the perceived needs of the city dweller. The villas of kings and princes, built and supportedby public wealth, are essentially hybrids, rooted in bourgeois ideology but, by virtue of often unlimited economic means and the symbolic andrepresentationalrequirementsof supremepower, demanding a scale and an elegance in some degree antitheticalto the concept. The villa of the EmperorHadrianat Tivoli is the paradigmof this hybrid form.

11

The Ideology of the Villa

12

These and other prolific periods in villa dehistory were also markedby a literature voted to the design and improvement of villas and their gardens- an equally rich Because literatureis a primaryform expres- source for the interpretation of the myth. the of the villa in The rather muddled sing myths, ideology prescriptionsof ancient is reinforced authors stimulated a every epoch richly by poetry particularinventiveand prose. Indeed, literaryworks have not ness in treatise writers of the Renaissance (Palladio immediately comes to mind). The merely reflected the villa cultureof their time; they have promotedvilla concepts de- publicationin Englandof books on the villa from the early eighteenthto the midveloped in later times. nineteenthcentury was literally an industry in itself, and there were those for whom it Major revivals of the villa from that of the fifteenth century in Italy to Le Corbusier was a primaryvocation. In America, from have been explicitly justified by referenceto the time of The Horticulturalistin the the Roman writers of the late Republic and 1830s to Sunset Magazine, House and Garearly Empire-Cato, Varro,Virgil, Horace, den, and House Beautiful in the mid- and I use "ideology" not in the currentcollolater twentiethcentury, instructionin the Pliny the Younger,Vitruvius, and others. Each villa revival has been accompaniedby nurtureof the suburbanvilla has attracteda quial sense, to designate a strongly held a revival of villa literature: in the fifteenth conviction, but ratheras referringto a large public. concept or myth so firmly rooted in the century that of Poliziano and Bembo; in unconscious that it is held as an incontroPaintingalso bolsters the ideology. In Pomeighteenth-centuryEnglandthat of vertible truth. Marxists interpretideology in Shaftesbury,James Thompson, Pope, and peiian and other Campanianvillas the walls this sense as the means by which the domi- ultimately the early novel (the writings of were often decoratedwith ideal gardenand nant class reinforces andjustifies the social villa scenes; it is chiefly from this source Jane Austen seem obsessed with the propand economic structureand its privileged of the seaerty and status problems of urban-oriented that we know of the appearance side pleasure residences of the type called Amerposition within it while obscuringits moticountry life); in nineteenth-century vation from itself and others. In these terms ica, that of the Transcendentalists, villa marittima. Tapestriesand wall paintHenry the villa is a paradigm,not only of architec- James, and Edith Wharton. ings in late-medievalcountry castles but of it is a or ture, ideology; myth fantasy depicted the delights of country life, anticiover the course of millenthroughwhich, pating the scenes of social gatherings, of whose is music parties, and outings on the walls of nia, persons position privilege rooted in urbancommerce and industry

Today, as in the past, the farmerand the peasant, whetherpoor and oppressedor rich and independent, do not as a rule regard country life as an idyllic state;they accept it as a necessary and, more often than not, somewhat antipatheticcondition. In the folklore of all ages the country dweller longs- though possibly with some misgivings- for the stimulationand comforts of city life. The city dweller, on the other hand, has typically idealized country life and has sought to acquirea propertyfrom which it might be enjoyed if he could afford it. This impulse is generatedby psychological ratherthan utilitarianneeds; it is quintessentiallyideological.2

have been able to expropriateruralland often requiringthe care of a laboringclass or of slaves for the realizationof the myth.

2 Fresco of a pleasure villa from Villa Barbaro, Masir, Italy, by Paolo Veronese 3 "Badminton" by Antonio Canaletto

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villas (fig. 2). Eighteenth-century Palladian England pioneeredin a new genre of paintthe ing, portraitof the country house; its was stimulatedby the visit of the popularity Venetiantopographicalpainter distinguished Canaletto (fig. 3). Turnergot his startas a in specialist this genre which, though it admittedlygave prominenceto the great countryhouses of the landed aristocracy, musthave promotedbourgeois idealization of countrylife. classical landscape Seventeenth-century that of Claude particularly painting, rose to prominencein the followLorrain, ing centuryand fostered the aesthetic of the and the informalEnglish garpicturesque den;at the end of the centurythe first Romantic villa designers actuallytook the buildings of the Roman Camimaginary pagnain Lorrainpaintings as architectural models.The more modest ambitionsof the mid-nineteenth century suburbanvilla are reflectedin early Impressionistpaintings, especiallythose of Monet.

The content of villa ideology is rooted in the contrastof country and city, the virtues and delights of the one being presentedas the antithesesof the vices and excesses of the other. The expression is fully articulated in the literatureof RepublicanRome, where it evolves from an early protovillastage in the agriculturaltreatises of Cato and Varro into the typical matureform of Pliny the Younger'stwo lettersdescribingto a friend the pleasures of two of his numerousluxurious estates-one on the Tuscan seashore and one at Laurentiumoutside Rome. The early stage, relatedto stoicism in its ascetic and moral tone, advises the urbanman of affairs to acquire a modest farmhouseon a small country propertyand to cultivate it himself with little or no help; the labor itself is seen as purifying him of the contaminationof the city. A similarpatternof evolution is repeatedin the later provincial villa culture of ImperialRome, with its transitionfrom the simple and almost unadorned country residences of the fifteenth century in the Veneto to the elegance of Palladianvillas. The same metamorphosis is traceablein Thomas Jefferson's concept of his farm at Monticello from the modest structureof the 1770s (itself surely influenced by the early Roman writers)to the lavish estate of the early nineteenthcentury (fig. 4).

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In describing the sumptuousTuscanvilla, Pliny set the tone for later writers;the letter concludes with an encomium that clearly delineates the rural-urban antithesis. For besides the attractionswhichI have mentioned, the greatest is the relaxation and carefree luxuryof the place - there is no need for a toga, the neighborsdo not come to call, it is always quiet and peaceful-advantages as great as the healthful situation and limpidair. I alwaysfeel energetic andfit for anythingat my Tuscan villa, both mentallyand physically. I exercise my mind by study, my body by hunting. My household, too, flourishes better here than elsewhere: I have never lost a retainer [slave?], none of those I broughtup with me.3 About 1600 years later Palladiodescribes the same benefitsfrom the architect's perspective. But the villa mansion is of no less utility and comfort [than the city house], since the rest of the time [the gentleman]passes there overseeing his possessions and in improving their potential with industryand with the skill of agriculture. There also, by means of the exercise that one can get in the villa on foot or horseback, the body may more actively be made to preserve its health and robustness, and there the spirit tired of the turmoilof the city may be greatly re-

stored and consoled and may peacefully attend to the pursuit of letters and of contemplation.For this reason, the ancient sages used often to retire to such places, where they might be visited by their virtuousfriends and relatives and where there were houses, gardens,fountains and similar relaxing places . . . so that they could easily pursue that blessed life so far as it may be achieved here below.4 And Le Corbusier,writing to a client in the 1920s, stresses the importanceof the landscape setting: The inhabitantscome here because this rustic landscape goes well with countrylife. They survey their whole domainfrom the height of their jardin suspenduor from the four aspects of their fenetres en longeur. Their domestic life is insertedinto a Vergilian dream.5 The same repertoryof the benefits of villa life echoes down the centuries:the practical advantagesof farming, the healthfulness providedby the air and exercise-particularly hunting-relaxation in reading, conversationwith virtuousfriends and contemplation, and delightfulviews of the landscape.

4
Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia, 1769, Thomas Jefferson

5
Gallo-Roman Villa Anthee, near Naumur, Belgium

Social and Economic Aspects

Le Corbusier's referenceto his client's "domain" remindsus that the villa is by nature the possession of the privileged and powerful class in society, though at certaintimes in history, as in the mid-nineteenth century, the privilege has filtereddown to those of modest financialmeans. The social structure of most of the villas we are considering involves the proprietorand his guests on one stratum,servantson another,and in the case of agriculturalestablishments,farm laborers (often supervisedby bailiffs) on still a third. Whetherfree or enslaved, all of the and latter were dependenton the proprietor his estate for their subsistenceduringmost of the historical span we are considering, and they could not breakthe serf-master bond without great risk. The owner, however, had no reciprocalobligationtoward his retainers.In this respect the villa differs fundamentallyfrom the feudal castle, where the relation between the lord and his retainers was contractualand reciprocal;they providedgoods and services-including military service - and he providedprotection against common enemies. Long after the feudal system had been forced into the backgroundby a money economy and by urbancapitalism, the landed nobility resisted abandoningcountrycastles in favor of villas; this class had no reasonto develop a villa ideology until it became economically dependenton the city.

In those areas of the postmedievalwestern world in which the feudal system was most firmly established, therefore,a villa culture was slow to develop. The situationis clearly delineated in France, where the formatof country life for the privileged classes derived from the feudal chateau.The social characterof the chateaudid not change substantiallyas the monarchygained in power, drawing the aristocracyinto a dependent position at the court, where the competition for prefermentmade rustic retirementa the prestige of risky option. Furthermore, the aristocracyin Francewas such that, well into the nineteenthcentury,bourgeois proprietorsmodeled theircountryresidences on the aristocrat's chateau. Viollet-le-Duc's for designs country residences are called "chateaux"while CesarDaly's, for a lower social stratum,are called "villas."

on the economic resourcesof the city.

15

The villa frequentlyappearsin a colonial context, where a powerfulempirecontrols distant territoriesfrom whose produceit gains sufficientprofitto offset the expense and burdenof providingdefense and communications. Colonial villas tend to differ in type and scale from those in the homeland; being isolated, they must functionas units in themsocial and administrative for substitutes as often selves, serving towns. Their proprietors are, typically, ecothe on productionof nomically dependent their estates. The grandervillas on the periphery of the RomanEmpire-in Gaul, Pannonia,Africa, and the like-mostly built between the second and the fifth centuries, were more complex establishments than those on the Italianpeninsula;some, like the villa Anthee nearNaumurin of two villa falls into one Belgium (fig. 5), were small villages in Economically the themselves, containingcommunitybaths. categories: the self-sustainingagricultural The American colonies of the southernAtits for estate that yields not only produce lantic seaboardwere virtuallywithout any or own use but a surplusfor sale to urban nearby towns, so that the estates had to regional marketssufficientto sustainthe accommodateall the communalfunctions; desired mode of life; and the proprietor's as Battista Alberti villa described by Leone many included dependentsettlements,like Roman ancestors. The dwellings and their as conceived purely "per semplice diletto," a retreatand dependentfor its construcworkshopsof slaves and freedmenhave survived too selectively to permit a credible tion and maintenanceon surpluscapital of these settlements. reconstruction The ideourban centers. in earned normally and of city logical opposition country values is thus in part a responseto the dependence of the villa style of countrylife

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In the course of time colonial villas in rural territoriesoften spawnedtowns, reversing the normal dependenceof the villa on the city. The far-flungImperialvilla-settlements of Rome and the Americanplantationcenters had originally been sited in places suitable for communication,transport,and in the case of the Romanexamples, defense; as urbanization increased, these considerationsencouragedthe growthof towns, as we are remindedin the etymological linking of "villa," "village," andthe French "ville." These were not the great metropolitancenters that grew up as administrative headquarters, but more modest markettowns. In the southernUnited States the domestic architecture of these towns retained some of the openness and ruralflavor of the villa-plantationresidence. Southernplantationmansions themselves were not designed to express autonomy from the mothercountry;on the contrary, their owners, eager to affirmtheir close ties to Britain, had their carpentersbuild from plans in books recentlypublishedin London; this intentionexplains the Palladian porch added to the facade of DraytonHall near Charleston(fig. 6), which was to have had symmetricallyplaced outbuildingsconnected to the central block by Palladian quadrants.The fact that these settlershad to subduethe wildernessof a new land at great physical and financialrisk cementedtheir

attachmentto the country life and architectural tastes of the British squire. The absence of a comparablevilla development in the northernAtlanticcolonies is initially attributableto the differentsocial and political orientationof the colonists, the majorityof whom, refugees from church and class dominationat home, had not attained positions of privilege and statuson which to reflect with nostalgia. They had, furthermore,chosen an area more adapted to family farming on small freeholdproperties, and they had establisheda society in which there were no slaves, peasants, or serfs to supporta gentlemanfarmeror to maintaina pleasurevilla. The contrastbetween the northerncolonial farmerand the southernplantationowner was even greater than thatbetween Cato and Pliny the Younger;Cato, a statesman,farmedfor ideological and philosophicalreasons, while his American counterpart tilled the land to survive, with a certainCatonian(and Protestant) pride in successful crops and in the sweat they representedbut withoutthose mythic trappingsthat find expressionin the literature,art, and architectural symbolism of a properideology. Eventuallythe polarity in both the Romanand the American social and ethical attitudesbecame seeds of civil war.

The most radical mutationin the history of the villa occurredin the early nineteenth century, when the villa ideology became democratizedand accessible to the growing body of lower-middle-classcity dwellers.6 The causes were complex: the rapidgrowth of central cities at the expense of the counrail and trolley tryside; industrialization; the effects of eighteenthtransportation; century egalitariansocial philosophy; Romanticism;and others. The development was anticipatedin British villa literature of the later eighteenthand early nineteenth centuries (most effectively by JohnClaudius Loudon in GreatBritainand by Alexander JacksonDavis andAndrewJacksonDowning in the United States), which firstprovided model plans for small and inexpensive country houses; the texts accompanying these plans promotedthe elements of the traditionalmythology suited to proprietors below the rankof gentleman(fig. 7). Once the villa had been presentedas a commodity, it was a short step to its manufacture by for the open market,and anentrepreneurs other short step to its mass productionon the peripheryof great cities and ultimately of smaller ones. The garden-citymovement of the later nineteenthcentury appropriated as much as possible of villa ideology into its blurredvision of urbanand ruralvalues. Ultimately the term "villa" came to be applied to any detachedor semidetached residence in city, suburb,or countrywith

17

Style and Form

18

a little more open space aroundit than could be found in dwellings in the densely populatedstreets of the urbancore. This development,however, did not affect the evolution of the villa in its traditionalsense, except perhapsin helping to disparagethe use of the word "villa" to designatethe type. Nineteenth-centurycountry houses in the villa tradition-such as those of Scott, Richardson,Viollet-le-Duc, and Voyseywere not called villas, and in the present century Le Corbusierwas exceptional in reviving the designation.

The distinction between the farmhouseand the villa is not simply one of purposeand of program;it is rooted in differentcultures and in differentrates of evolution. Just as agriculturalpractices change more slowly than those of industryand commerce, so the farmhousechanges more slowly than the villa. Frenchhistoriansof the Annales school have called this phenomenonof gradualismthe longue duree and have opened new historicalpotentialitiesin studying its processes.7 Farmhousesin many parts of Europe today retainforms that have remainedunchangedfor millennia- though they are rapidlybeing replacedby contractors' villas and will soon be threatenedwith total extinction. The debased economic and social position of the peasant(as well as the contadino and the sharecropper) have, until recent times, kept him from altering his agriculturalmethods or the physical setting in which he lives and works; but even on the rareoccasions when he became wealthy and worldly, his sense of proprietyand pride of class led him to retain traditionalforms. The villa is quite the opposite; it seldom displays an effort on the part of the proprietor or the architectto conform to past custom; with rare exceptions it strainsto be the paradigmof the architectural avantThe rule is illustrated the celegarde. by brated milestones of modernistarchitecture:

the Ames Gatehouse, the Coonley House, the Villa Savoye at Poissy (fig. 8), the suburbanretreatsof the New York Five (fig. 9), and Venturi. Granted,Renaissancearchitects sought to revive antiquevillas, and British eighteenth-centuryvilla architects were fanatic Palladians;but in both cases the revival was a progressive statementthat explicitly rejected a prevailingstyle. There is hardly a moment in the history of architecture when villas were less innovative than other architectural types. Though urban residences have sometimes kept abreast of villas, generally they follow a more conservative tradition, even in instances where urbanand ruralresidences were designed for the same patron. The differenthousing styles are consistent with the proprietors' usual fashions of dress in the city as opposed to the country. The villa is less fixed in form than most other architectural types because the requirementsof leisure lack clear definition. But two contrastingmodels were firmly established in Roman times: the condensedcubic and the open-extended.The former was better suited to such crowdedsuburbs as Pompeii, where the line between the city house and villa was - as in the residencesof Le Corbusieror Peter Eisenman(figs. 8, 9)- not firmly drawnand to the initial

8 Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 1929-1930, Le Corbusier

9 House II (Falk House), Hardwick, Vermont, 1969, Peter Eisenman

19

10

20

settlements on the peripheryof the Empire, where considerationsof defense demanded consolidation. The compactedPompeiian form, as in the Villa dei Misteri, just outside the city walls (fig. 10), is due also to the fact that the villa had not yet gained its independencefrom urbanmodels by the first century B.C.; the vaguenessof the contemporarywriter Vitruviusin describing villas (his main point is that the orderof rooms at the entrancediffers from that of the city houses) confirmsthis suspicion. When the condensed villa faced a farmyard or a view, it tended to acquirea loggia along its facade, in Romanexamples typically framedbetween two projectingblocks or towers. This type reappearsin the small early Renaissancevilla, like the Belvedere of Innocent VIII at the Vatican,or the Farnesina in Rome (fig. 11). Tropicalforest conditions produceda variantof the cubic type in the plantationhouses of seventeenthcentury Brazil and in the eighteenth-century Caribbean,a unique veranda-surrounded block that seems not to have been exported from Europe;it found its way into the plantation-housedesign of the early-nineteenth-centuryMississippi valley, as at Home Place in Louisiana(fig. 12).8

The open villa is more congenial to the ideological engagementwith nature.It expands informally in extended asymmetrical blocks and porticoes, and in the variedprofiles of changing levels; it often grows is organicallyas the wealthy proprietor initial extend the to tempted continuously structureby adding rooms, courts, and porticoes. Pliny must have done as much, and Jefferson(who in the course of forty years never ceased to alter the shape of Monticello), as did FrankLloyd Wrightat the Taliesins (fig. 13). To fulfill its ideological mission, the villa must interactin some way with nature,and the two majortypes I have definedare roughly coordinatedwith two types of interaction. The compact-cubicvilla is often a foil to nature, standingoff from it in polar opposition; the open-extendedtype is integrative, imitatingnaturein the irregularity of its layout and profile, embracingthe ground, assuming naturalcolors and textures. A paradigmof the first is Lorenzode' Medici's villa at Poggio a Caiano, outside Florence (fig. 14). Inscribedwithin a cube, it is faced with white stucco to emphasize of trees its total polarity to the irrationality and rolling hills; to underscorethis message, it is raised on a high podiumto assure that the contact of the residentswith nature would be not intimate but removedand in perspective.9

10 Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii, Italy, first century B.c.

11
Villa Farnesina, Rome, 1509, sixteenth-century view 12 Home Place Plantation, Louisiana, 1801

13
Taliesin East, Spring Green, Wisconsin, begun 1911, Frank Lloyd Wright

12

14 Villaof Lorenzo de' Medici,Poggioa Caiano, Italy,1489 15 VillaGodi,Lonedo,Italy, 1537-1542

The white-stuccoedpodium-villabecame a major twentieth-century paradigm,notably in the Villa Savoye at Poissy (fig. 8) and in the TugendhatHouse in Bmo. Palladioalso followed this traditionin the design of his first villa, that of the Godi family in Lonedo (fig. 15), which is also sharplygeometrical in form, avoiding even window framesor moldings; there is no podium, but the entrance stairwayleads to the upperfloor (later Palladianworks are more engaged with nature-even the entirely cubic Villa Rotunda in Vicenza, which is designed to reflect the varied views and which seems to crown the hill on which it is placed). The effort to respond to natureby antithesisexplains the apparentparadoxof melding the sharplygeometrical and classical Palladian Britain (at style in early eighteenth-century Lord Burlington'svilla at Chiswick, for example) with the inventionof the informal English garden in reaction againstthe imposition of geometric orderon plant life.

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Pliny's descriptionsof extended, even sprawlingstructuresoffer a model of the more collaborativeresponse to the landscape, but the appearanceof these villas is difficult to reconstructfrom his letters;the villa at Piazza Armerinain Sicily, unearthedin recent times, providesa better opportunityto visualize this exceptionally large and lavish "organic" type (fig. 16).

den design; for the first time the centralaxis of the composition is occupied by landscaping elements- watercourses, fountains, and stairways- while the shy, cubic residential casinos are pushed to either side.

Renaissancedesigners would have been disappointedand disorientedhad they discovered that Romanvillas were not classical. Most of the ancient models (none of of villas were too Renaissance which was known priorto the discovery Designers fixed on the polarity of natureand culture of Pompeii) lacked the axial symmetry, to devise schemes in which the barriers rational integration, and proportionthat between the two were blurred;what intersupportedtheir conception of the heritage action did occur was, rather,between the of antiquity.WhetherRomanvillas, like architectureand the garden, which remany in later times, expressed their commained firmly in the artist'scontrol. The munion with natureby a richness of color formal garden of the Renaissancewas freand of texture is hardto tell even today, because of the condition of the remains. In quently complementedby a barco, or hunting park, where the wildness of nature any event, Renaissancearchitectsfrom could be accepted;the nature-art dialectic Giuliano da Sangallo throughBramante, was transferredto the contrastof wild and Raphael, and Palladiodid give the villa a tamed greenery and water. An early engrav- classical form by imposing a rule of order, number, and symmetrythat fixed the type ing of the Villa Lante in Bagnaiashows a small "wild" area in the lower right corner until the moment of naturalistdisruptionin Renaissance the eighteenth century (SebastianoSerlio, (fig. 17). In nonagricultural in his manuscriptfor a book on villas and villas, such as those of the Papalcourt in Rome, the artifices of the formal garden palaces, even classicized the peasant'shut). took precedence even over the architecture; This achievementgreatly narrowedthe distance between the two Romantypes by the Villa d'Este in Tivoli concedes all empulling the extending arms and wings of the phasis to the garden(fig. 18), while the building itself is exceptionally inexpressive open villa in symmetricalorderabouta of the Villa and bland. The architecture central block, as in the porticoedvillas Lante in Bagnaia is overwhelmedby its gar- of Palladio.

The triumphof natureover architectural form was ultimately achieved in the eighteenth century, when the fashion of the picturesqueemerged. The desire to make the real environmentlook like pictureswas stimulatedby the landscapepaintingsof Poussin, Claude Lorrain,Ruysdael, and while others, in which the architecture, in its forms, was defrequentlygeometric of to be seen as signed part the landscape and to respondto it in mood. Authorsof and landscapedebooks on architecture as Richard PayneKnight, sign-such Uvedale Price, and their heir Humphrey Repton- urged clients to build villas that borrowedfrom the landscapesomethingof its irregularity,its contrastsof light, and its shadows and textures. The asymmetriesof Gothic proved sympatheticto this aim, and the "ItalianVilla" style (fig. 7) abruptly emerged, not from any actualmodels in Italy, but from the canvasesof the French and British painterswho had workedthere villa (Schinkel'sCharlottenhof gardener's was one exception; its motives were authenticallyItalian). From this point on, a picturesque, nature-integrating spirit dominates the naturalistlineage of villa architecture-from the publicists Papworth, Loudon, andDowningthroughPhilipWebb's Red House, Shaw and Richardson,Lutyens, Aalto, Wright, the Greens, andMaybeckto Moore.

23

The View

24

In reflecting on the ways in which villas respondto the landscape, one must remember to look not only at them, but out from them. The choice of prospectis almost as subject to myth and the rule of taste as is the choice of design-I say "almost"because villa buildersare limited in the choice of land formationand floraby the natureof the particularterritoryin which they intend to settle and by the propertyavailableto them. The environs of Tivoli, west of Rome, offer paradigmatic examples of three vast villa genres of villa siting. Hadrian's extends over a low-lying escarpmentat the base of the hills thatrise out of the wooded Campagna,just barely above the level of the plain; it is a nestling villa in the lap of the hills, with views just over the treetops. The villa of QuintiliusVarusand the Renaissance Villa of the Este family are perched high on the slopes-not on the very peaks, of but high enough to gain a vast panorama the countrysideand distantmountains.A view towardthe formerfrom the terraceof the latter (fig. 19) shows both to be commanding, extrovertedvillas (the famed gardens of Villa d'Este, incidentally,are barely

visible from the villa itself: they drop away sharply, and attentionis drawnonly to the distant panorama).By contrast, Horace's "Sabine Farm" is back within the mountains on an extraordinary site suited to a a poet (fig. 20): saddle, only large enough to hold a small cubic structure,deeply embedded between two sharplyrising hills, with a valley on one side of the cross-axis and conical peaks on the other, atop one of which a village seems almost to cling (the surviving one is believed to occupy the site of its Roman predecessor). Surely the architectureof each of these four structures is designed aroundwhat can be seen from them as much as aroundwhat is done in them. The villa view that in one sense most fully illustratesthe urbanroots of the villa myth is the one that looks back on the city from a high and distantpromontoryoutside its walls; such villas once dotted the slopes of Mount Vesuvius when Pompeii flourished, and Cosimo de' Medici built one of the earliest Renaissancevillas on a man-made terraceabove Fiesole, so that in his leisure hours he could enjoy visual commandof the city he controlledpolitically.

The impact of the prospecton the conception of the villa was intensifiedin eighteenth-century Englandwhen the vogue for the informal gardenwas extendedto embrace the entire agricultural landscape. The effect was achievedby removingwalls, hedges, and fences so that the lawn and planted trees would merge imperceptibly into pastureand bosc. The innovationwas due not merely to a change of taste, as its promotersmade it out to be, but also to a radical change in agricultural economy and from the Acts of Enclosociety resulting sure, which wiped out the ancientcommon pasturesand peasanttillage, as well as many villages on the great estates, and concentrateddevelopmentof the entire landscape in the hands of the landowners. Extended fields with cattle and haystacks could now become embellishmentsof a pastoralelegy.

19 View from Villa d'Este, Tivoli, Italy, 1565

20

Horace's Sabine Farm, Tivoli, Italy, first century

25

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22

Survival or Revival?

26

Renaissancevilla architects,intentas they were on reviving the ancientvillas, did not know of any models on which to base their designs and were forced to dependentirely on the meager literary sources.'?Of these, Vitruviuswas almost no help, and Pliny's descriptions, though ample, were useful only for projectsof great lavishness, such as Raphael'sdesign for Villa Madamain Rome (about which he wrote a letter filled with Plinian phrases). In spite of this lack, archaeologicalevidence continuesto mount of Roman villas that anticipatedRenaissance and later types. Since a revival of these ancient forms cannot have occurred, they must somehow or otherhave survived over the interveningcenturiesthroughlinks that have now almost entirely vanished. The persistence of the compact-cubictype may not be especially significant, since within the rationalistorientationof Mediterranean culture it is one self-evident architectural solution to the problem of designing a freestanding structure.The U-shapedvilla, with projectingblocks framinga centralloggia, however, is specific enough in form to arouse curiosity about how it traveledfrom the late Roman empire to the fifteenthcentury and beyond. Whateverthe answer, it is more likely to be in the realm of folkways than of architectural style. In a characteristic Roman provincialexample, at Mayen in GermanGaul (fig. 21), the loggia with extended wings was added in the fourth

century to an earlierblock. The type was preserved in a sixth-centuryvilla of Theodoric in Galeata(fig. 22), not far from Ravenna, and emerges again in the typical Venetian-Byzantine palace, from which it passes back into a type of early Renaissance villa that achieves a refinedform in BaldassarePeruzzi'sVilla Farnesinain Rome (fig. 11). Anothervilla (fig. 23), only in recently excavated at Montmaurin the French part of Gaul, anticipatedthe of entrancewayflankedwith two quadrants a circle in a style reinventedby Palladiofor such projects as the Villa Badoer at Fratta Pol6sine (fig. 24) and passing from there into innumerablehouses and villas in Europe and America.

21 Gallo-Roman villa, Mayen, Rhineland, first to fourth centuries 22 Villa of Theodoric, reconstruction, Galeata near Ravenna, Italy, sixth century 23 Gallo-Roman villa, Montmaurin, France, fourth century
24

Villa Badoer, Fratta Polesine, Italy, after 1556, Andrea Palladio

27

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Massachusetts, 1881, H H Richardson 28 Villa Medici, Cafaggiolo, Italy, ca1450

27

28 28

The Villa as Sign

The villa inevitablyexpresses the mythology thatcauses it to be built: the attraction to nature,whetherstated in engagementor in cool distance;the dialectic natureand cultureor artifice;the prerogativesof privilege and power;and national, regional or class pride. The signifiers range from the sitingand form of the building(s) as a whole to individualdetails and characteristics. Since signs and symbols convey meaningonly to those who know what they signify,they are usually chosen from past architectural usage or, as occasionally happens, are importedfrom other types of like the ship railings of Le construction, Corbusier. Intimate engagementwith natureis signifiedby a site and design that permitthe villa to nestle and to extend out into its surroundings, by assymmetricaland open design, colors reflectingthe setting, and and varied textures. Distancing from natural the setting, on the other hand, is signified by an overall compact, cubic form (often with a podiumor similar device to elevate the living quartersfrom the earth), studied and emphasison plane surfaces proportions, of whiteor of a light color thatdisguise the

natureof the materials.Ambiguitytoward these two poles can also be expressed, as occurs in FrankLloyd Wright'sKaufmann house at Bear Run (fig. 25), which poses a dialogue between the nature-affirming effects of fieldstone hearth, chimneys, and floors laid in irregularslabs linking the interior and exterior, and the contrasting coolness of the carefully formed white concrete balconies. The comparablecombination of wood and stucco of Aalto's Villa Mairea serves the same purpose. The dialectic natureand artifice is expressed in the paradoxicalimitationof naturalforms in man-madeelements. Rustication, adopted from a small numberof Roman buildings of the firstcentury,was a Renaissance device that aimed to give building blocks the appearanceof "living" stone as distinct from ashlarmasonryof finely finished surfaces. While late medieval and early Renaissance rusticationimplied a military and public function, the symbolization evolved in the sixteenth centuryto conform with the rustic implicationsof the term, and rustic gates, walls, and portals, often with the rusticity created in terracotta, were increasingly used for villas. Sebastiano Serlio, taking up the idea from Giulio Romano, made much of combining rustic and smooth treatmentsas a way of dramatizing the antithesis of the naturaland the artificial (fig. 26). The fountain-grotto of

villa gardens was a companionmotif, in which such irregularnaturalphenomenaas stalactites were reproducedin a variety of plastic materialsto which naturalobjects-such as shells and fossils-were added. H H Richardsonused rusticationof a vigorous new kind, not intendingparticularly to refer to the Renaissance;this is most vividly evident in the Ames Gate Lodge at North Easton (fig. 27) and the Payne house in Waltham.He was also one of the many proponentsof shingles as a nature-invokingsurface. The expression of power and class aspiration is evident in the firstvillas of the Renaissance, which took over the vocabularyof the medieval feudal castle-towers, irregular blocks, battlements, and crenellations. One such is the Medici villa at Cafaggiolo (fig. 28). Even a villa as modernas Lorenzo de'Medici's Poggio a Caiano (fig. 14) has a walled enceinte with four cornertowers. The equally avant-garde early-sixteenthcentury Villa Giustinianat Roncade, near Venice, was given a moat and drawbridge. Castles returnedto favor in the eighteenth and the century in the work of Vanbrugh early Scottish designs of RobertAdam.

29

Conclusion

30

While the adoptionof Georgianarchitectural symbols in southernplantationhouses affirmedthe link of the colonists with their taste for pre-Imperial homeland, Jefferson's Roman and Palladianreferenceswas intended to express republicanas againstaristocraticideals. In nineteenth-century Newport the villas of the excessively rich again assumed aristocratic,even regal pretensions. Regionalism informs the symbolism of the Florentinevillas of the Medici dukedomin the sixteenth century;of the British villas of Scott, Voysey, and Lutyens;and more recently of the Californiaschool. Palladio was extraordinarily prolific in devising and combining villa messages. While his geometric and axial forms and white surfaces express a sophisticatedcontrastto the organic world, the compositionoften reaches out into the surroundings.Though his domes and temple-frontfacades are urbane and calculatedto imply the patrons' exalted social statusby bringingthe auraof classical learning and religious traditionto the villa, he could join them to common

barnyardelements. At the villas Barbaroat Maser, Emo at Fanzolo (fig. 29), and elsewhere, he adaptedthe loggias flankingthe temple-frontfrom barchesse, traditionalagriculturalsheds of the Venetianmainland designed to store farm machineryand implements, produce, and cattle. Theirrole in the Palladianvillas was probablynot fully utilitarian;the patronswould not have supportedthe odors and the noise. Barchesse do not appearat the Villa Rotonda villa near Vicenza because it is a suburban with no farm functions;here Palladioplaced the temple-fronton all four faces of a domed cube to underscorethe focal position of the hilltop site in relationto the surroundingviews. Signification has become problematicin contemporaryvilla design because of the absence of clear purposeand confidencein privilege on the part of the exceptionally wealthy individualswho can affordto build them. This circumstanceleaves the designer free to devise an expressionthat will best serve the maker'simage as an artistand best define a position in the dialectic of modernism versus antimodernism.The semantic function of the returnof elements of the vocabularyof antiquityin this dialectic is less to evoke the classical traditionand its historical implicationthan to underscorethe antimodernistposition.

The paradigmof the villa poses a cultural paradox. If the farmhouseresists change because agricultureand farm cultureevolve slowly, we should expect the villa to remain even more convention-bound.It is supremely conservativesocially, being a luxury commodity availableonly to persons of privilege and power, and the ideology that sustains the type has stayedunchanged over millennia. Yet the mythicalnatureof villa ideology liberatesthe type from concrete restraintsof utility and productivity and makes it ideally suited to the creative aspirationsof patronand architect.This creativity,however, is essentiallylimited to the sphere of taste. In this respectthe design of villas parallelsthatof fashions in apparel, which has been similarlymotivated by an unchangingmythology since surplus wealth first offered its temptations.

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29 29 Villa Emo, Fanzolo, Italy, 1564, Andrea Palladio

31