A house for Vitruvius

Santiago Miret

A house for Vitruvius

According to Rudolf Wittkower, Andrea Palladio had develop a generative project system that
allowed him to design his villas based on a nine square grid1. The homogeneous space that
resulted from Palladios project system was not revolutionary, but the way of producing family
variations was something completely new. Thus, Palladio was inaugurating the single family home
topic in the discipline and also he was inventing the heuristic project. This is, a project able to
become different shapes and forms according to a variety of needs and programs.

1. The generative diagrams of Andrea Palladio. Source WITTKOWER, Rudolf. 1949. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism
(London The Warburg Institute).

In 1947, Collin Rowe writes his famous essay "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa" where he
compares the Palladian Villa Malcontenta with Le Corbusiers Villa Stein2. In both cases Rowe
identifies the importance in mathematics from each house. Nevertheless, Le Corbusier presented a
much less structured approach than the one exposed in the Palladian grid, he never could escape
from the configurations of the classical. Palladio was presenting a rigid mathematical composition
looking for the idealization of repetition, mean while Le Corbusier develop a fluid mathematical
composition towards the idealization of functionality. Function was never present as a generative
tool for Palladio. His concerns were attached to homogeneity and a reconfiguration of harmony
and proportion. Instead of looking for symmetry as proportion (like the Greeks a long time before
1
2

WITTKOWER, Rudolf. 1949. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: The Warburg Institute).
ROWE, Collin. 1947. "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa" in Architectural Review.
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A house for Vitruvius

Santiago Miret

him) Palladio was interested in a kind of compositional model that could make Classical
configurations much more flexible an easy to remember. In fact his work presented the basis for
the Beaux Arts model of composition highly influenced by Claude Perrault and his redrawn orders
from around the 1660s.

2. Palladios Villa malcontenta and le Corbusiers Villa Stein comparison according to Rowes article. Source:
https://parolenonnelvuoto.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/coerenza-metrica/

Almost forty years after Rowes influential essay, Peter Eisenman published his controversial article
"The End of the Classical" where he links directly the Modern with the Classical3. Concluding the
thesis started by Rowe, where he states the impossibility of the Modernity to break free from the
technique and thinking configurations from the Classic era. In this sense, Eisenmans project
experimentations developed with his "Houses" are in the quest to free architecture (and
specifically the house topic) from the attachments that the moderns could not escape from. Both
the Cartesian geometry and the architecture elements significations are Eisenmans interest and
this is what he criticizes through his projects. Eisenman was searching for a process-based
syntactic braking of the Cartesian order towards an anti-functionalist procedure.

3. House VI, Peter Eisenman. Source: DAVIDSON, Cynthia. 2006. Tracing Eisenman (Nueva York: Rizzoli).

EISENMAN, Peter. 1984. The End of the Classical in Perspecta N21 (Cambrige: The MIT Press).
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A house for Vitruvius

Santiago Miret

Today, thirty years from Eisenmans paradigmatic article, the discipline is still stranded. Not to the
metaphysical conditions inherited from the Classical, neither to the rigid project structures, not to
the sign of architectural semantics. The housing architecture appears today attached to the habitat
devices. The habitat devices are those architectonic configurations that are in the search of
satisfying everyday activities. Nevertheless, these devices are frozen, motionless configurations
which were developed with the objective to produce immediate responses and because of
convenience they have remain unaffected through decades. In this sense, today habitat activities
are doomed to develop in places that were not intended for them. Bedrooms, dining-rooms,
bathrooms, kitchens; all devices that do not respond to contemporary needs. But there are also
other devices such as structure, facade systems, borders, circulation, among others that limit the
operability of the author architect.

4. Historical process for the project "A house for Vitruvis". Santiago Miret, Melisa Brieva, Federico Menichetti. 2015. Source:
http://www.santiagomiret.com/

All things consider, the project system developed in "A house for Vitruvius" is in the search of
focusing on how activities are combined in order to constitute new activities, or chained activities.
First, a basic activity grid (eating, washing, playing, sleeping, cooking) is combined to constitute
composed activities, then they will be combined in complex activities.
DEGREE 0

DEGREE 1

DEGREE 2

(line)

(surface)

(volume)

Chained

Composed

Complex

activities

activities

activities

A house for Vitruvius

Santiago Miret

5. Stochastic algorithm for selection of activities in degree 0, 1 and 2. Santiago Miret, Melisa Brieva, Federico Menichetti. 2015.

6. Actualization process. Santiago Miret, Melisa Brieva, Federico Menichetti. 2015. Source: http://www.santiagomiret.com/

The diagram emerges from the stochastic test of the activities variability, in this sense it does not
focuses on specific functionality but on the possibility of relationship between activities. Then, the
emergent diagram is adjusted to a tectonic and a way of appear (actualization of the diagram). The
objective is to build an overcome critic of the rigid classic structure (Palladio), the restricted
functionalist focus of the modernists (Le Corbusier) and the syntactic post-modern critic
(Eisenman) in order to produce a project for the contemporary house that responds to the
exigencies of the Vitruvius triad (Utilitas, Firmitas, Venustas) and, at the same time, realizes the
habitat modes that results from the contemporary activities of living.

A house for Vitruvius

Santiago Miret

7_ Interior views. Santiago Miret, Melisa Brieva, Federico Menichetti. 2015. Source: http://www.santiagomiret.com/

8_ Exterior views. Santiago Miret, Melisa Brieva, Federico Menichetti. 2015. Source: http://www.santiagomiret.com/