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 agri-
culturalenterprise,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 archi-
tect'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
liturgy,the natureof manufacturehave
changed, frequentlyand often 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 eco-
nomic 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 sus-
tained 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-andnineteenth-
century Britain, and the twentiethcentury
throughoutthe West) and has declined with
urbandecline - indeed, to the point of ex-
tinction 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 republi-
can 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 11
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
pre-Revolutionarytimes -were established
in areas almost devoid of urbandevelop-
ment and became in themselves industrial
and culturalcenters, importingthe values of
urbanculture. They often grew to be large
in scale, and their dependenceon the in-
stitution 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, re-
sponding 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 andrepre-
sentationalrequirementsof 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.
 The Ideology of the Villa

12 Today, as in the past, the farmerand the have been able to expropriateruralland These and other prolific periods in villa
peasant, whetherpoor and oppressedor rich often requiringthe care of a laboringclass history were also markedby a literaturede-
and independent, do not as a rule regard or of slaves for the realizationof the myth. voted to the design and improvementof
country life as an idyllic state;they accept villas and their gardens- an equally rich
it as a necessary and, more often than not, Because literatureis a primaryform expres- source for the interpretationof the myth.
somewhat antipatheticcondition. In the sing myths, the ideology of the villa in The rathermuddledprescriptionsof ancient
folklore of all ages the country dweller is
every epoch richly reinforced by poetry authorsstimulateda particularinventive-
longs- though possibly with some misgiv- and prose. Indeed, literaryworks have not ness in treatise writers of the Renaissance
ings- for the stimulationand comforts of merely reflected the villa cultureof their (Palladio immediately comes to mind). The
city life. The city dweller, on the other time; they have promotedvilla concepts de- publicationin Englandof books on the
hand, has typically idealized country life veloped in later times. villa from the early eighteenthto the mid-
and has sought to acquirea propertyfrom nineteenthcentury was literally an industry
which it might be enjoyed if he could afford Major revivals of the villa from that of the in itself, and there were those for whom it
it. This impulse is generatedby psycho- fifteenth century in Italy to Le Corbusier was a primaryvocation. In America, from
logical ratherthan utilitarianneeds; it is have been explicitly justified by referenceto the time of The Horticulturalistin the
quintessentiallyideological.2 the Roman writers of the late Republic and 1830s to Sunset Magazine, House and Gar-
early Empire-Cato, Varro,Virgil, Horace, den, and House Beautiful in the mid- and
I use "ideology" not in the currentcollo- Pliny the Younger,Vitruvius, and others. later twentiethcentury, instructionin the
quial sense, to designate a strongly held Each villa revival has been accompaniedby nurtureof the suburbanvilla has attracteda
conviction, but ratheras referringto a a revival of villa literature:in the fifteenth large public.
concept or myth so firmly rooted in the century that of Poliziano and Bembo; in
unconscious that it is held as an incontro- eighteenth-centuryEnglandthat of Paintingalso bolsters the ideology. In Pom-
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 Jane Austen seem obsessed with the prop- villa scenes; it is chiefly from this source
and economic structureand its privileged erty and status problems of urban-oriented that we know of the appearanceof the sea-
position within it while obscuringits moti- country life); in nineteenth-centuryAmer- side pleasure residences of the type called
vation from itself and others. In these terms ica, that of the Transcendentalists,Henry villa marittima. Tapestriesand wall paint-
the villa is a paradigm,not only of architec- James, and Edith Wharton. ings in late-medievalcountry castles
ture, but of ideology; it is a or
myth fantasy depicted the delights of country life, antici-
throughwhich, over the course of millen- pating the scenes of social gatherings,
nia, persons whose of
position privilege is music parties, and outings on the walls of
rooted in urbancommerce and industry

Palladianvillas (fig. 2). Eighteenth-century
Englandpioneeredin a new genre of paint-
ing, the portraitof the country house; its
popularitywas stimulatedby the visit of the
distinguishedVenetiantopographicalpainter
Canaletto(fig. 3). Turnergot his startas a
specialistin this genre which, though it ad-
mittedlygave prominenceto the great
countryhouses of the landed aristocracy,
musthave promotedbourgeois idealization
of countrylife.
Seventeenth-century classical landscape
painting, particularlythat of Claude
Lorrain,rose to prominencein the follow-
ing centuryand fostered the aesthetic of the
picturesqueand the informalEnglish gar-
den;at the end of the centurythe first
Romanticvilla designers actuallytook the
imaginarybuildings of the Roman Cam-
pagnain Lorrainpaintings as architectural
models.The more modest ambitionsof the
mid-nineteenthcentury suburbanvilla are
reflectedin early Impressionistpaintings,
especiallythose of Monet.
2
Fresco of a pleasure villa
from Villa Barbaro, Masir,
Italy, by Paolo Veronese
3
"Badminton" by Antonio
Canaletto
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The content of villa ideology is rooted in 13
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 numerouslux-
urious 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 con-
taminationof the city. A similarpatternof
evolution is repeatedin the later provincial
villa culture of ImperialRome, with its
transitionfrom the simple and almost un-
adorned country residences of the fifteenth
century in the Veneto to the elegance of
Palladianvillas. The same metamorphosisis
traceablein Thomas Jefferson'sconcept of
his farm at Monticello from the modest
structureof the 1770s (itself surely influ-
enced by the early Roman writers)to the
lavish estate of the early nineteenthcen-
tury (fig. 4).
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14 In describing the sumptuousTuscanvilla, stored and consoled and may peacefully

Pliny set the tone for later writers;the letter attend to the pursuit of letters and of con-
concludes with an encomium that clearly templation.For this reason, the ancient
delineates the rural-urbanantithesis. sages used often to retire to such places,
where they might be visited by their vir-
For besides the attractionswhichI have tuousfriends and relatives and where there
mentioned, the greatest is the relaxation were houses, gardens,fountains and simi-
and carefree luxuryof the place - there is lar relaxing places . . . so that they could
no need for a toga, the neighborsdo not easily pursue that blessed life so far as it
come to call, it is always quiet and peace- may be achieved here below.4
ful-advantages as great as the healthful
situation and limpidair. I alwaysfeel ener- And Le Corbusier,writing to a client in the
getic andfit for anythingat my Tuscan 1920s, stresses the importanceof the land-
villa, both mentallyand physically. I exer- scape setting:
cise my mind by study, my body by hunt-
ing. My household, too, flourishes better The inhabitantscome here because this
here than elsewhere: I have never lost a re- rustic landscape goes well with countrylife.
tainer [slave?], none of those I broughtup They survey their whole domainfrom the
with me.3 height of their jardin suspenduor from the
four aspects of their fenetres en longeur.
About 1600 years later Palladiodescribes Their domestic life is insertedinto a Ver-
the same benefitsfrom the architect's gilian dream.5
perspective.
The same repertoryof the benefits of villa
But the villa mansion is of no less utility life echoes down the centuries:the practical
and comfort [than the city house], since the advantagesof farming, the healthfulness
rest of the time [the gentleman]passes providedby the air and exercise-par-
there overseeing his possessions and in im- ticularly hunting-relaxation in reading,
proving their potential with industryand conversationwith virtuousfriends and
with the skill of agriculture. There also, by contemplation, and delightfulviews of
means of the exercise that one can get in the landscape.
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-
 4 5
Monticello, Charlottesville,
Virginia, 1769, Thomas
Jefferson
Social and Economic Aspects
Le Corbusier'sreferenceto his client's "do-
main" remindsus that the villa is by nature
the possession of the privileged and power-
ful class in society, though at certaintimes
in history, as in the mid-nineteenthcentury,
the privilege has filtereddown to those of
modest financialmeans. The social struc-
ture 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 la-
borers (often supervisedby bailiffs) on still
a third. Whetherfree or enslaved, all of the
latter were dependenton the proprietorand
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, how-
ever, had no reciprocalobligationtoward
his retainers.In this respect the villa differs
fundamentallyfrom the feudal castle, where
the relation between the lord and his re-
tainers was contractualand reciprocal;they
providedgoods and services-including
military service - and he providedprotec-
tion against common enemies. Long after
the feudal system had been forced into the
backgroundby a money economy and by
urbancapitalism, the landed nobility re-
sisted abandoningcountrycastles in favor
of villas; this class had no reasonto develop
a villa ideology until it became economi-
cally dependenton the city.
Gallo-Roman Villa Anthee,
near Naumur, Belgium
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 de-
rived from the feudal chateau.The social
characterof the chateaudid not change sub-
stantiallyas the monarchygained in power,
drawing the aristocracyinto a dependent
position at the court, where the competition
for prefermentmade rustic retirementa
risky option. Furthermore,the prestige of
the aristocracyin Francewas such that,
well into the nineteenthcentury,bourgeois
proprietorsmodeled theircountryresidences
on the aristocrat'schateau. Viollet-le-Duc's
designs for country residences are called
"chateaux"while CesarDaly's, for a lower
social stratum,are called "villas."
Economically the villa falls into one of two
categories: the self-sustainingagricultural
estate that yields not only produce for its
own use but a surplusfor sale to urban or
regional marketssufficientto sustainthe
proprietor'sdesired mode of life; and the
villa described by Leone Battista Alberti as many included dependentsettlements,like
"per semplice diletto," conceived purely
a retreatand dependentfor its construc-
tion and maintenanceon surpluscapital
normally earned in urban centers. The ideo- reconstruction of these settlements.
of
logical opposition country and city
values is thus in part a responseto the de-
pendence of the villa style of countrylife
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 com-
munications. Colonial villas tend to differ
in type and scale from those in the home-
land; being isolated, they must functionas
social and administrativeunits in them-
selves, often serving as substitutesfor
towns. Their proprietorsare, typically, eco-
nomically dependenton the productionof
their estates. The grandervillas on the pe-
riphery of the RomanEmpire-in Gaul,
Pannonia,Africa, and the like-mostly
built between the second and the fifth cen-
turies, were more complex establishments
than those on the Italianpeninsula;some,
like the villa Anthee nearNaumurin
Belgium (fig. 5), were small villages in
themselves, containingcommunitybaths.
The American colonies of the southernAt-
lantic seaboardwere virtuallywithout any
nearby towns, so that the estates had to
accommodateall the communalfunctions;
as their Roman ancestors. The dwellings and
workshopsof slaves and freedmenhave sur-
vived too selectively to permit a credible
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6 7
Drayton Hall, Charleston, "Villa in the Italian Style,"
North Carolina from The Architecture of
CountryHouses, 1850, by
Andrew Jackson Downing
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 Americanplantationcen-
ters had originally been sited in places
suitable for communication,transport,and
in the case of the Romanexamples, de-
fense; as urbanizationincreased, these
considerationsencouragedthe growthof
towns, as we are remindedin the etymo-
logical linking of "villa," "village," andthe
French "ville." These were not the great
metropolitancenters that grew up as admin-
istrative headquarters,but more modest
markettowns. In the southernUnited States
the domestic architectureof these towns re-
tained 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 Lon-
don; this intentionexplains the Palladian
porch added to the facade of DraytonHall
near Charleston(fig. 6), which was to have
had symmetricallyplaced outbuildingscon-
nected 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 architec-
tural tastes of the British squire. The
absence of a comparablevilla development
in the northernAtlanticcolonies is initially
attributableto the differentsocial and po-
litical orientationof the colonists, the
majorityof whom, refugees from church
and class dominationat home, had not at-
tained positions of privilege and statuson
which to reflect with nostalgia. They had,
furthermore,chosen an area more adapted
to family farming on small freeholdproper-
ties, and they had establisheda society in
which there were no slaves, peasants, or
serfs to supporta gentlemanfarmeror to
maintaina pleasurevilla. The contrastbe-
tween 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 counterparttilled the land to
survive, with a certainCatonian(and Prot-
estant) pride in successful crops and in the
sweat they representedbut withoutthose
mythic trappingsthat find expressionin the
literature,art, and architecturalsymbolism
of a properideology. Eventuallythe po-
larity in both the Romanand the American
social and ethical attitudesbecame seeds of
civil war.
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The most radical mutationin the history of 17
the villa occurredin the early nineteenth
century, when the villa ideology became de-
mocratizedand 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 coun-
tryside; industrialization;rail and trolley
transportation;the effects of eighteenth-
century egalitariansocial philosophy;
Romanticism;and others. The development
was anticipatedin British villa literatureof
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 commod-
ity, it was a short step to its manufactureby
entrepreneursfor the open market,and an-
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

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 Voysey-
were not called villas, and in the present
century Le Corbusierwas exceptional in re-
viving the designation.
Style and Form
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 study-
ing its processes.7 Farmhousesin many
parts of Europe today retainforms that have
remainedunchangedfor millennia- though
they are rapidlybeing replacedby contrac-
tors' 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 re-
tain traditionalforms.
The villa is quite the opposite; it seldom
displays an effort on the part of the pro-
prietor or the architectto conform to past
custom; with rare exceptions it strainsto
be the paradigmof the architecturalavant-
garde. The rule is illustratedby the cele-
brated milestones of modernistarchitecture:
s
the Ames Gatehouse, the Coonley House,
the Villa Savoye at Poissy (fig. 8), the sub-
urbanretreatsof the New York Five (fig. 9),
and Venturi. Granted,Renaissancearchi-
tects 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 archi-
tecture when villas were less innovative
than other architecturaltypes. Though ur-
ban residences have sometimes kept abreast
of villas, generally they follow a more con-
servative 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 op-
posed to the country.
The villa is less fixed in form than most
other architecturaltypes because the re-
quirementsof leisure lack clear definition.
But two contrastingmodels were firmly
established in Roman times: the condensed-
cubic 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 9
Villa Savoye, Poissy, House II (Falk House),
France, 1929-1930, Hardwick, Vermont, 1969,
Le Corbusier 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 out-
side 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 con-
temporarywriter 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 Far-
nesina in Rome (fig. 11). Tropicalforest
conditions produceda variantof the cubic
type in the plantationhouses of seventeenth-
century 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-nine-
teenth-centuryMississippi valley, as at
Home Place in Louisiana(fig. 12).8
The open villa is more congenial to the
ideological engagementwith nature.It ex-
pands informally in extended asymmetrical
blocks and porticoes, and in the variedpro-
files of changing levels; it often grows
organicallyas the wealthy proprietoris
temptedto continuouslyextend the initial
structureby adding rooms, courts, and por-
ticoes. Pliny must have done as much, and
Jefferson(who in the course of forty years
never ceased to alter the shape of Mon-
ticello), as did FrankLloyd Wrightat the
Taliesins (fig. 13).
To fulfill its ideological mission, the villa
must interactin some way with nature,and 10
Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii,
the two majortypes I have definedare
Italy, first century B.c.
roughly coordinatedwith two types of inter-
action. The compact-cubicvilla is often a 11
Villa Farnesina, Rome,
foil to nature, standingoff from it in polar 1509, sixteenth-century
view
opposition; the open-extendedtype is inte-
grative, imitatingnaturein the irregularity 12
Home Place Plantation,
of its layout and profile, embracingthe
Louisiana, 1801
ground, assuming naturalcolors and tex-
tures. A paradigmof the first is Lorenzode' 13
Taliesin East, Spring
Medici's villa at Poggio a Caiano, outside Green, Wisconsin, begun
Florence (fig. 14). Inscribedwithin a cube, 1911, Frank Lloyd Wright
it is faced with white stucco to emphasize
its total polarity to the irrationalityof trees
and rolling hills; to underscorethis mes-
sage, it is raised on a high podiumto assure
that the contact of the residentswith nature
would be not intimate but removedand
in perspective.9
 The white-stuccoedpodium-villabecame a 21
major twentieth-centuryparadigm,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 en-
trance stairwayleads to the upperfloor (la-
ter Palladianworks are more engaged with
nature-even the entirely cubic Villa Ro-
tunda in Vicenza, which is designed to re-
flect the varied views and which seems to
12 crown the hill on which it is placed). The
14 effort to respond to natureby antithesisex-
Villaof Lorenzo
de' Medici,Poggioa plains the apparentparadoxof melding the
Caiano,Italy,1489 sharplygeometrical and classical Palladian
15 style in early eighteenth-centuryBritain (at
VillaGodi,Lonedo,Italy, Lord Burlington'svilla at Chiswick, for ex-
1537-1542
ample) with the inventionof the informal
English garden in reaction againstthe im-
position of geometric orderon plant life.
22
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Imperial villa, Piazza
Armerina, Rome, third
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17
Villa Lante, Ragnia,
Italy, 1568

18
Villa d'Este, Tivoli, Italy,
1565 (etching by Venturini)

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Pliny's descriptionsof extended, even den design; for the first time the centralaxis The triumphof natureover architectural 23
sprawlingstructuresoffer a model of the of the composition is occupied by land- form was ultimately achieved in the eigh-
more collaborativeresponse to the land- scaping elements- watercourses, fountains, teenth century, when the fashion of the
scape, but the appearanceof these villas is and stairways- while the shy, cubic residen- picturesqueemerged. The desire to make
difficult to reconstructfrom his letters;the tial casinos are pushed to either side. the real environmentlook like pictureswas
villa at Piazza Armerinain Sicily, un- stimulatedby the landscapepaintingsof
earthedin recent times, providesa better Renaissancedesigners would have been Poussin, Claude Lorrain,Ruysdael, and
opportunityto visualize this exceptionally disappointedand disorientedhad they others, in which the architecture,while
large and lavish "organic" type (fig. 16). discovered that Romanvillas were not clas- frequentlygeometric in its forms, was de-
sical. Most of the ancient models (none of signed to be seen as part of the landscape
Designers of Renaissance villas were too which was known priorto the discovery and to respondto it in mood. Authorsof
fixed on the polarity of natureand culture of Pompeii) lacked the axial symmetry, books on architectureand landscapede-
to devise schemes in which the barriers rational integration, and proportionthat sign-such as RichardPayneKnight,
between the two were blurred;what inter- supportedtheir conception of the heritage Uvedale Price, and their heir Humphrey
action did occur was, rather,between the of antiquity.WhetherRomanvillas, like Repton- urged clients to build villas that
architectureand the garden, which re- many in later times, expressed their com- borrowedfrom the landscapesomethingof
mained firmly in the artist'scontrol. The munion with natureby a richness of color its irregularity,its contrastsof light, and its
formal garden of the Renaissancewas fre- and of texture is hardto tell even today, shadows and textures. The asymmetriesof
quently complementedby a barco, or because of the condition of the remains. In Gothic proved sympatheticto this aim, and
hunting park, where the wildness of nature any event, Renaissancearchitectsfrom the "ItalianVilla" style (fig. 7) abruptly
could be accepted;the nature-artdialectic Giuliano da Sangallo throughBramante, emerged, not from any actualmodels in
was transferredto the contrastof wild and Raphael, and Palladiodid give the villa a Italy, but from the canvasesof the French
tamed greenery and water. An early engrav- classical form by imposing a rule of order, and British painterswho had workedthere
ing of the Villa Lante in Bagnaiashows a number, and symmetrythat fixed the type (Schinkel'sCharlottenhofgardener'svilla
small "wild" area in the lower right corner until the moment of naturalistdisruptionin was one exception; its motives were au-
(fig. 17). In nonagriculturalRenaissance the eighteenth century (SebastianoSerlio, thenticallyItalian). From this point on,
villas, such as those of the Papalcourt in in his manuscriptfor a book on villas and a picturesque, nature-integratingspirit
Rome, the artifices of the formal garden palaces, even classicized the peasant'shut). dominates the naturalistlineage of villa
took precedence even over the architecture; This achievementgreatly narrowedthe dis- architecture-from the publicists Papworth,
the Villa d'Este in Tivoli concedes all em- tance between the two Romantypes by Loudon, andDowningthroughPhilipWebb's
phasis to the garden(fig. 18), while the pulling the extending arms and wings of the Red House, Shaw and Richardson,Lutyens,
building itself is exceptionally inexpressive open villa in symmetricalorderabouta Aalto, Wright, the Greens, andMaybeckto
and bland. The architectureof the Villa central block, as in the porticoedvillas Moore.
Lante in Bagnaia is overwhelmedby its gar- of Palladio.
 The View
24 In reflecting on the ways in which villas
respondto the landscape, one must remem-
ber 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"be-
cause 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 paradigmaticexamples of three
genres of villa siting. Hadrian'svast villa
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 Renais-
sance Villa of the Este family are perched
high on the slopes-not on the very peaks,
but high enough to gain a vast panoramaof
the countrysideand distantmountains.A
view towardthe formerfrom the terraceof
the latter (fig. 19) shows both to be com-
manding, extrovertedvillas (the famed gar-
dens 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 moun-
tains on an extraordinarysite suited to a
poet (fig. 20): a saddle, only large enough
to hold a small cubic structure,deeply em-
bedded 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 struc-
tures 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 ear-
liest 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 con-
ception of the villa was intensifiedin
eighteenth-centuryEnglandwhen the vogue
for the informal gardenwas extendedto
embrace the entire agriculturallandscape.
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 agriculturaleconomy and
society resulting from the Acts of Enclo-
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.
I

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19 20
View from Villa d'Este, Horace's Sabine Farm,
Tivoli, Italy, 1565 Tivoli, Italy, first century

25

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21 22

Survival or Revival?

26 Renaissancevilla architects,intentas they century to an earlierblock. The type was

were on reviving the ancientvillas, did not preserved in a sixth-centuryvilla of Theo-
know of any models on which to base their doric in Galeata(fig. 22), not far from Ra-
designs and were forced to dependentirely venna, and emerges again in the typical
on the meager literary sources.'?Of these, Venetian-Byzantinepalace, from which it
Vitruviuswas almost no help, and Pliny's passes back into a type of early Renaissance
descriptions, though ample, were useful villa that achieves a refinedform in Bal-
only for projectsof great lavishness, such dassarePeruzzi'sVilla Farnesinain Rome
as Raphael'sdesign for Villa Madamain (fig. 11). Anothervilla (fig. 23), only
Rome (about which he wrote a letter filled recently excavated at Montmaurinin
with Plinian phrases). In spite of this lack, the French part of Gaul, anticipatedthe
archaeologicalevidence continuesto mount entrancewayflankedwith two quadrantsof
of Roman villas that anticipatedRenais- a circle in a style reinventedby Palladiofor
sance and later types. Since a revival of such projects as the Villa Badoer at Fratta
these ancient forms cannot have occurred, Pol6sine (fig. 24) and passing from there
they must somehow or otherhave survived into innumerablehouses and villas in Eu-
over the interveningcenturiesthroughlinks rope and America.
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 free-
standing 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 fifteenthcen-
tury and beyond. Whateverthe answer, it is
more likely to be in the realm of folkways
than of architecturalstyle. In a characteris-
tic Roman provincialexample, at Mayen in
GermanGaul (fig. 21), the loggia with
extended wings was added in the fourth
 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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 25 26
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"Falling Water"
(Kaufmann house), Bear
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lFrank Lloyd Wright

26
Rustic gate, 1584,
~~~~i;~~~~3 &Sebastiano Serlio

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~Easton, Massachusetts,
1881, H H Richardson

28
Villa Medici, Cafaggiolo,
Italy, ca1450

27

The Villa as Sign
The villa inevitablyexpresses the mythol-
ogy thatcauses it to be built: the attraction
to nature,whetherstated in engagementor
in cool distance;the dialectic natureand
cultureor artifice;the prerogativesof privi-
lege 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 characteris-
tics. Since signs and symbols convey
meaningonly to those who know what they
signify,they are usually chosen from past
architecturalusage or, as occasionally hap-
pens, are importedfrom other types of
construction,like the ship railings of Le
Corbusier.
Intimateengagementwith natureis sig-
nifiedby a site and design that permitthe
villa to nestle and to extend out into its
surroundings,by assymmetricaland open
design, colors reflectingthe setting, and
naturaland varied textures. Distancing from
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
proportions,and emphasison plane surfaces
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 inte-
rior and exterior, and the contrasting
coolness of the carefully formed white
concrete balconies. The comparablecom-
bination of wood and stucco of Aalto's
Villa Mairea serves the same purpose.
The dialectic natureand artifice is ex-
pressed in the paradoxicalimitationof
naturalforms in man-madeelements. Rusti-
cation, adopted from a small numberof
Roman buildings of the firstcentury,was a
Renaissance device that aimed to give build-
ing 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 symboliza-
tion 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. Seba-
stiano Serlio, taking up the idea from Giulio
Romano, made much of combining rustic
and smooth treatmentsas a way of drama-
tizing the antithesis of the naturaland the
artificial (fig. 26). The fountain-grottoof
28
28
villa gardens was a companionmotif, in 29
which such irregularnaturalphenomenaas
stalactites were reproducedin a variety
of plastic materialsto which naturalob-
jects-such as shells and fossils-were
added. H H Richardsonused rusticationof
a vigorous new kind, not intendingparticu-
larly 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 Renais-
sance, which took over the vocabularyof
the medieval feudal castle-towers, irreg-
ular 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-gardeearly-sixteenth-
century Villa Giustinianat Roncade, near
Venice, was given a moat and drawbridge.
Castles returnedto favor in the eighteenth
century in the work of Vanbrughand the
early Scottish designs of RobertAdam.

30 While the adoptionof Georgianarchitec-
tural symbols in southernplantationhouses
affirmedthe link of the colonists with their
homeland, Jefferson'staste for pre-Imperial
Roman and Palladianreferenceswas in-
tended to express republicanas againstaris-
tocraticideals. In nineteenth-centuryNew-
port 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 extraordinarilyprolific in de-
vising 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 ur-
bane 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 else-
where, he adaptedthe loggias flankingthe
temple-frontfrom barchesse, traditionalag-
riculturalsheds of the Venetianmainland
designed to store farm machineryand im-
plements, produce, and cattle. Theirrole
in the Palladianvillas was probablynot
fully utilitarian;the patronswould not have
supportedthe odors and the noise. Bar-
chesse do not appearat the Villa Rotonda
near Vicenza because it is a suburbanvilla
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 sur-
roundingviews.
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 modern-
ism 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.
Conclusion
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 su-
premely 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 con-
crete 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 similarlymoti-
vated by an unchangingmythology since
surplus wealth first offered its temptations.
 LrJ

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29
29 31
Villa Emo, Fanzolo, Italy,
1564, Andrea Palladio