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The Villa as Paradigm James AckermaTl

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Introduction

A villa is a building in the country - orat least outside the city - designed for itsowner's enjoyment and relaxation. Though avilla may also serve as the center of an agri-cultural enterprise, the pleasure factor iswhat essentially distinguishes this kind ofresidence from the farmhouse. Similarly. avilla estate differs from the farm.I Thefarmhouse tends to be simple in structureand to perpetuate formal solutions that donot require the intervention of a designer.The villa, typically the product of an archi-tect's imagination, asserts its modernity.

Since it was first fixed by the patricians ofancient Rome, the basic program of thevilla has remained unchanged for more than

I two thousand years. The villa is therefore

, unique as a paradigm; other architecturalr types - the palace, the place of worship, theI factory-have changed in form and purpose

as the role of the ruler, the character of theliturgy, the nature of manufacture have

changed, frequently and often radically. Thevilla has remained substantially the samebecause it fulfills a need that never alters.

Because it is not material but psychologicaland ideological, this need is not subject tothe influences of evolving societies and

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technologies. The villa accommodates afantasy impervious to reality.

The villa cannot be understood apart fromthe city; it exists not to ful/ill autonomousfunctions but as the antithesis to urbanvalues and accommodations. and its eco-

nomic situation is that of a satellite (fig. I).The villa may be built and supported withmonetary surpluses generated by urbancommerce and industry; or. when it is sus-tained by agriculture, the villa may bejustified by urban centers' need for thesurplus it will produce. Consequently thefate of the villa has been intimately tied tothat of the city; villa culture has thrived inperiods of metropolitan growth (as was truein ancient Rome, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and the twentieth centurythroughout the West) and has declined withurban decline - indeed, to the point of ex-tinction as urban life withered [rom the fifth

to the eleventh century in the West. But thisgeneralization is invalid for two moments inWestern history: the apogee of the republi-can city-state in classical Greece and thecommunes of central Europe and Italy inthe period 1000- 1300. Perhaps in thesemoments of communal idealism those whom

the political institutions most benefited feltno need to escape the city; or it may be thatlife in the country was still too rugged andunsafe for anyone not raised to endure itsrlf!ors.

As satellites. villas have not always beennea{' the cities on which they depended.Some colonial agricultural centers - such asthose in Gaul. Britain, and Africa in Romantimes and in the southern United States in

pre-Revolutionary times - were establishedin areas almost devoid of urban develop-ment and became in themselves industrial

and cultural centers, importing the values ofurban culture. They often grew to be largein scale, and their dependence on the in-stitution of slavery was due in part totheir isolation.

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I shall exclude from what follows examplesdesigned for rulers. While only persons ofwealth, and usually of prestige and power,have been able to afford a villa (at least

until the nineteenth century), the idea of acountry dwelling is a bourgeois concept, re-sponding to the perceived needs of the citydweller. The villas of kings and princes,built and supported by public wealth, areessentially hybrids, rooted in bourgeoisideology but, by virtue of often unlimitedeconomic means and the symbolic and repre-sentational requirements of supreme power,demanding a scale and an elegance in somedegree antithetical to the concept. The villaof the Emperor Hadrian at Tivoli is theparadigm of this hybrid form.

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The Ideology of the Villa

12 Today. as in the past. the farmer and thepeasant. whether poor and oppressed or richand independent. do not as a rule regardcountry life as an idyllic state; they acceptit as a necessary and. more often than not.somewhat antipathetic condition. In thefolklore of all ages the country dwellerlongs - though possibly with some misgiv-ings - for the stimulation and comforts ofcity life. The city dweller. on the otherhand, has typically idealized country lifeand has sought to acquire a property fromwhich it might be enjoyed if he could affordit. This impulse is generated by psycho-logical rather than utilitarian needs; it isquintessentially ideological.2

I use "ideology" not in the current collo-quial sense. to designate a strongly heldconviction, but rather as referring to aconcept or myth so firmly rooted in theunconscious that it is held' as an incontro-

vertible truth. Marxists interpret ideology inthis sense as the means by which the domi-nant class reinforces and justifies the social

. and economic structure and its privilegedposition within it while obscuring its moti-vation from itself and others. In these terms

the villa is a paradigm, not only of architec-ture, but of ideology; it is a myth or fantasythrough which, over the course of millen-nia, persons whose position of privilege isrooted in urban commerce and industry

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have been able to expropriate rural land.often requiring the care of a laboring clas~or of slaves for the realization of the myth.

Because literature is a primary form expres-sing myths. the ideology of the villa inevery epoch is richly reinforced by poetryand prose. Indeed. literary works have notmerely reflected the villa culture of theirtime; they have promoted villa concepts de-veloped in later times.

Major revivals of the villa from that of thefifteenth century in Italy to Le Corbusierhave been explicitly justified by reference tothe Roman writers of the late Republic andearly Empire - Cato. Varro. Virgil. Horace,Pliny the Younger. Vitruvius. and others.Each villa revival has been accompanied bya revival of villa literature: in the fifteenth

century that of poliziano and Bembo; ineighteenth-century England that ofS~_aftesbury. James Thompson, Pope, andultimately the early novel (the writings ofJane Austen seem 'obsessed with the prop-erty and status problems of urban-orientedcountry life); in nineteenth-century Amer-ica. that of the Transcendentalists, HenryJames, and Edith Wharton.

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These and other prolific periods in villahistory were also marked by a literature de-voted to the design and improvement ofvillas and their gardens - an equally richsource for the interpretation of the myth.The rather muddled prescriptions of ancientauthors stimulated a particular inventive-ness in treatise writers of the Renaissance

(Palladio immediately comes to mind). Thepublication in England of books on the'villa from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century was literally an industryin itself. and there were those for whom it

was a primary vocation. In America, fromthe time of The Horticulturalist in the

1830s to Sunset Magazille, House al!d Gar-dell, and House Beautiful in the mid- andlater twentieth century, instruction in thenurture of the suburban villa has attracted a

large public.

Painting also bolsters the ideology. In Porn-peiian and other Campanian villas the wallswere often decorated with ideal garden andvilla scenes; it is chiefly from this sourcethat we know of the appearance of the sea-side pleasure residences of the type calledvilla marittima. Tapestries and wall paint-ings in late-medieval country castlesdepicted the delights of country life, antici-pating the scenes of social gatherings,music parties. and outings on the walls of

Palladian villas (fig. 2). Eighteenth-centuryEngland pioneered in a new genre of paint-ing, the portrait of the country house: itspopularity was stimulated by the visit of thedistinguished Venetian topographical painlerCanaletto (fig. 3). Turner got his start as aspecialist in this genre which. though it ad-mittedly gave prominence to the greatcountry houses of the landed aristocracy.must have promoted bourgeois idealizationof country life.

Seventeenth-century classical landscapepainting, particularly that of ClaudeLorrain, rose to prominence in the follow-ing century and fostered the aesthetic of the

picturesque and the informal English gar-den; at the end of the century the firstRomantic villa designers actually took theimaginary buildings of the Roman Cam-pagna in Lorrain paintings as architecturalmodels. The more modest ambitions of themid-nineteenth century suburban villa are

reflected in early Impressionist paintings,especially those of Monet.

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The content of villa ideology is rooted inthe contrast of country and city. the virtuesand delights of the one being presented asthe antitheses of the vices and excesses of

the other. The expression is fully articulatedin the literature of Republican Rome. whereit evolves from an early protovilla stage inthe agricultural treatises of Cato and Varrointo the typical mature form of Pliny theYounger's two letters describing to a friendthe pleasures of two of his numerous lux-urious estates - one on the Tuscan seashoreand one at Laurentium outside Rome. The

early stage. related to stoicism in its asceticand moral tone. advises the urban man of

affairs to acquire a modest farmhouse on asmall country property and to cultivate ithimself with little or no help: the laboritself is seen as purifying him of the con-tamination of the city. A similar pattern ofevolution is repeated in the later provincialvilla culture of Imperial Rome. with itstransition from the simple and almost un-adorned country residences of the fifteenthcentury in the. Veneto to the elegance ofPalladian villas. The same metamorphosis istraceable in Thomas Jefferson's concept ofhis farm at Monticello from the modest

structure of the l770s (itself surely inllu-enced by the early Roman writers) to thelavish estate of the early nineteenth cen-tury (fig. 4).

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Fresc:oof a pleasure villafrom Villa Barbaro, Maser,Italy, by Paolo Veronese

3"Badminton" by AntonioCanaidtO'.

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