Architecture 101: Lessons of the Lawn                                                                                                         Issued: 11/08/05 Exploration No. 9                                                                                                                                 Due: 11/14/05

 

ON PRE--CONDITIONS AND INVENTIONS WITHIN AS POST-SCRIPTS TO PETRARCH

Case Studies:  Villa Capra, “La Rotunda”, Vicenza, Italia

                        Miller House & Garden, Columbus, Indiana

 

METHOD

These two “un-private houses” are built upon a major premise of Humanism, which advocated a symbiotic relationship with Nature, first in 16th Century Italy and then re-interpreted in the mid 20th Century in America.

 

Petrarch inspired a medieval culture to build upon the healthy aspects of agricultural and pastoral life in the Eugenean Hills within the precincts of the Veneto and to the southeast of Vicenza. Palladio, a stonemason, was educated as a Humanist and Cabalist and was commissioned first by Archbishop Capra to design a summer villa as a retreat from the heat and pestilence of Rome. The site was a working farm with evidence of previous villas and fields dating back to Roman antiquity.

 

Over a half-century period of patronage, Irwin Miller inspired architects and landscape architects to build the institutions of a 20th Century Academical Village in Columbus, Indiana. Specifically, he commissioned Eero Saarinen, Architect, and Dan Kiley, Landscape Architect to collaborate on a dwelling and a re-interpreted landscape, ranging from country road to wetland riverfront. Again, distinct landscapes of urban walls, grand allees, dark bosques, and singular figures re-construct the pre-conditions of the site aggressively and inventions not a plinth but a pit within serve as critical reassessments of the horizon and the legacy of the setting sun as hearth in Arcadian myths of America.

 

ASSIGNMENT

Villa Capra: Describe the Pre-Conditions of the Site in the four cardinal directions and relate those distinct landscapes to four framed porches and then to the four major rooms on the four corners of the centralized complex. Finally, having recorded the external conditions of the World, what then was invented as a foil within that reached conceptually from Attic to Basement?

Miller House: Describe, as in the Villa Capra exploration, the pre-conditions amplified and the world made within as a lens by which to reassess Nature.  The Canal, the River, and thus good wet bottom land provided for bountiful crops and the production of corn. Agriculture in the Veneto and Indiana provided the capital to speculate on Nature in an increasingly unnatural world.  Each case study, at the level of the dwelling, provides for the opportunity to fictionalize the World, Again.

Write a four page text with diagrams of your own choosing comparing and contrasting the Pre-Conditions of the Lawn as Lens and Oculus within as re-considered World, Again to the readings derived from Villa Capra and the Miller House/Garden in Columbus.

Be inclusive. Refer to readings and previous projects, certainly Ise and Barcelona, if not all the others.

 

GLOSSARY

Allee: A walk of gravel, sand or turf, enclosed by a fence, hedge or trees.  A linear space of enclosure and shelter. Tree branches trained to meet overhead. 

Arcadian myths: Dreams of a rustic, peaceful, and simple life.

Bosque (Bosquet): A French term for a small, irregularly planted wood, often contrasting a geometrical garden surrounding it. 

Cabalist (Kabbalah): Generally, an expert who is highly skilled in obscure, difficult or esoteric matters.  Specifically, a body of mystical teachings of rabbinical origin, often based on an esoteric interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Foil: To prevent from being successful; to thwart, obscure or confuse.  To contradict and cause friction.  

Humanist: Pertaining to a philosophy asserting human dignity and man's capacity for fulfillment through reason and scientific method and often rejecting religion.

Inclusive: Including the specified extremes or limits as well as the area between them.

Petrarch (1304-1374): Italian poet, scholar, and humanist famous for Canzoniere, a collection of love lyrics.

Plinth: A block or slab on which a pedestal, column, or statue is placed.  In contemporary usage, it implies a fabricated level condition, earthen or otherwise, often but not always supporting a building. 

Veneto: A region of northeastern Italy on the Adriatic.

Vicenza: A city of northeast Italy west of Venice. Founded by Ligurians c. 100 CE. Vicenza joined the kingdom of Italy in 1866.