6 – 2015

The villa

The villa was an outpost of the city and power in a rural setting. Whether in Roman times or, after the establishment of peace in the countryside, in the Renaissance: those who lived i villas were always people from the city who led there an aristocratic way of life, and the villa was a place that signified dominion over the surrounding area — which it often changed in terms of symbolism and cultivation. Since Palladio villas have been models of architecture, they embody the paradigms of a certain style or epoch. For Thomas Jefferson, Hermann Muthesius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Jørn Utzon, and Rem Koolhaas — a list that could be easily extended — the villa was a test object that brought together, to an equal extent, utopia and an individual way of living. Both, the general and the specific, still form the basis for current designs for villas but globalization has clarified the relationships: here the promise and the representative and comfortable mainstream of a globally employed class — there the casing for the soul in the globally interlinked art and architecture market. It is precisely the producers of art who introduce urban culture into the country, and their pied-à-terre between the hotspots of the art market reproduces once again the logic of the country estate in the Venetian terraferma — Würenlos as the Veneto. This tempts to still ascribe the main role in the architecture of a villa to dominion over the landscape — even if only in the form of a garden — and to characterize the single-family house as a popularized form. With an ironic wink of the eye Bruno Reichlin and Fabio Reinhart erected a monument to it in 1974: as a Palladian reference, as a myth for everyone.