Plan Of Villa Research Articles

Examining control, centrality and flexibility in Palladio's villa plans using space syntax measurements

Andrea Palladio's Renaissance villas are amongst the most famous and widely studied examples of domestic architecture ever produced. The majority of past research about Palladio's architecture employed historical, mathematical and computational methods to analyse their complex proportional systems and rules. In contrast, this paper examines three of Palladio's arguments about his villas plans which relate to their spatial properties and topological connections. Specifically, this paper uses a computational method – the justified plan graph (JPG) – to test two arguments about the location and significance of the primary salon on the plan, and a third about the extent to which the rooms in Palladio's plans are, as he claims, flexible enough to contain alternative functions. Using ten of Palladio's piano nobile (main floor) plans from I Quattro Libri Dell'Architettura as cases, this paper develops mathematical data to test three hypotheses framed around Palladio's plans and theories.

Review: Design and Plan in the Country House: From Castle Donjons to Palladian Boxes, by Andor Gomme and Alison Maguire

Andor Gomme and Alison Maguire ; Design and Plan in Country House: From Castle Donjons to Palladian Boxes ; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008, 338 pp., 288 illus., 230 plans. ££50, ISBN 9780300126457 For Le Corbusier ( Towards a New Architecture , ed. F. Etchells, 1927) the plan is generator, and this belief lies behind Gomme and Maguire's long and idiosyncratic book. Plans do come before elevations, and anyone seriously wishing to understand domestic architecture should study plans before being seduced by blandishments of style and ornament. The focus of their study is sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when loose domestic planning of Middle Ages gave way in Britain to a more compact system that reached its apogee in forty years or so after restoration of monarchy in 1660. This is not a new field of inquiry. Domestic planning looms large in Mark Girouard's Life in English Country House (1978) and his Robert Smythson and Elizabethan Country House (1983), and more recently there have been Nicholas Cooper's perceptive and wide-ranging Houses of Gentry 1480––1680 (1999) and a stimulating chapter on seventeenth-century English villa plans by Patricia Smith in The Renaissance Villa in Britain …

Possible Palladian Villas (Plus a Few Instructively Impossible Ones)

From the Publisher: The villas of Andrea Palladio have been among the most influential buildings in history. Drawing on the architect's original published legacy of forty-odd designs, George Hersey and Richard Freedman reveal the rigorous geometric rules by which Palladio conceived these structures. Where most earlier attempts to analyze the villas are mere lists of numbers and ratios that ignore space distribution, the present rules produce actual designs. Using a computer, the authors test each rule in every possible application, establishing a degree of validity not possible in ad hoc analyses. Progressing from the architect's most obvious to his subtlest ideas, the computer ultimately creates villa plans and facades that are stylistically indistinguishable from those of Palladio himself. Possible Palladian Villas opens the way to similar analyses of other such "paradigmatic" designs, whether Chinese screens, Greek temples, baroque churches, or Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Houses. In fact a new approach to architectural history emerges: we can study designs that a given master might have produced but did not. Palladio's actual buildings, along with those of his generations of imitators, are set into the context not only of a new theory but of a new type of theory. Along with the Macintosh disk that runs the program, Possible Palladian Villas will fascinate the design community and students of architectural style, symmetry, and geometry. It will fill architectural historians with bracing dismay. George Hersey is Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. Richard Freedman, who designed the computer program, is a product marketer working on MS-DOS at theMicrosoft Corporation.

Ayia Triada: A New Perspective on the Minoan Villa

Ayia Triada: A New Perspective on the Minoan Villa

FLIGHT OF CAPITAL OR FLIGHT OF FANCY?

Summary. It has been suggested, on the evidence of mosaics, inscriptions, religious cults and villa plans, that a flight of capital from Gaul and Germany to Britain took place in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries. Villa plans in particular have been used to support this idea; analysis shows that the specific continental connections alleged for them do not exist, and other categories of evidence give very dubious support. Only the connection established by mosaics remains, and to explain that by a flight of capital is unnecessary.

Counting Palladian Plans

The parametric shape grammar developed in Stiny and Mitchell (1978) is used to enumerate possible room layouts for Palladian villa plans of fixed sizes. The complete catalogue of room layouts for plans based on 3 × 3 and 5 × 3 grids is given. Members of this catalogue corresponding to Palladio's villa plans in I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura (Palladio, 1965) are identified.

An Evaluation of Palladian Plans

Criteria are suggested for the aesthetic evaluation of Palladian villa plans. These criteria are applied to two catalogues of all possible plans constructed on underlying grids of sizes 3 × 3 and 5...