Polar Transformation of the Villa Rotonda

The Villa Rotonda (1550, completed 1591) is a representation of an anthropomorphic world.

“If we consider this beautiful machine of the world, with how many wonderful ornaments it is filled, and how the heavens, by their continual revolutions, change the seasons according as nature requires, and their motion preserves itself by the sweetest harmony of temperature; we cannot doubt but that the little temples we make, ought to resemble this very great one, which, by his immense goodness, was perfectly compleated with one word of his.” (Palladio, 1570, in Norberg-Schiulz, 1980: 127)

The circular space at the centre, which Palladio derived from the Pantheon, figures completeness and order. All the rooms of the house refer back to this stable centre. Another way to look at this is that the central space doubles the outer world in miniature. What happens if, rather than echoing the world in a rationalised way, we make the representation of the world and the world itself coincide, like they do in the legend of the 1:1 map.

By subjecting the plan of the Villa Rotonda to a polar transformation, we can effectively unroll it. The static closure of the circle is replaced by open-ended linearity. The house becomes a demarcating line: the porches face one way, and all the passages lead through to an infinite interior. What happens to your fancy Renaissance humanism now, Andrea? Huh?

The result is different if the plan is rotated 45º : before / after

Contingency

Posted by Carl Douglas

In lieu of spitting on the carpet in the doorway, Vek nodded politely and left the Risk Manager’s office. He waited until he was around the corner before muttering angrily at such a preposterous waste of his time. It was obscene to be managed like this. Vek resented the insinuation that the way he had been managing his department for seventeen years was suddenly risky. And what made him irate was that it didn’t seem like the Risk Manager actually thought this. He had been apologetic, the ridiculous little crab, as if it wasn’t really him asking for thirty-odd pages of forms and boilerplate. He had even rolled his eyes at one point, which Vek took to be implying that the two men were in the same boat really, driven by managerial whims. That it was the system, the institution, that somehow required Vek to stop working for the three days it would take him to fill in enough rectangles to quell its anxieties. As if he, the Risk Manager, wasn’t the institution! As if somehow writing things in a rectangle on a form made them comprehensible and controllable! Planes fell out of the sky some days!

Unwilling to go back to the workshop after his meeting, Vek slunk off home. Stopping on the corner close to his rented flat, he pushed through the grubby glass door of a questionable-looking eating establishment and searched his pockets to see what he could afford for dinner. Not finding much, he settled for a pie and a drink taken at random from the fridge. In the back corner, where it was warm, he settled on a bench: the pie was ok, but the drink tasted terrible. He squinted at the label trying to find a description in English of its contents, but when this proved futile he drank the rest anyway. Reaching into his bag, he took out a piece of paper and a pencil. Exhausted by consistency, he leaned over the page and began to draw the plan of the apartment he would build one day.

Enric Miralles, <em>Apartment Calle Mercaders</em> (1995)

Enric Miralles, Apartment Calle Mercaders (1995)

Gunnar Asplund, Villa Snellman (1917-18)

Posted by Carl Douglas

I am in awe of this plan! Just look at it. In overview its not that complicated: a two-storey main block with a single-storey wing meeting it at a slight angle in the corner. Rectangular rooms off a couple of corridors. But look more closely: everything is tweaked. Look at the shape of the upstairs corridor! That circular room isn’t actually a circle or an ellipse—it’s amorphous—and look at the shape of the the entry to the room on the left of it! Good grief, is that another stair squeezed in to the sliver of space left over from the corridor? Notice the thickening of the walls where the two wings meet downstairs. Look at the three doors in the first room of the smaller wing—they’re all different sizes. And look how the window spacings slip out of alignment in the garden elevation! The walls enclosing the bath upstairs!

Villa Snellman, Djursholm (near Stockholm), Erik Gunnar Asplund, 1917-18.

[ Pictures of the house on flickr ]