Building Collective Individualities. Residential Pavilions in the Roman Countryside

By bringing the long-neglected subject of the single-family home back into play within today's Italian architectural culture, this text provides evidence that the villa can be seen as both a private dwelling and the place where collective individuality is formed. The design for three residencies in the Roman countryside supplies a reading of the suburban villa as a pavilion, made up of a core, surrounded by a shell. The concept of pavilion emerged as a country house for pleasurable or health-related purposes, but later on it lost its domestic dimension and was used to describe an isolated, dismantleable structure, erected in a public space, or in a green environment. Aiming at reassessing the pavilion as a twofold architecture, the design featured here links the concept of private house to that of public building. By enveloping a central nucleus with a shell or a portico, a residential pavilion broadens its domestic dimension to incorporate an institutional and collective status, analogously to the Palladian villas, where the portico was co-opted from sacred or public buildings and lent to the private residence.