Building Collective Individualities: Residential Pavilions in the Italian Countryside

By bringing the long-neglected subject of the single-family dwelling back into today’s Italian architectural discourse, this text illustrates that the villa can be understood as both a private dwelling and a place where collective individuality is formed. Three residences designed by Malfona Peltrini Architects in the Roman countryside provide a reading of the suburban villa as a pavilion made up of a core surrounded by a shell. The concept of the pavilion emerged as a country house for pleasurable or health-related purposes, but it eventually lost its domestic dimension and was used to describe an isolated, dismantlable structure erected in a public space or a green environment. Aiming at reassessing the pavilion as a twofold architecture, the design featured here links the concept of a private house to that of a 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, similar to the Palladian villa where the portico was co-opted from sacred or public buildings and lent to the private residence.

Iñaki Abalos

Professor in Residence, Department of Architecture, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA

Orazio Carpenzano

Dean, Facoltà di Architettura, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome

Yung Ho Chang

Professor of Architecture, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

Winka Dubbeldam

Founder of Archi-Tectonics, Miller Professor and Chair of Architecture at Stuart Weitzman School of Design

Brian Ford

Professor Emeritus, Department of Architecture & Built Environment, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Hsinming Fung

Professor, SCI-Arc, Los Angeles CA, USA

Carlo Gasparrini

Professor of Urbanism, Dipartimento di Architettura, Universita' degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Naples, Italy

Rahul Mehrotra

Professor of Urban Design and Planning, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA

Antoine Picon

Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA

Mónica Ponce de León

Dean, School of Architecture, Princeton University, Princeton NJ, USA

Jane Rendell

Professor, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, London, UK

Peter Rich

Professor of Architecture, Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa

Michael Speaks

Dean, School of Architecture, Syracuse University, Syracuse NY, USA

Martha Thorne

Hon FRIBA, Hon COAM, Senior Advisor for The OBEL Award

C David Tseng

Dean, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Chiao-Tung University, Taipei, Taiwan

Sarah Whiting

Dean, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA

Li Xiangning

Deputy Dean, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

Building Collective Individualities: Residential Pavilions in the Italian Countryside

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