Villa of the Tetrarchs
Proposal for a Roman villa developed for the exhibition Re-constructivist Architecture.
In the tradition of Hadrian’s villa, the villa Giulia, and Madama, the House of the Tetrarchs is a political withdrawal into nature, fortified with the geometry of an urban ideal on the periphery of an unruly city. Four spiralling compounds are connected at their centre at a recessed geometric grotto, and each face out towards the horizon in a different direction across the Roman campagna from four large, pavilion-topped ramps.
The three Presidents of Italy, of the Republic, the Senate, and the Chamber of Deputies, as well as the Prime Minister -the contemporary Tetrarchy- find a bureaucratic respite and seclusion within the walls of each of these four dwellings, each grounded in a specifically formal notion of architectural continuity. The House is located on a promontory next to Il Corviale, a kilometre-long social housing project from the 1970s, a masterpiece in concrete, a miracle of repetition, of grand vision, and ultimately, of failure. The Corviale is relentlessly grey, and linear. The house of the Tetrarchs is eye-gougingly colourful, and endlessly involuted. An efflorescence of monumentality and polychromous pomp, in an age of political retreat.
