Seminar on Tuesday, October 26, at 5 pm, Ground Floor Back Room, 33 Bedford Sq. Domestic architecture – the architecture of houses – has never been the obvious locus of action for architects, neither today, nor when architecture as a profession was born. Before the 16th century architectural expertise was mainly addressed towards the design of extraordinary buildings.
And yet it is precisely within the urge to reinvent domestic typologies between the 15th and 16th century, that the figure of the architect as a “specialized” practicioner emerges. Professional architects like Francesco di Giorgio, Baldassarre Peruzzi, Antonio Da Sangallo the Younger, Sebastiano Serlio, Jacopo Sansovino and later Palladio made their reputation not only by designing extraordinary buildings, but also by defining exempla for domestic architecture. It is within these exempla, that one can see how the emergence of the architect as a recognizable profession is parallel (if not tied) to the rise of the “question of housing” as a central problem for urban governance. A special case study in this sense is Sebastiano Serlio’s unpublished Sixth Book on Architecture, where for the first time in the history of architecture an architect proposes ready made typologies for all class of people including improbable clients for architecture such as the poor peasant, and the poor merchant.
What become clear with the advent of housing as a main focus of the architectural profession, is the clash between rarefied conditions such as land value and the management and reproduction of life, and the will of architects and their client to maintain a classical composition. This clash is not simply a matter of form, but also questions of ethics and political opportunism. The seminar will offer an overview of domestic projects from late 15th and early 16th (from Di Giorgio to Palladio) and speculate about their social and political background.

Seminar on Tuesday, October 22, Studio 2, 4 pm. If in ancient European and Mediterranean cultures the domestic environment had been hidden and protected by blank walls with little or no architectural features addressing the space of circulation, in the Middle Ages the rise of a new ethos produced an urban condition marked by the flourishing of façade designs. The façade becomes then the embodiment of the right to private property, a representation of the status of the individual, and the exuberant, stylistically diverse expression of a society that flaunted and displayed productivity as the main raison d’etre of the city. It is in this context that housing ceases to be a private concern and becomes, on the contrary, the key ingredient of urban form; while still typologically undefined, the domestic architecture of the late medieval period becomes the object of an increasingly refined linguistic experimentation precisely at the level of its façade. Through the paradigmatic case of medieval Siena, the seminar will look at the way in which the design of elevations went from mere necessity to self-representation to locus of the invention of the discipline of architecture. The Sienese case will therefore offer a chance to investigate the political and economic roots of the shift which turned the intimacy of the house inside-out proposing for the first time in European history a complete fusion of public and private, production and reproduction, ritual and labour.

Suggested readings:

Frugoni, Chiara. A Distant City: Images of Urban Experience in the Medieval World. Trans. William McCuaig. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Nevola, Fabrizio J. D. “’Per Ornato Della Città’: Siena’s Strada Romana and Fifteenth-Century Urban Renewal”. In The Art Bulletin 82, no. 1 (March 2000): 26-50.

Rubinstein, Nicolai. “Political Ideas in Sienese Art”. In Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21, no. 3-4 (Jul.-Dec. 1958): 201-202.

Skinner, Quentin. “Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Artist as Political Philosopher”. In Proceedings of the British Academy LXII: 1-56.