Last October the exhibition “Urban Villa – From Speculation to Collaboration”, curated by the architectural firm Dogma, opened in Antwerp. The exhibition has been recently chronicled in the publication of the same name, for which we had the opportunity to speak with the studio's founders, Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara.
“The exhibition was born when the VAi – Flanders Architecture Institute – asked us to do an exhibition on the theme of commoning,” Aureli told us. “We decided to take advantage of the opportunity by continuing our research on domestic space, focusing this time on the urban villa. The intent of the exhibition and publication is to show how this typology, which started out as strictly speculative, can actually be a model for a new design of living.” 

The publication is divided into two parts. The first part revisits the history of the urban villa through forty-two case studies that trace its origins in antiquity as a suburban villa to its modern implementation as a distinct multifamily speculative typology. The second part presents a series of projects that address the urban villa as an affordable form of housing, as well as a typology that can be used for the densification of Antwerp.
“The historical analysis part is a very important methodological aspect of our work, where we are not just trying to show design references. The body of research must retain its autonomy and must explain what the history of a typology or architectural form is. Often our projects are also an antithesis to the historical part.”

Collected chronologically, the case studies tell through plans and axonometries the evolution of typology since Roman times. Whether Roman villas, Renaissance palaces, medieval bourgeois houses, nineteenth-century bourgeois residences, Milanese condominiums, or contemporary council houses, each retains a discrete figure and architectural language. “Even in this temporal sequence, our intent was to show how the Urban Villa has gone from being a villa to smaller, more economical solutions, while still retaining certain typological aspects. For example, the fact of always having very generous overlooks. The loggia can be considered the quintessential aspect of villas”.

On the one hand, villas had an aspiration for isolation, but – as they were inhabited by people who often had a very strong relationship with the city anyway – they simultaneously had to be easily accessible. This paradox then becomes even more stringent in the urban villa.
“The very interesting thing about urban villas is the public space between them, which is often very narrow,” Tattara continued on the topic. “When visited, these places are almost picturesque spaces. Although the villa is a medium-sized building, it is actually capable of building very different urban conditions, both when it is a single element and when several villas begin to actually build parts of cities.”

“An important aspect of all our projects is the landscape,” Aureli also explained. “Landscape not understood as plants, but as the relationship between built and unbuilt, that is, between full and empty. For us, empty space is almost more important than full space. Once you remove from the street surface all the fences that separate properties, you not only gain a lot of space, you remove a lot of impermeable surface.” During the exhibition these visual elements of architecture were also told through projected films shot by studio collaborator Annalisa Massari.

Despite its highly theoretical nature, the research nonetheless affirms the desire to investigate the problems and challenges of contemporary housing units. “Collective living, thus the more existential aspect of sharing domestic space, challenges the idea of the nuclear family.” In fact, as stated by the designers, the most influential among the literature references used for their research came from the tradition of materialist feminism, focused in the reform of domestic space. “One thing that has always been very strong is that forms of co-housing are often forms that remove domestic work from the private sphere, socializing it against the logic of privatizing it and still making it become women's work.”

“We wanted to understand what are the loopholes, what are the possibilities of advancing such a project, both from a more existential point of view, but also from a more bureaucratic or regulatory or political point of view. Because, for example, today it is difficult to question private home ownership, and it is not only a technical-normative aspect, it is also a political aspect, because the state does not give many incentives in this direction,” Aureli concludes. “We need to understand that often behind such regulations – such regulatory limitations – there is also a tacit political will to favor or discourage alternative forms of housing.”