The Villa: From Ancient to Modern Book

If you're tired of those for-sale ads in your local newspaper hawking three-bedroom split-levels and "charming" fixer-uppers and want to feast your eyes on some real real estate, check out this sumptuously illustrated and eruditely narrated revue of perhaps the eighteen most dazzling crash pads of Western civilization. Architecture scholar Joseph Rykwert, who annotates each spread, defines villa rather broadly here to include not only the Renaissance-era Tuscan hideaways that the word evokes but also some of the most celebrated and innovative retreats of the 20th century. The volume opens with Roberto Schezen's lovely photographs of the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii (built in first-century AD but not rediscovered until 1930); Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli, with both its Greek and Roman theater and library, plus the ruins of its baths; the 13th-century Alhambra, its interior walls so richly carved that they look like woven tapestries; and Palladio's archetypal and much-copied Villa Rotonda in Vicenza. It closes, however, with some latter-day jewels that would have knocked the socks off Louis XV and Thomas Jefferson (whose Petit Trianon at Versailles and Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia, are also included here), such as Adolf Loos' fabulous early modernist villa at Montreux, Switzerland; Le Corbusier's celebrated 1929 Villa Savoye in Poussy, France; and the home that spurred Frank Lloyd Wright's mid-'30s career comeback, the gravity-defying Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania--all of which were so astonishingly ahead of their time that they still look as though they must have been built at least a quarter-century after their actual construction dates. (It's still too early to say the same of the book's last two entries, Gwathmey Siegel's sleek 1979 Francois de Menil House in East Hampton, New York, and Richard Meier's 1998 Neugebauer House in Naples, Florida, which, its high-tech coolness notwithstanding, looks more like one of Meier's acclaimed public projects than a private residence.) The one thing that unifies these homes of vastly different styles and eras is their sheer grandness and majesty of scale. Many may have been conceived as vacation or country homes, but if you're expecting anything like a twee Swiss chalet or a Nantucket clapboard cottage, forget about it. Passing the book around and debating which one you'd choose to spend the night in, however, makes for a great parlor game. This green-eyed reviewer, who probably won't ever own even a tree house, is still trying to decide. --Timothy Murphy Read More