The Villa

James Ackerman follows the villa as a building type across Western history, from ancient Rome to twentieth-century France and the United States. Rather than cataloguing styles alone, he treats the country house as a subject that reveals how people have thought about the countryside and their place in it.

His chapters move through Roman villas, the early country residences of the Medici family, the Palladian villas of England, and the modern houses of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Throughout, Ackerman uses the idea of the country place to examine the relationship between urban and rural life, between a building and its natural setting, and between architectural design and the social, cultural, economic, and political forces behind it. He is the author of earlier studies of Palladio and Michelangelo, and this book draws on that long attention to Italian and European architecture.

Ackerman argues that the villa is less a working farm than a fantasy of leisure, one that persists regardless of rural realities. From its earliest appearances in Roman writing, the villa's promise of rest, good health, hunting, reading, and good company belonged to those wealthy enough to leave the city, often by taking over farmland. Farmers rarely viewed the countryside as a paradise. Unlike the farmhouse, the villa openly shows its modernity and its designer's imagination.