"Studio Krucker Bates is concerned with exploring ideas and structures of the house and city within the context of the European city. In the Winter semester 2020–21 the emphasis of our work was to consider how a residential development could be organized within a deep urban block. These ‘inner worlds’ offer the potential for an intensification of use and inhabitation while minimising the need to expand the city and its infrastructure. Our aim was to create a collection of fine rooms and interior spaces that invite rather than prescribe use. To study the potential of rooms we explored how their proportions, scale and interconnectivity could be the defining aspects of these inner structures.
The plans of Andrea Palladio’s (1508 – 80) villas show an artful combination of rooms of different sizes within a rigidly rectangular plan. In his Quattro Libri (1570) he wrote that “there should be large, medium-sized and small rooms, one side by side with the next, so that they can be mutually useful.” We can learn from this idea of working with similarly proportioned, spatially coherent rooms to create inner blocks of variable scale that can be adapted for long-term use.
We travelled to Vicenza and the surrounding Veneto countryside to pace through a select number of Palladio’s agricultural villas and surveyed them in preparation for making a set of drawings exploring Palladio’s rigorous and inventive spatial and volumetric strategies. We wanted to use the study to speculate on the usefulness and appropriateness of a collection of well-defined and finely proportioned rooms for modern-day city living. In our investigation of intelligent housing solutions for our fast-changing world, amidst a climate emergency, the potential of a ‘society of rooms’ may be highly relevant for a sustainable, adaptive architecture for the future." – Stephen Bates and Bruno Krucker, April 2022
Details
The country houses of Palladio, Veneto
2022 / 20 x 26.5cm / English / 88 pages
ISBN 978-3-00-072182-3