Figure 1.1.1 Andrea Palladio, Villa Barbaro at Maser, elevation from Quattro Libri
As the sole surviving general text from Roman times about how to make architecture, Vitruvius’s Ten Books of Architecture is an obvious starting point for this enquiry, particularly as it was also the model for Renaissance authors such as Alberti, Serlio and Palladio, whose books are definitive for the classical tradition. However, direct discussion of the experience of movement is surprisingly thin among these authors, especially Vitruvius himself, though the benefits of walking in the open air do make a bold appearance in the chapter on Colonnades and walks in Book V:
The space in the middle, between the colonnades and open to the sky, ought to be embellished with green things; for walking in the open air is very healthy, particularly for the eyes, since the refined and rarefied air that comes from green things, finding its way in because of the physical exercise, gives a clean-cut image, and, by clearing away the gross humours from the eyes, leaves the sight clear and the image distinct. Besides, as the body gets warm with exercise in walking, this air, by sucking out the humours from the frame, diminished their superabundance, and disperses and thus reduces that superfluity which is more than the body can bear. . . . Therefore . . . there is no doubt that cities should be provided with the roomiest and most ornamented walks, laid out under the free and open sky.1
In his book, Walking in Roman Culture, Timothy O’Sullivan reveals that there is rather more to this than a casual health fad. The Romans considered it important to maintain the proportions of dry and humid in the body as part of gender identity.2 O’Sullivan also discusses at length the importance of walking and talking together for conversation, discussion and advice, and the significance in such a stratified society of the temporary equality between two men walking side by side. He cites Vitruvius’s advice that houses of noblemen should include atria, peristyles and spacious walkways, ‘because in their homes they provide both consultations on public affairs and private decisions and opinions’.3 However, for the most part, Vitruvius himself remains rather pragmatic in tone, as, for example, when advising on passage in and out of the theatre:
The different entrances ought to be numerous and spacious, the upper not connected with the lower, but built in a continuous straight line from all parts of the house, without turnings, so that the people may not be crowded together when let out from shows, but may have separate exits from all parts without obstruction.4
And similarly: ‘colonnades must be constructed behind the scaena, so that when sudden showers interrupt plays, the people may have somewhere to retire from the theatre.’5
Vitruvius and his successors portray the practical business of being an architect as remarkably broad and all-encompassing, covering matters such as how to determine the quality of a site by examining the guts of animals, how to char the ends of wooden piles or how to build fortifications. However, when it comes to designing buildings, their primary concerns are with the orders and which to apply where, or the relative positions and proportions of rooms according to some numerical formulation convenient for reapplication. A general argument much repeated between them holds that the building should be like a body, well proportioned in its parts, and the use of whole-number proportions with a base of ten or twelve is evidently convenient for transferable prescriptions, whatever its proposed aesthetic advantages.6 But all the classical theorists give the impression that the content and purpose of buildings are well understood and not to be challenged, so that, when movement of persons is mentioned, it is usually, again, in a practical vein. This is Alberti on transitional spaces:
Vestibules, halls and the like places of public reception in houses, ought to be like squares and other open places in cities: not in a remote private corner, but in the centre and the most public place, where all the other members may readily meet: for here all lobbies and staircases are to terminate; here you meet and receive your guests. Moreover, the houses should not have above one entrance, to the intent that nobody may come in, or any thing be carried out, without the knowledge of the porter.7
The final sentence reminds us that, in societies with servants, the gates are controlled by guardians, whom one first encounters on arrival and with whom one must negotiate greetings, which colours the whole experience of a gate. But again, as far as direct mention of walking is concerned, Alberti too remains laconic. Mention does occur fleetingly in his initial definition of architecture in Book 1, Chapter II, where, perhaps surprisingly, he places the division of functions in a house before the provision of shelter, citing the need for places to sleep and cook, so as ‘not to confound public and private matters’. Later, he defines the platform as, ‘those spaces of the buildings which in walking we tread upon with our feet’, and adds that, ‘compartition is that which subdivides the whole platform of the house into smaller platforms, so that the whole edifice thus formed and constituted of these its members, seems to be full of lesser edifices’. He describes apertures as if they are to be cut into walls already built, defining them as, ‘all those outlets, which are in any part of the building, for the convenience of egress and regress, or the passage of things necessary to the inmates’, which is as far as discussion of movement goes in his opening section.8 In Book 1, Chapter IX, following his famous remark about a house being a small city and a city a big house, Alberti deals in more detail with ‘compartition’, stressing that the parts of a building be proportionate like the members of a body, but there is also advice on the relative positions of parts in their order of importance:
To every member therefore ought to be allotted its fit place and proper situation; not less than dignity requires, not greater than conveniency demands; not in an impertinent or indecent place, but in a situation so proper to itself that it could be set nowhere else more fitly. Nor should the greatest part of the structure, that is to be of the greatest honour, be thrown into a remote corner; nor that which ought to be the most public, into a private hole; nor that which should be most private, be set in too conspicuous a place. We should besides have regard to the seasons of the year, and make a great deal of difference between hot places and cold, both in proportions and situation . . . And here we should provide, that the inhabitants may not be obliged to pass out of a cold place into a hot one without a medium of temperate air.9
Chapter XIII deals with staircases, which one would expect to involve movement, but Alberti concentrates on slopes and appropriate numbers of steps, advocating frequent addition of landings, so that ‘such as were weak or tired with the fatigue of the ascent might have leisure to rest themselves, and that if they should chance to stumble, there might be a place to break their fall’.10 Again, the emphasis is pragmatic and concerns the constructed object. Andrea Palladio, in his Quattro Libri, gives more detailed descriptions of layouts and is more loquacious about types of staircase, their advantages and elegance, but he is also surprisingly laconic about movement on them, merely remarking in Book I, Chapter XXVIII that:
Great care ought to be taken in the placing of staircases . . . The staircases will be commendable if they are clear, ample, and commodious to ascend, inviting, as it were, people to go up . . . They will be sufficiently ample, if they do not seem scanty and narrow to the largeness and quality of the fabric, but they are never to be made less wide than four foot, that if two persons meet, they may conveniently give one another room.11
Yet Palladio, like Alberti, does show a strong sense of propriety and concern about the correct positions of things, and, as with Vitruvius, the loggia earns special attention. In Book I, Chapter XXI:
The loggias, for the most part, are made in the fore and back front of the house and are placed in the middle, when only one is made, and on each side when there are two. These loggias serve for many uses, as to walk, eat in, and other recreations; and are either made larger or smaller; according as the bigness and conveniency of the fabrick requires; but, for the most part, they are not to be made less than ten foot wide, nor more than twenty.
Besides, all the well-contrived houses have in the middle, and in their more beautiful part, some places, by which all the others have a communication: these in the under part are called entries, and in the upper halls. These places are public. The entries are the first parts, except the loggias, which offer to those that enter the house, and are the most convenient for those to stay in who wait the master’s coming out, to salute or to do business with him. The halls serve for feasts, entertainments and decorations, for comedies, weddings, and such like recreations; and therefore these places ought to be much larger than the others, and to have the most capacious form, to the end that many persons may be commodiously placed, and see whatever is done there.12
One might have expected Palladio to have something more explict to say about the masterly spatial sequences in his beautiful villa at Masera, picked out elswhere in this book by David Lea as a prime example of architecture conditioned by the experience of movement (p. 74), but his description is short and understated, more interested in his hydraulic triumph:
That part of the fabric which advances a little forward has two orders of rooms. The floor of those above is even with the level of the court backwards, where there is a fountain cut into the mountain opposite to the house . . . This fountain forms a small lake, which serves as a fish pond. From this place the water runs into the kitchen; and having watered the gardens that are on the right and left of the road, which leads gradually to the fabric, it forms two fish ponds, with their watering places upon the high-road; from whence it waters the kitchen garden, which is very large, and full of the most excellent fruits, and of different kinds of pulse.13
Figure 1.1.1 Andrea Palladio, Villa Barbaro at Maser, elevation from Quattro Libri
1 Vitruvius 1960, p. 155.
2 O’Sullivan 2011, p. 80.
3 Ibid., p. 87, including his version of the Vitruvius quote.
4 Vitruvius 1960, p. 138.
5 Ibid., p. 154.
6 Ibid., pp. 72–3.
7 Alberti 1986 (reprint of 1755 Leoni edition), p. 84.
8 Ibid., p. 2.
9 Ibid., p 13.
10 Ibid., p. 19.
11 Palladio 1965 (reprint of 1738 Isaac Ware edition), p. 34.
12 Ibid., p. 27.
13 Ibid., p. 49 (Book II Ch. XIV).