The Game with Death : a transgressive tradition of Villa Adriana

Abstract

Villa Adriana has long been hailed as poetry in architectural form. A world building project executed at the scale of landscape, it manipulated the very fabric of the earth with audacity, draining a river plain, conjuring valleys and precipices, cutting into soft tufa and drawing water like fine threadwork through the site. Famously inspiring Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn, architects have long looked at the pieces of this game and reconfigured them in tune to their interpretations. These volumes and axes, eternally in collision, taught them to play their own games with architecture. Thus began a transgressive tradition in architecture. With Hadrian, a politically and spiritually fraught figure, began the tradition of cultural and architectural transgressions upon this sprawling site; he challenged the boundaries of context and transcended them through cross-cultural play with form. The Villa is a riddle in space, quicksand magic. Its constant movement across space and time positions it as a game best kept out of the glass box of architectural history. This thesis argues that Villa Adriana is meant to be played with, for the game is infinite and can never be lost or won. While traversing Villa Adriana’s landscape in 1947, a young American writer, Eleanor Clark, wrote in her memoir that “Hadrian’s game was with Death.” Comparing it with the “childish whimsies” of Versailles, she intuitively felt Villa Adriana was an entirely different game – something grave, vast, unfathomable. If Versailles was one of life’s grand illusions, Villa Adriana encapsulated the very essence of it. This thesis will use Eleanor Clark’s words as a prompt to begin a world building exercise constructed using memory and phenomenological encounter, through a game in writing and drawing architecture.