ABSTRACT
The Villa Rosa, in the semirural outskirts of Alexandria near the Mason Neck National Wildlife Refuge, was created while Marco Frascari was G. Truman Ward Professor of Architecture at the Washington Alexandria Architecture Center. The corporeal demonstration evident in the Villa Rosa project is highly significant and ubiquitous, and it is the most important part of a multi-layered, imaginative and productive fantasy that Frascari employed to dream up the project. The figures on Frascari's drawings for the Villa Rosa are mutable and enigmatic, transubstantiating from human to wingless angel and vice versa. In "A New Angel/Angle in Architectural Research," Frascari cites the Hellenistic Tower of the Winds in the Roman Agora in Athens, an ancient horologion, combining a clepsydra and sundials. The angles used to set out cities have a significant influence on the orientation of buildings constructed within them. Drawings, Frascari writes, "must demonstrate the angelic image."
