Pochemuchka refers (in Russian) to a 'why-er', the kind of person who keeps on asking why - just about, well, everything. It is an ambivalent #wordoftheweek because on the one hand it's easy to be annoyed by a pochemuchka but, at the same time, we're all pochemuchka every once in a while. Kids tend to be more pochemuchka than adults, or more healthily pochemuchka at least, as the world of a kid tends to be rather full of wonders you haven't yet worked out. This plan of the Villa del Casale at Piazza Armerina, Sicily, is still able to turn architects of any age into pochemuchkas. It is just so difficult to understand where the formal stops, and where the functional begins (if ever). It is also infinitely baffling how Roman architecture - which, almost 20 centuries afterwards, we tend to consider one big indistinct lump - changed so radically after the introduction of a widespread use of concrete and the poche, rounded shapes it allows to produce. The villa dates to the early 4th century, when this kind of spatial solution was relatively diffused, but we do know that apses and niches were not that common at least until the 1st century - no private buildings in Pompeii show a similar degree of geometric flamboyance. It is said that perhaps the first instance of use of concrete for a non-infrastructural building was Nero's Domus Aurea (mid-60s). Of course it would be difficult to label the Domus Aurea as private, or even residential, architecture; but still, it might have been the first case this kind of technique was used outside of works of public interest - the heyday of concrete will start towards the beginning of the next century to climax in Hadrian's era. Roman architecture would never be the same. Even in the provinces, even in a relatively obscure building, the new technical possibilities would bring another language. Why? Remains the question. Why all those apses. Why all those conflicting axes. Why all those bizarrely shaped rooms. Why.
