The Unified Plan of the House of the Faun

The theory that the House of the Faun, as it is known from the excavations at Pompeii, was the product of at least two successive building phases meets serious problems when the plan of the house is considered as a whole. The following analysis of the ground plan reveals a work of architecture that seems extraordinarily unified in its design, hence unlikely to have been implemented in separate phases. Elements of the atrium plans (those supposedly created in the first phase) appear to be so clearly subordinated to the planning of the insula as a whole (the putative second phase), that it is hard to imagine them as part of a presumably earlier building phase separate from the one that comprises the central peristyle in its entirety. Even more indicative of a unified plan is the consistent use of the 4:5 rectangle in three of the four major features of the house-from the subdivision of the insula as a whole to the proportioning of the Tuscan atrium.