The classical ideal-Palladio's architectural vision

Palladian Design: The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected is a compact and thought-provoking exhibition that operates on several levels which subtly and surprisingly intersect. The raw materials are the commonly encountered artefacts, such as plans and elevations of buildings, books, models, photographs and short videos. The items are overseen by an eighteenth-century bust of Palladio, one of the many that helped in putting a face to the Renaissance architect. The exhibition stands out for the temporal and spatial ground covered: from the 16 th century to the present day, and from the original Veneto to England, to American colonies and the Indian subcontinent. The visitor expecting an immersion into Palladio's design and drawings, such as in the 2009 Royal Academy exhibition commemorating his quincentenary, will be disappointed. This exhibition focuses instead on what happened after Palladio's lifetime: the development of Palladianism as an architectural language that, the curators claim, is still spoken today with its contemporary inflections in places distant from the original Veneto. Given the compact format of RIBA exhibitions this is a tall order, yet the curators, Charles Hind and Vicky Wilson, tackle it boldly, following two exploratory strands: how Palladianism became a British architectural landmark and how Palladio's design principles are still relevant for present day practising architects.This twofold aim was attempted by choosing interpretation as the working concept for the display. Interpretation accommodates processes such as invention, understood both as discovery and mere invention-gimmickry, idealisation, adaptation, patterning, taking liberties with the prototype, forfeiting practical over aesthetical matters, and abstracting. Each process achieves various degrees of success, originality and distinctness, and is worthy of consideration, especially when dealing with Palladio. Moreover, as a conceptual framework, interpretation leads itself to a thematic display, yet this exhibition is still largely chronologically ordered. It begins with viewing Palladio's design as revolutionary and ends with as eternally contemporary. Notwithstanding, the terms Palladian and Palladianism are not explicitly defined in this exhibition; neither is Palladio's work comprehensively presented. Visitors have to hold on to the tripartite structure of the exhibition: 'Revolution', 'Evolution' and 'Eternally Contemporary' in order to assay for themselves all possibilities of interpretative interactions with the past design and theory that claim legible links to Palladio. The audacious action of engaging the visitor in the process of interpretation is highly

2009

Ego, 2011

Andrea Palladio has shaped the development of European architecture as no other architect of the Italian Renaissance. More than two hundred years after his death he was still regarded as an undoubted authority. The cultural transfer between Italy and England played an essential role in this success. From the early 17th century English architects regarded Palladio's work as the epitome of a classical architecture modelled on the ancient world. Palladianism spread from England to Germany, and then to Northern Europe and the United States, where, despite changes in aesthetic views, it continued to exercise a strong influence well into the 19th century.

Architectural History 65, 2022

This article demonstrates that the most celebrated building designed by Andrea Palladio, widely known as the Villa Rotonda and begun around 1566, was left only partially constructed at the time of the architect's death in 1580 and that, as a villa design, it was neither perfect nor ideal. Drawing on detailed records of the construction work carried out in the 1590s, the article shows that much of the villa was constructed or altered after Palladio died, in significant part so as to deal with practical difficulties and deficiencies inherent in the design originally published in Palladio's treatise. Scholars in general have come to recognise that the Villa Rotonda is something of a palimpsest. However, it has not been properly understood that the building was largely constructed not as an adjusted scheme devised by Palladio, but rather as a strategically revised concept for a villa developed after Palladio's time by Vincenzo Scamozzi. This preserved something of the original scheme as a hilltop belvedere-especially its outward appearance as a domed and isolated block with four near-identical porticoes-but it adapted what had been built, which was far from complete, to a much more practical vision of the requirements of rural life. What was built during this later period then remained intact until the late eighteenth century.

8th Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics, 2021

Our research focuses on architectural design and its close examination in the contemporary post-alphabetic era. According to the interpretive scheme suggested by Vilém Flusser, the evolution of writing is divided into three periods, each of which corresponds to a specific different type of thinking: pre-alphabetic era – mythical thinking, alphabetic era – linear thinking, post-alphabetic era – digital thinking. Any significant change to the fields of the written form of thinking, any significant change to the structure of retaining-the-meaning-in-signs, redefines the aesthetics of an era and always affects the basic principles and terms of architectural design. Our research refers mainly to the 1980s, when the history of architecture and writing took a decisive turn. The basic reasons of this turn were the emergence and fast spread of digital media, networks and personal computers, as well as of the computer aided design software. Moreover, during the same period, the dominant strategies of Deconstruction intended to abolish, as far as architecture is concerned, the recognizable classes, the typological catalogues and the compositional processes. During the turmoil of the above changes, Peter Eisenman declared the end of the centuries-old dominant aesthetics of the classical, an aesthetics that managed to remain active up until Late Modernism. We suggest that this aesthetics brought forth, [hervorbringen] while also being brought forth by, an evolving, yet invariable in its general principles, linear- alphabetic thinking. In architecture, the familiarity of this linear thinking was presented as a certain familiarity of dwelling. By exploring the architectural design after the end of the aesthetics of the classical towards the consolidation of a post-alphabetic type of retaining-the-meaning, now expressed through digital items, we study the new boundaries, delimited as they are by a multitude of unfamiliar elements, of architectural design in the domain of the contemporary digital media.

Spatium, 2019

Palladio?s heritage has aspects that are interrelated with the vernacular architectural heritage of the Mediterranean, and it entails a collective knowledge. The aim of this research is to analyse his work and its evolution over time, paying specific attention to three architectural design elements: the patio, the portico and the atrium in relation to their proportions and ratios. This work will highlight how geometry shapes the space and the form of these three elements, producing architecture for well-being. The main results may constitute a possible new frontier of research where these three design elements make a connection between interior and exterior spaces, strengthen a greater visibility of the geometry, create ?intermediate spaces? and enhance the idea of a ?Continuous Monument?. The paper will underline how mathematical factors such as proportions, ratios and constructive geometry, together with climatic reasons, are important in architecture for both its configuration an...

Architectural History, 2015

The enduring concept of the orders was fundamental to the perpetuation of the classical tradition, and it is central to much architectural theory. One of the most resoundingly influential of its elucidations was published in 1570 by Andrea Palladio (1508–80) in the opening book of his architectural treatise, the Quattro libri dell'architettura (Four Books of Architecture). There, as in other theoretical works from around this period and later, the five orders — Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite — are presented as a hierarchy of purportedly ideal exemplars; and, in this particular case, their universal ‘principles’ (precetti) are conveyed through two sets of illustrations, one depicting colonnades (Fig. 1) and the other arcades (Fig. 2), together with many further plates showing various individual details. In each of the main illustrations, the specimen is given its own designated proportions of column-diameter to column-height, ranging from 1:7 for Tuscan to 1:10 fo...