The summer of 2001 saw a spate of architectural exhibitions. In New York City, there were two shows on Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one at the Whitney, the other at the Museum of Modern Art, as well as a Frank Gehry exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum. In addition, the Philadelphia Museum of Art held a major retrospective of the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
These exhibitions underline the fickle nature of architectural fame. Robert Venturi rattled the cage of modern architecture when he built an iconoclastic house (for his mother) in 1962 and followed it with Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, “probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture,” according to Vincent Scully. For the following two decades, Venturi was architecture’s most influential theorist. He advocated buildings that were rich in meaning and awareness of history, and he ridiculed formally monumental buildings, which he called “ducks,” proposing to replace them with “decorated sheds.” Two famous—or rather infamous—decorated sheds of the 1980s were Michael Graves’s gift-wrapped Portland Building and Philip Johnson’s Chippendale-topped AT&T office tower. What came to be known as postmodernism was all the rage, but it didn’t last; Graves went on to a sort of stylized classicism, and Johnson just went on—and on. As for Venturi and Scott Brown, their ironic combination of flattened decoration and mannered modernism never really caught on. Although they built some striking campus buildings and several high-profile museums, including the handsome Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, they also lost prominent commissions, notably the Staten Island ferry terminal and the new Philadelphia concert hall. They stuck to their guns, but it turned out that ducks—or rather titanium artichokes, in the case of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao—not decorated sheds, were what clients and the public wanted.
Frank Gehry is, of course, the architect du jour. The Guggenheim in Bilbao is not only at the cutting edge of architectural design but also a hit with the public. Hundreds of thousands of people have flocked to an obscure Basque industrial city, attracted by his extraordinary sculptural confection of titanium curves. If the new Guggenheim that he has designed for New York City is built, it will likely be a great success. Currently, Gehry occupies a unique position in the architectural world: he is a popular avant-gardist, or an avant-garde populist, I’m not sure which. This is unusual. All too often in the last seventy-five years, the architects most admired by other architects and the critics did not find favor with the public, which was unimpressed by bare concrete, unadorned brick walls, and steel-pipe railings. On the other hand, the crowd-pleasing works of Raymond Hood, architect of Rockefeller Center, Morris Lapidus, of Miami Beach hotel fame, and I. M. Pei, whose East Building of the National Gallery of Art is the most visited site in Washington, D.C., were pooh-poohed by the architectural cognoscenti.
Mies van der Rohe never achieved popularity. On the other hand, he had an architectural following, and the so-called Miesian style, in vogue throughout the 1950s, produced such distinguished offspring as Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, and Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center. However, by the time that Mies died in 1969, less really did seem a bore, as Venturi cheekily put it, and Mies’s brand of architectural minimalism was out of fashion. But fashion in architecture is no different from any other kind—it swings. The attention paid to Mies last summer is revealing. As a younger generation of architects works to reinvent modernism, it is the taciturn Mies—rather than the mercurial Corbusier, the flaccid Gropius, or the obscure Kahn—who stands out as the beau ideal.
This interest does not herald a return to Miesian architecture, however. Although every designer of a skyscraper owes a debt to Mies’s steel-and-glass high-rise buildings, his brand of Platonic idealism will not be taken up again by real estate developers, as it was in the 1950s. That moment has passed. Mies will continue to be venerated, and his buildings will be admired both for their beauty and for their pioneering influence, but already only thirty-two years after his death he is slipping into history. A hundred years from now the Seagram Building will still be a brooding presence on Park Avenue, and its architect will be remembered, the way that H. H. Richardson, say, or Louis Sullivan is remembered today. But what about three hundred years from now? The Seagram Building may survive—its curtain wall is, after all, bronze—but if Mies van der Rohe is remembered at all, it will likely be by historians, not by the general public, who will have forgotten what “Miesian” meant.
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For a durable architectural reputation, consider the long-lived influence of an architect who lived at the end of a very different revolutionary architectural period. Andrea Palladio, whom Paul Johnson has called the last of the true Renaissance architects, died in 1580. Thirty-three years after his death, there was no museum retrospective, but there was something much more important—a revival. Inigo Jones visited the Veneto, saw Palladio’s churches, palazzi, and villas, and as a result introduced Palladian classicism to Britain. Jones was a genius, and although only eight of his forty-six completed buildings have survived, masterworks such as the Banqueting House in Whitehall and the Queen’s House in Greenwich mark him as one of the world’s great architectural talents. More than a hundred years later, there was a second Palladian revival, led by Lord Burlington and architects such as Colen Campbell and William Kent. Its imprint on British architecture, particularly on country houses, was indelible, and a columned portico in the center of a house facade became the quintessential image of a country retreat. Meanwhile, Palladian buildings were springing up all over Europe, not only in his native Italy, but in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Russia. And a hundred years after that, when Thomas Jefferson was asked for architectural advice by a Virginia neighbor, he responded, “Palladio is the Bible. You should get it and stick to it.” Jefferson, whose entry in the architectural competition for the new President’s House in Washington, D.C., was a faithful rendition of a Palladio house—the Villa Rotonda—was a great admirer, as was George Washington, who included a beautiful Palladian window in Mount Vernon. Nor did Palladio’s influence stop there. The great Edwardian architect Sir Edwin Lutyens considered himself a Palladian, and Palladian motifs reappeared in twentieth-century classical buildings such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Frick Collection in New York City, and the Tennis House in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. And every American Colonial house with a pedimented porch, whether it is the Ewings’ fictional spread at Southfork or a suburban bungalow, owes a debt to Palladio.
The architect who wielded this long-lived influence lived and worked most of his life in Vicenza, a small city in the Venetian Republic. With the exception of two prominent churches in Venice—San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore—most of Palladio’s surviving work is either in Vicenza or, in the case of villas, scattered in far-flung locations in the Veneto countryside. Although Jones and Lord Burlington—and thousands of architects since—made pilgrimages to Palladio’s buildings, his designs and ideas became known chiefly as the result of his book, I quattro libri dell’architettura (The Four Books on Architecture). Palladio was hardly the first Renaissance treatise writer—he was preceded by Alberti, Filarete, Serlio, and Vignola, to name only the most prominent authors—but he had the greatest influence. This was due to a number of factors. Quattro libri is written in simple language. Its author was a seasoned practitioner who emphasized practical advice and avoided abstract theory. Above all, the book is full of images; almost every page contains an illustration. Architecture is a visual art, and Palladio provides abundant visual information: plans of buildings, elevations, sections, details, all carefully drawn and dimensioned.
Palladio’s first book describes the rudiments of architecture, not only construction techniques, but especially the five orders that form the basis of the classical style. The second and third books document his own designs for residential buildings and bridges. The fourth book is devoted to ancient temples. Palladio was not only an exceptional designer; he was an expert on ancient Roman architecture, and he devoted almost half of his treatise to a catalog of his surveys and reconstructions of ancient monuments. This was an invaluable source of information for any architect interested in studying the prototypes of classicism.
Book 2 had the greatest architectural influence. It is a catalog of fourteen palazzi and twenty-three villas. Although these are not theoretical projects but actual commissions that Palladio had built—or was in the process of building—they amount to an architectural manifesto. Palladio was a designer of enormous invention but also endowed with a sharp analytical mind. His buildings consisted of discrete elements—columned porticoes, curved loggias, pedimented porches. In the hands of a skilled architect like Jones, they could fuel designs that were entirely original and yet still recognizably Palladian. It is as if Palladio had magically unearthed an architectural gene that could be spliced and respliced by others to make apparently endless permutations. Moreover, he was a magician who explained his tricks. Quattro libri is full of simple formulas for laying out rooms (Palladio recommended seven pleasing shapes), calculating ceiling heights, and spacing columns. For generations of gentlemen amateurs, as well as professional architects, Palladio’s treatise served as dictionary, primer, and pattern book. The first American to own a copy was Thomas Jefferson.
Quattro libri was published in Venice in 1570, when Palladio was sixty-two. It was translated into Spanish, French, German, and Russian. There were several eighteenth-century English translations, the most accurate of which was by Isaac Ware, a distinguished Palladian architect. Ware’s 1738 edition became the standard English text, since 1965 available in an inexpensive paperback facsimile edition from the redoubtable Dover Publications.
The Ware translation has a number of serious limitations. The language is often stilted, and eighteenth-century spelling and typography make it inconvenient for the modern reader. For example: “If upon any fabrick labour and induftry may be beftowed, that it may be comparted with beautiful meafure and proportion; this, without any doubt, ought to be done in temples.” For the sake of convenience in printing, Ware placed the illustrations in groups, losing the concordance between text and drawings that characterized Palladio’s treatise. Lastly, he had his engravings copied directly from the original woodblocks, with the curious result that all his illustrations are mirror images of the originals. Because so many of Palladio’s plans and facades are symmetrical, this is less disturbing than it sounds, but it means that occasionally a plan shows a staircase on the left when it should be on the right or facing pages do not match. Moreover, Ware’s metal engravings have a somewhat spindly appearance compared with Palladio’s sturdy woodcuts.
Now, after more than 250 years, a superb new English translation of Quattro libri corrects all these defects, breathing new life into the architectural classic. Robert Tavernor, a professor of architecture at the University of Bath, who was a co-editor of a translation of Leon Battista Alberti’s On the Art of Building in Ten Books, and Richard Schofield, a professor of art history at the University of Nottingham, have produced a model of the scholarly translation. They have augmented the text with a thoughtful introduction, copious notes, a comprehensive bibliography, and a useful glossary. Their translation is more accurate than Ware’s and above all more readable. For example, the awkward sentence quoted above is now “If any building should have effort and labor expended on it, so that it is laid out with beautiful dimensions and proportions, then, doubtless, this should be done for temples.”
“Ultimately, it is the qualitative combination of purposeful words and readable images that has made Palladio’s Quattro libri an enduring source of inspiration,” Tavernor writes. He and Schofield use facsimile reproductions of the original woodcuts, and, equally important, they follow Palladio’s original graphic layout. In the treatise, the words and pictures for a particular project were usually on the same page, and full-page illustrations were arranged in specific sequences. The beautiful drawings of the Basilica in Vicenza, for example, were on facing pages, and small- and large-scale drawings of the same building complemented each other. Palladio was an artist, and reading his book was intended to be a visual as well as an intellectual experience. This translation re-creates the masterful and stimulating mix of words and pictures that their author intended.
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There is no doubt that Tavernor and Schofield’s translation will henceforth be the standard Quattro libri in English. By making Palladio more accessible—and more readable—they have increased the likelihood that yet another generation of architects and lovers of architecture will discover this Renaissance genius. On the other hand, it is also likely that the excellence of this new edition will unintentionally carry on what Douglas Lewis refers to as its “pernicious influences.” Lewis, the author of The Drawings of Andrea Palladio, gently indicts Quattro libri as a guide to Palladio’s own architecture on several counts. First, because Palladio regularized—and sometimes idealized—his designs for didactic purposes, the descriptions in the book do not correspond to the actual buildings. Second, the illustrations in the book are black-and-white, whereas Palladio’s buildings frequently incorporated color. Third, Palladio’s architecture is part of a preexisting context of surrounding buildings and landscape features, which the schematic illustrations in Quattro libri do not convey. Lastly, the rather crude woodcuts are a poor medium to communicate the subtle and often delicate quality of Palladio’s architecture.
Paradoxically, these limitations accounted for Palladio’s enduring appeal. An eighteenth-century rationalist, for example, could see Palladio as a kindred spirit. So could a twentieth-century modernist, who could imagine Palladio to have been a designer of monochrome, object buildings, a Platonic explorer of idealized geometry, of harmonic proportions and “pure” space, unconcerned with his immediate surroundings. Yet Palladio’s buildings “are not black and white; they are not flat and boldly outlined,” Lewis writes, “they do not sit on pristine, abstract, inviolate Euclidian planes, but instead are jostled and nudged and crowded in dense urban or agrarian contexts, which almost universally have never been measured, drawn, photographed, dated, or otherwise acknowledged to exist.”
The authority of Quattro libri rests on the incontrovertible fact that it was the book that Palladio himself compiled and whose publishing he oversaw. Whatever its limitations, this was the source of its power, a power that even Palladio’s surviving buildings could not dampen. Palladio’s buildings should overshadow his book, but they don’t. Partly this is because of their frequently remote locations. Moreover, many of his designs—even the Villa Rotonda, arguably the most famous private house in architectural history—were never completed or were completed by others. Not one of Palladio’s palazzi was built in its entirety, and even the great church of San Giorgio Maggiore was in large part unfinished at the time of Palladio’s death. And many of Palladio’s buildings have been destroyed. Only a small portion of the Carità convent, which Goethe considered Palladio’s best work, has survived. Of roughly thirty villas, only seventeen are more or less intact. For these reasons, the misplaced notion has arisen that the buildings documented in Quattro libri represent the “real” Palladio.
The aim of The Drawings of Andrea Palladio is to correct this view. Douglas Lewis is curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and in 1981 he organized an exhibition of more than a hundred Palladio drawings that was shown in the National Gallery and five other American museums. The annotated catalog that accompanied the exhibit has now reappeared in a larger format and vastly expanded form. Because there are no comparable books on Palladio’s drawings, it is an invaluable work. Published in a large format, on good-quality paper, the reproductions of the drawings in this splendid book are almost as good as the real thing, because most of Palladio’s original drawings are small, generally about eight by ten inches. In addition, the book contains numerous photographs of surviving buildings, floor plans, and illustrations from Quattro libri that can be studied side by side with the drawings. An exhaustive bibliography and a particularly thorough index complete the book.
Thanks to English collectors such as Inigo Jones and Lord Burlington, there are about 330 surviving drawings by Palladio, more than for any other Renaissance architect. They are not necessarily a typical cross section of his total output. About two-thirds are drawings of ancient buildings that he was going to use for additional books of his treatise (which he never completed). There are also drawings of early work and a few later projects. There are no construction drawings, however, as these were presumably destroyed through hard use. Some projects are described in preliminary sketches, allowing a glimpse into Palladio’s creative process; many others have no backup documentation. The most valuable drawings are of projects that do not appear in Quattro libri. Some, like the beautiful drawing of a new facade for the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, postdate the treatise. The palazzo had been damaged by fire in 1577, and Palladio, who was by then the semiofficial architect of the republic, proposed demolishing what remained of the structure and building anew (the Senate decided instead to restore the palazzo to its former state). Other drawings are of buildings, especially villas, that for one reason or another he did not include in the treatise. Such drawings enrich the Palladio oeuvre immeasurably and show that Palladio often reused unbuilt plans and that he developed motifs over the course of several buildings. They also show him to have been concerned with site planning and with fitting buildings to their surroundings. Lewis’s lively and opinionated accompanying text points out many interesting and previously ignored aspects of the great architect’s work.
Lewis’s most important discovery (or, rather, rediscovery, because the drawing was known two hundred years ago) concerns a drawing of the interior of the Villa Godi that Palladio made in 1550. The rooms of the Villa Godi, like so many Palladio villas, are richly frescoed. Architectural historians in the past assumed that these frescoes were entirely the work of the artists involved; some even considered the frescoes to be intrusions on Palladio’s architectural vision. “That aesthetic viewpoint has insisted (in broad terms) on a Palladian architecture of pure whitewashed spaces, proportionately conceived, and sparingly (if at all) decorated with stone moldings of rigorously chaste profile,” Lewis writes. The Godi drawing, which is in Palladio’s hand, shows a design for the fictive architectural elements that the painter Giambattista Zelotti later frescoed on the walls of the main room of the villa. In other words, the drawing establishes that Palladio designed the overall layout of the rich decor. Far from being extraneous, the frescoes were an integral part of his architectural design.
A striking feature of Palladio’s drawings, which, though severe, are very beautiful, is their modernity. Palladio used drawing to explore design in much the same way as do contemporary architects (computers excepted). There are thumbnail sketches, back-of-the-envelope diagrams, hurriedly drawn preliminary plans, and rendered presentation drawings. He might have been the last of the true Renaissance architects, but he was also the first modern professional. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Palladio was not trained as a painter or sculptor; he was a stonemason. Skilled in the practicalities of the building arts, versed in history, a student of ancient ruins, he was a zealous advocate of classicism as well as a restless and innovative designer. No wonder his influence was so long-lived.
This essay-review was written as I was working on a book about Palladio, The Perfect House. I came across Douglas Lewis’s book during my research, and I was taken by his approach: although he was an art historian, he described buildings not as isolated works of art but as products of specific conditions, sites, building technology, and clients. I later met Lewis at the National Gallery of Art, where he was a curator, and my own view of Palladio benefited greatly from his firsthand research and from that conversation.