The villas of Andrea Palladio have been among the most influential buildings in history. Drawing on the architect's original published legacy of forty-odd designs, George Hersey and Richard Freedman reveal the rigorous geometric rules by which Palladio conceived these structures. Where most earlier attempts to analyze the villas are mere lists of numbers and ratios that ignore space distribution, the present rules produce actual designs. Using a computer, the authors test each rule in every possible application, establishing a degree of validity not possible in ad hoc analyses. Progressing from the architect's most obvious to his subtlest ideas, the computer ultimately creates villa plans and facades that are stylistically indistinguishable from those of Palladio himself.Possible Palladian Villas opens the way to similar analyses of other such "paradigmatic" designs, whether Chinese screens, Greek temples, baroque churches, or Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Houses. In fact a new approach to architectural history emerges: we can study designs that a given master might have produced but did not. Palladio's actual buildings, along with those of his generations of imitators, are set into the context not only of a new theory but of a new type of theory.Along with the Macintosh disk that runs the program, Possible Palladian Villas will fascinate the design community and students of architectural style, symmetry, and geometry. It will fill architectural historians with bracing dismay.George Hersey is Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. Richard Freedman, who designed the computer program, is a product marketer working on MS-DOS at the Microsoft Corporation.
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About the Author
Matthew Paterson is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Keele University. He is author of Global Warming and Global Politics (1996) and Understanding Global Environmental Politics (2003), as well as many articles and book chapters on these subjects. He is currently working on cars and global environmental politics. He is Associate Editor of Global Environmental Politics.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Densely written,
By misterbeets "misterbeets" (Safe Harbor, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Possible Palladian Villas: (Plus a Few Instructively Impossible Ones) (Paperback)
An attempt to divine the mathematical rules governing room dimensions of Palladio's Renaissance buildings using computer software. One must give the author credit for the large amount of research involved, all documented in its extensive bibliography.
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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2
books
cite this book:
- The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio by Witold Rybczynski in Back Matter
- SITES 25 by Dennis L. Dollens on page 6
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