The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio [Paperback]

Italian Renaissance architect and architectural theorist Palladio (1508-1580), whose superb and influential buildings helped define the renaissance, has been lucky in his commentators. Palladio's unique way of relating art to nature and architecture to surrounding natural forms in order to reinvent ancient classicism has been well described in such previous books as Vincent Scully's The Villas of Palladio. Now Rybczynski (The Look of Architecture, etc.), the University of Pennsylvania professor of urbanism and Wharton Business School professor of real estate, offers a confident look at his own touristic visits to the surviving Palladian villas: 17 out of around 30 remain, such as the Villa Rotunda in Vicenza and the Villa Foscari at Malcontenta. In 10 concise chapters devoted to these and other villas, Rybczynski proves a deeply able and aptly enchanted guide. Actually renting Villa Saraceno at Finale di Agugliaro, he describes in detail how careful proportions foster a sense of "well-being" and make the small villa seem "palatial" "almost like being outside." While Rybczynski doesn't quite generate the personal interest that normally drives a travel diary, his careful observations of everything from climatic conditions to fender benders will have readers eagerly following in his footsteps and finding traces of Palladio everywhere. Illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

One of our most original, accessible, and stimulating writers on architecture builds on some of his earlier, and more personal, publications (e.g., Home: A Short History of an Idea) to offer an appreciation of the residential work of Andrea Palladio (1508-80). Pointing out in the preface that much of the most persistent architectural symbolism associated with houses derives from Palladio's villas, the author provides a detailed analysis, both historical and architectural, of ten of the 30 villas attributed to the architect. With its intriguing biographical detail, precise descriptions of design elements, and engaging insights into daily life in the 16th century, Rybczynski's book is a small but lasting gift to the reader. Despite the sparse illustrations, which consist of plans and elevations from Palladio's own publications and of fine freehand drawings by the author, this volume is an excellent companion to James S. Ackerman's Palladio. For more illustrated material, Manfred Wundram's Andrea Palladio, 1508-1580: Architect Between the Renaissance and the Baroque and Andrea Palladio: The Complete Illustrated Works are essential. Nevertheless, any collection with titles on Palladio or residential architecture should acquire this. Paul Glassman, New York Sch. of Interior Design Lib.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Modern architects are more and more often finding fame as builders of personal houses, instead of from the building of public buildings and spaces. Perhaps the very first architect who found fame almost exclusively through the building of privately owned homes was Palladio, who designed villas in the countryside around Venice and Vicenza, Italy, in the sixteenth century. Rybczynski, a professor of architecture, finds himself smitten with Palladio and the greatness of his work. He takes a tour of his villas, carefully describing each one, and deftly interweaves the story of Palladio's life. And Palladio's villas, though generally small in scale, have had a big influence on some of the best known landmark buildings (and grand private residences) around the world: the White House, Buckingham Palace, and Monticello--all of them derive some of their architectural motifs from Palladio's influence. Rybczynski's fascination comes from the fact "that a handful of houses should have made their presence felt hundreds of years later and halfway around the globe is extraordinary. It makes Palladio the most influential architect in history." Michael Spinella
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Ross King author of Brunelleschi's Dome [A] wonderfully informative and evocative guide to both the elegant rooms of Palladio's villas and the fascinating history of how a humble stonemason from Padua became one of the most influential architects of all time.

The Philadelphia Inquirer Rybczynski has applied all his usual grace, style, and curiosity to explore an important chapter of domestic history.

Los Angeles Times Rybczynski's clear description of what he sees and his lucid explanations of Palladio's ideas and methods enable the reader to see and understand the essence of this architect's accomplishments.

The New York Times Evocative, compelling, charming, The Perfect House is the perfect traveling companion.

"Palladio is the Bible," Thomas Jefferson once said. "You should get it and stick to it." With his simple, gracious, perfectly proportioned villas, Andrea Palladio elevated the architecture of the private house into an art form during the late sixteenth century -- and his influence is still evident in the ample porches, columned porticoes, grand ceilings, and front-door pediments of America today.

In The Perfect House, bestselling author Witold Rybczynski, whose previous books have transformed our understanding of domestic architecture, reveals how a handful of Palladio's houses in an obscure corner of the Venetian Republic should have made their presence felt hundreds of years later and halfway across the globe. More than just a study of one of history's seminal architectural figures, The Perfect House reflects Rybczynski's enormous admiration for his subject and provides a new way of looking at the special landscapes we call "home" in the modern world.

Witold Rybczynski, born in Edinburgh, raised in Canada, and currently living in Philadelphia, is the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written on architecture and urbanism for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and Slate, and is the author of the critically acclaimed Home and the A Clearing in the Distance, a biography of frederick Law Olmsted, for which he was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. He is the recipient of the National Building Museum’s 2007 Vincent Scully Prize.

I

Godi

Forty miles northwest of Venice, the flat plain that starts on the shore of the Adriatic runs abruptly into the base of the Dolomitic Alps. The foothills village of Lugo Vicentino overlooks the Astico River, whose broad valley must have been pretty once but is now an unsettled quilt of cultivated fields and large manufacturing sheds. The mixture of agriculture and industry is apparent in the La Casara restaurant, where I'm surrounded by a noisy crowd of farmers and factory workers enjoying their lunch hour.

After an excessive meal, which raises again the puzzle of how Italians get anything done in the afternoon, I take a stroll. The restaurant is on the outskirts of the village. The houses here are too new to be picturesque, but the neat buildings and well-kept gardens attest to the prosperity of the region. The suburban landscape is dotted with agricultural remnants: a renovated farmhouse, a stone barn, a fenced piece of pasture. At the edge of the built-up area the ground rises steeply and I can see the bare branches of an orchard. Farther up the hill, behind a forsythia hedge that is already blooming, a large rectangular building with a red-tile roof commands the scene. This is what I've come to see -- Palladio's Villa Godi. Although Renaissance country houses are commonly referred to as villas, this use of the term is modern. In the sixteenth century, la villa referred to the entire estate; the house itself was la casa padronale (the master's house), or more simply la casa di villa.

I drive my rented car up the winding road. "Placed on a hill with a wonderful view and beside a river" is how Palladio described the house, and despite its industrial excrescence the Astico valley still presents a spectacular vista. The house sits on a man-made podium circumscribed by an imposing stone retaining wall. The curving, battered wall resembles a medieval bastion; the sturdy building, with its compact mass and severe symmetry, likewise has a military bearing. At first glance it could be an armory or a garrison post. As one gets closer, two features soften its severity: the plastered walls, which are painted a faded but cheerful buttery yellow and resemble old parchment, and an arcaded loggia, which is recessed into the center of the building and creates a shaded and welcoming entrance.

The caretaker lets me in through a large wrought-iron gate and I follow a path across the podium. The gravel crunches agreeably underfoot. The lawn is planted with conifers clipped into spheres and pyramids. A fountain, whose centerpiece is a statue of a nymph surrounded by cavorting cherubs, sprays water into a pool. I give her a sideward glance and hurry through the garden to the house.

The villa, which did not look large from a distance, turns out to be immense, almost as tall as a modern five-story building. The plain plastered walls are relieved by a regular pattern of windows with stone frames and slightly different details: a heavy bracketed sill for the lowest floor; a delicately modeled sill for the main level; and a plain surround for the attic. Square windows are pushed up against an elegant cornice just under the shallow eaves. The cornice is supported by a row of little repetitive blocks, a detail adapted from ancient Roman temple eaves decorations called modillions. These are the only classical references in this otherwise undecorated and austere façade.

"The master's rooms, which have floors thirteen feet above ground, are provided with ceilings," Palladio wrote, "above these are the granaries, and in the thirteen-foot-high basement are placed the cellars, the places for making wine, the kitchen, and other similar rooms." This pragmatic stacking of warehouse and domestic uses originated in Venice, where land was scarce. The tall Godi "basement" is entirely aboveground, so a long straight stair leads to the loggia. This spacious outdoor room faces west, which must give splendid views of sunsets over the peaks of the altipiano but leaves the main façade of the house exposed to the hot afternoon sun. It is unclear why Palladio turned the building this way -- the preferred orientation was southern, and that view was equally fine. It may have had to do with how one originally arrived at the villa, since old maps show a long, straight approach road climbing the hill from the west. Or it may be explained by the fact that the villa is believed to incorporate parts of a medieval house that already existed on the site. The citizens of the Venetian Republic had a reputation for penny-pinching, if not outright parsimony, and new houses were frequently built on top of old ones in order to save money by reusing foundations and walls.

The intonaco, or plastered stucco, of the walls shows marks where it was once incised to simulate the joints of stone construction. The entry in my old edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica claims that Palladio's buildings were originally "designed to be executed in stone." In fact, none of Palladio's country houses are built of stone; all are brick covered in plaster, which was the standard method of construction for rural buildings. The jointing pattern, which is faint today but was prominent when the house was built, was not meant to deceive. Like the wooden faux-stonework of George Washington's Mount Vernon, it produces a sense of scale as well as a pleasing decorative texture.

Not all the masonry is simulated. The most distinctive feature of the house is the three-arch loggia whose square piers, arches, and imposts from which the arches spring are all faced with stone. Two carved stone emblems adorn the wall above the loggia: an armorial shield with imperial eagles, symbols of the owner's nobility, and a rampant lion, the stemma, or coat of arms, of the Godi family. An inscription on the tablet below reads HIERONYMUS GODUS HENRICI ANTONII FILIUS FECIT ANNO MDXLII (Built by Girolamo Godi, son of Enrico Antonio, in the year 1542). The Godis, one of the most powerful and wealthy patrician families of Vicenza, owned large estates in the Vicentino. When the patriarch Enrico Antonio died in 1536, he bequeathed the lands in common to his three sons (the fourth was a priest). Girolamo took charge of the Lugo holdings, more than five hundred acres, which included the hilltop of Lonedo, where he started to build a villa the following year.

Small doors lead directly from the loggia to rooms on either side, but the large door in the center is obviously the main entrance. PROCUL ESTE PROFANI is carved into the stone frame. "Keep the unholy far away" may have been intended tongue in cheek, since the Godis were known to have had heretical tendencies. ET LIBERA NOS A MALO -- "And deliver us from evil" -- completes the sentiment on the inside. I read the interior inscription later, for when I open the door my attention is immediately arrested by the grand space -- as Palladio, no doubt, intended. The cavernous room rises up to the roof -- about twenty-five feet -- and extends all the way to the rear of the house. This is the sala, or hall. The sala, which originated in medieval times, was a common feature of Venetian country houses. Always the largest room in the house, it was neither an entrance vestibule nor a living room, but a formal social space, "designed for parties, banquets, as the sets for acting out comedies, weddings, and similar entertainments," Palladio wrote. The sala in the Villa Godi is lit by a large window, a triple opening with a semicircular arch in the center called a serliana. This end of the sala extends slightly beyond the rest of the house, and the additional narrow windows on the two sides give the effect of a large bay window, which not only illuminates the room but also affords views of the garden below.

The sala is flanked by eight large rooms -- four on each side. Six of the rooms are identical, two are slightly smaller to make room for the staircases; the large rooms are each about eighteen by twenty-eight feet. This seems like a lot of space, but the bachelor Girolamo shared the villa with his brothers and their families. There are no corridors; instead, each room opens directly into the next. The doors and windows are exactly lined up so that standing in one of the rooms with my back to a window, I can look through four sets of open doors and see the corresponding window on the opposite side of the house. The stair, the loggia arcade, the front door, the sala, and the serliana are likewise carefully aligned. These precise geometrical relationships give the interior a sense of calm and repose. Everything appears in its place.

I walk around the house, or rather slide since I am obliged to wear felt slippers to reduce wear on the floors. These are battuto, an early version of terrazzo, made by slathering a mixture of lime, sand, and powdered brick across the floor, pressing milled stone chips into the hardening mixture with heavy rollers, then grinding smooth and oiling the surface. There are no other visitors, and the caretaker has left me alone. I swish from room to room. The doorways are low and the unpretentious doors of simple plank construction have wrought-iron strap hinges. The identical windows incorporate a charming feature: facing stone seats that transform them into little conversation nooks. The flat ceilings are supported by closely spaced wooden beams with ornamental carvings on the underside. The only room with a plaster ceiling is in the southeast corner of the house, a privileged position that gets the morning sun, summer and winter, and probably belonged to Girolamo.

The Godi house, which was begun about 1537, has the distinction of being Palladio's first villa; indeed, as far as we know, it was his first independent commission. The novice had moments of clumsiness, particularly in the front façade. The recessed entrance bay, for example, while welcoming, has a large section of blank wall over the loggia, which the heraldic coats of arms do not quite fill. The external staircase rise...