I recently visited Italy on a trip with my family. Among our travels, we visited Vicenza, a jewel of the Veneto and a city shaped by 16th century architect Andrea Palladio. Two buildings projected forth in our experience; the celebrated Villa Rotonda and Palladio’s earlier project, the Basilica Palladian. These projects provided me with insight into Palladio’s drive towards the ideal, exemplified in the Villa, while revealing a rich negotiation between the ideal and the imperfect reality of city-making in the earlier Basilica.

In designing the Villa Rotonda, Palladio made a strikingly clear decision, setting the building perfectly at 45 degrees from north; the precise geometry conspicuous when viewing the aerial photograph (01). This move converts the building into something of a diamond, favouring a cardinal, absolute orientation over the given geometry of the site boundary. 

Where a conventional approach may favour a southern orientation to admit winter sun while shading higher level summer sun through projecting eaves, Palladio’s decision meant that every façade received sun. This confers a certain equity across the facades, the daylighting equivalent of the plan geometry, consistent in all orientations. It is a sunbaker, orienting itself towards the sun to gain a uniform tan; a sundial, with each façade registering the evolving lighting conditions across the day – the sedimentary quality of Palladio’s stone and plaster surfaces holding the colours of the day from golden light when in sun and transitioning to a blue tone in shade (03, 04). 

The perfectly symmetrical form yields a surprising variety of landscape conditions. To the north, an open lawn provides a clear presentation of the building on approach, while ensuring that afternoon sun to the primary facade is unobstructed by treescape. To the south, thicker vegetation is present, shading the setting and creating contrast. The space has a contained quality; with dwelling walls to two sides and retaining structure to the two other. The result is a highly defined space, like a court (05), in contrast to the open setting to the north (06).

While familiar imagery presents the Villa as a building in the round, set among gradually sloping lawns at the crest of a hill, the reality is that the siting required dramatic transformation of the topography. The south-east and south-west elevations, away from the gradual approach, are set significantly higher than natural ground. To achieve the desired symmetry and consistent length of the external stairs, Palladio manipulated the ground with substantial retaining walls. The south-western stair terminates abruptly, almost perversely, at the retaining wall, and the unusual effect of this gesture is that the outlook is elevated to provide immersion among the canopy, an unexpected and pleasurable dislocation (07). This has an unusually contemporary quality, the surroundings recontextualised through the manipulation of the ground. 

Colin Rowe described the project as an ‘ideal type of central building,’ ‘Mathematical, abstract, four square, without apparent function’.¹ Regardless of the consistent, idealised form of the Villa, the context is inevitably varied. The absoluteness serves to reveal that variation, the control in the experiment, the frame that reveals the difference. The aspiration for the absolute requires a degree of negotiation with the specificity of the site – the site is always present in a realised work, because the site is part of the world, and the world is never neutral.

In addition to the inevitability of negotiation with the site, a second insight revealed through visiting the Villa was the presence of the intensely decorative interior (08), contrasting to the relatively subdued envelope. Conveniently omitted from the popular narrative, even excused, and perhaps jarring against the anticipated restraint, each interior surface and detail is exploited as an opportunity for pattern and decoration. This combination was strategic; the reductive exterior provided a discrete presence within the rural setting, avoiding an excessive display of wealth, while the interior held the treasure. It displays an Italian commitment to beauty and pleasure, by contrast to our deeply-grained Australian pragmatism.

When Rowe characterised the building’s rules-based geometrical ordering as a precursor to modernist abstraction, he perhaps shifted the course of interpretation away from a potential alternative emphasis; the combination of abstract exterior and decorative interior. Can we construct an alternative narrative that celebrates this combination; externally reductive buildings with expressive and materially rich interiors, where pattern (09), as a tool of human connection and receptacle of identity, is activated?

As we enjoyed the city of Vicenza, experience of a second building offered further understanding and surprise; the glorious Basilica Palladiana (10), the centrepiece building of the town, somehow absent from my university studies. The Basilica was Palladio’s first public project, commenced in 1546, some nineteen years prior to commencement of the Villa Rotonda and only eight years into his architectural career.

While less overt in nature than the Villa, it offers contemporary relevance, as an example of resourceful, city-making, adaptive re-use. It is a building with a sense that it gives to the buildings around it, bestowing the adjacent squares, the larger Piazza dei Signori and smaller Piazza delle Erbe, with a grandeur and anchoring quality.

Palladio named the structure a ‘Basilica’, drawing upon the earlier Roman interpretation of the name as a place of civic focus, a more open-ended programmatic descriptor and perhaps a catch-all for a rich combination of civic and commercial activities; a container that in contemporary terminology may be considered a ‘hybrid building’. Loose fit, simple in configuration, with a clear span upper level and gridded ground floor, the building offers flexibility and a capacity for reappropriation over time, proven over the centuries. The walls of the central hall extend above the upper loggia roof, framing the inside edge of an elevated terrace. The vaulted roof has a near semicircular profile, constructed from a series of arched beams with fine steel ties, informed by shipbuilding technology of the period.

The project displays an intense negotiation with the given attributes of the city, indeed comprising the adaptive re-use of an existing 15th century structure. The original structure was slightly irregular in geometry, likely in response to the incremental development of the surrounding built form. Palladio applied a loggia of uniform width, preserving and offsetting from the irregular geometry (11, 12). This irregularity however, is not overly apparent when experienced on the ground – the sense of perfect order is preserved. To the eastern end, the existing building was constructed to the boundary, conjoined with an adjacent building, precluding the possibility of constructing a building in the round. The loggia, returning to the three available sides, holds a sense of unrealised intention for a completed form. The fact that Palladio elected to publish the idealised plan in Quattro Libri (13) would seem to support this. Palladio’s desire for the ideal was challenged by the condition of the predetermined city and this enabled another of his design characteristics to be present, resourcefulness.

Palladio extended the new loggia beyond the alignment of the existing structure, preserving a sense of symmetry with the opposite end; the loggia extending one bay beyond the vaulted roof form when viewed from any direction. This gesture is facilitated by the offset of the adjacent Torre Bissara, which preceded the Basilica. Palladio carefully returned the façade ordering into the narrow void, a sleight of hand that maintains the volumetric integrity – perhaps the most underrated example of a ‘shadowline’ in architectural history.

To the opposite, southern corner, the uniform offset of the loggia results in an unusually close proximity to the adjacent buildings, a width of some 900mm at the column base. Despite this, Palladio did not compromise, instead working with the depth of architectural expression, maintaining the projection of cornice elements above, which appear to come within a few hundred millimetres of the neighbouring wall. The result is a slightly uncanny urbanistic disjunction. This proximity, in conjunction with the abrupt termination of the stair at the Villa, gives the distinct sense that Palladio was not afraid to challenge the site constraints, to exploit all available parameters to maximise the architectural effect.

The project is essentially an overlaid screen, or cloak, re-presenting the existing building. The limited scope of the project may have focused Palladio’s effort on the resolution of the façade, recognising the scope of his opportunity to display his potential. The end bays of the loggia are narrower than the intermediate, and Palladio accommodated this discretely through a combination of uniform arch and varying pilaster width. One can suppose that the width of the loggia was determined by the desired offsets from adjacent structures to north and south corners, effectively limiting the loggia depth and therefore the end bay width. The intermediate bay width was governed by the structural grid of the original building, hence resulting in differing end and intermediate bay widths. Palladio’s resolution, accommodating the variation in the secondary element while enabling uniformity of the primary element, demonstrates his capacity for practical, elegant resolution.

Palladio’s cloak is absent a central emphasis, instead providing a uniform treatment that contributes to it’s object presence. The perimeter colonnade invites entry at any point, in contrast to the defined approaches to the portico of the Villa. In contemporary design, retail consultants may advise against colonnades, due to the distance created between the pedestrian and the shopfront, the layering of elements causing visual obstruction between customer and products. At the Basilica, an alternative objective is present; to invite the citizen into participation, supporting the public function of the building.

A final insight is revealed when appreciating that the Basilica (14) was likely informed by another project, the 13th century Palazzo della Ragione (15) of nearby Padua. Born in Padua and a lifelong resident of the Veneto, Palladio was clearly familiar with the Palazzo, it’s centrepiece presence, flamboyant vaulting, commercial undercroft and vaulted hall above, all elements that recur in the later Basilica. A picture emerges of Palladio as the great refiner, identifying the potential of the Palazzo, integrating it’s achievements but achieving a fuller resolution in the Basilica.

Where the Palazzo contains a loggia to the two long sides only, Palladio extended this gesture to the perimeter, suppressing the presence of the end wall, which presents awkwardly as a secondary, less-resolved element at the Palazzo. Where the Palazzo contains a single storey awning at the frontage, mercantile in tone and suggestive of a permanent market stand; Palladio presumably recognised the compromise that this imposed upon the primary façade and omitted this element from the Basilica.

In addition to refinement of the façade, Palladio refined the section of the building (16). Where at Padua, the loggia is capped by a roof, a terrace is provided at Vicenza. Palladio identified the programmatic potential of the section, creating an incredibly pleasurable roof terrace. The walls of the hall extend above the terrace, creating the peculiar sense of being elevated within the city, but adjacent a single storey building. Again, the effect is one of recontextualization, enlivening the experience of the site and broadening the spectrum of experience of the city.

There are many lessons to be discovered in these buildings; historical architecture offers a rich well of sources, problems addressed and opportunities discovered, analagous to contemporary practice and relevant today. The negotiation between the ideal and the actual is an inevitable consideration in practice, where optimal configurations are applied to a specific site, requiring strategies to achieve clarity within the contingencies; site boundary, easements, permissible envelope, adjacent buildings, established urban pattern. This dynamic is present in the Villa Rotonda, Basilica Palladian and it’s precursor the Pallazo della Ragione – a drive towards improvement that transcends time and place. The technique of cloaking, as demonstrated at the Basilica, is a radical approach that can expand our range of adaptive re-use. The capacity for these buildings to be re-purposed over time demonstrates their endurance, supporting an argument for simple, yet materially rich buildings. Can we discover an approach to architecture that holds some of this material richness and charm, while incorporating appropriate high performance technologies, to create buildings that will endure for many generations? Lastly, can we integrate the potential of pattern, an affirmation of beauty and pleasure, drawing from the rich well of history to inform current directions?

References:

¹ Rowe, C. (1976). The mathematics of the Ideal Villa, and other essays. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, p2.

Image Sources:

01, 11, 14, 15.  Google Maps.

02, 12, 16.  Drawing by Jade Ma, Architecture AND.

03-08, 10.  Photographs by Author.

09.  Sketch by Author.

13.  Quattro Libri Della Architectura.