Fuoco amico 05 – Palladio. Instructions for use

ISSN 2385-2291

Fuoco Amico

October 2017

Palladio

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This special edition of the issue #5 of "Fuoco amico" is addressed and reserved to the students of Politecnico di Milano School of Architecture Urban Planning Construction Engineering Master of Science degree Architecture - Built Environment, Interiors Program year: 1 Academic year 2017-18, fall semester ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN STUDIO #1 Professors Alessandro Rocca (Architectural Design) Marco Bianconi (Urban Design) Enrico Molteni (Elements of Architectural Typology) Tutors Maria Feller, Julia Filatova, Marta Geroldi, Federica Rasenti, Elizaveta Sudravskaya, Francesca Zanotto

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Milano, official urban development plan with the main areas of transformation.

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A Preamble: from Palladio to Garden City

Around the half of the sixteenth century, a number of factors contribute to reduce the maritime supremacy of the Republic of Venice: British naval military dominance contrasts with Venetian influence in the Mediterranean; the opening up of the new trades to the Americas limits the importance of relations with the Near East; and the consolidation of stronger centralized national states, such as Spain, France and England, permanently changes European balances and relegates the economic and commercial system of the Mediterranean basin to a marginal role. In the

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same years, agriculture seeks to develop knowledge and techniques that improve soil productivity and products’ quality, and transform it from livelihood to the driving economy sector.

It is under these conditions that the patricians of the Serenissima, for the first time, turn to the hinterland with a capillary action of appropriation, reorganization and occupation of the lands, establishing a new regime of the territory based on the architectural type of the villa, a building that combines two different functionalities. On the one hand, it is the residence of the owners of the agricultural fund, and it must represent its social role and satisfy its needs, in terms of comfort and prestige. On the other hand, it is a directional and logistic hub that, in direct contact with the places and activities of production, carries out functions related to cultivation.

Thus, in the Sixteenth Century Venetian Republic, new ideas were needed, capable of combining the new principles of Renaissance architecture with the modernization of the countryside: the first examples fail to set precise charges and oscillate between the simple replication of citizen palaces or models confined to rural habits.

The satisfactory architectural answer, to this new evolution of Venetian society, has come from the

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design work of Andrea Palladio, who, in front of this new picture, develops a new architectural device derived directly from the in-depth study, in texts and in situ, of Roman architecture. The invention of Palladio has manifested in a very rapid process, and it is immediately validated by high quality realizations, both technically and economically, with immediate effect. This success results from a new and original compositional system based on known elements: the critical and creative review of another historical heritage. Ideas, images and rules of Palladio's theory don't come from the Venetian local culture, which was also in possession of a specific, and different, heritage of great value and strong identity, but from an intense appropriation of the Roman classical heritage.

We want to take this example of the history of architecture, so important, and so widely known, to advance a parallel with the current situation of the city of Milan. As everyone knows, in recent years the city center has been invested by complex and extensive transformations that have seen the emergence of new neighborhoods, new downtowns, new circulation public spaces. This rapid and often impetuous process, which sprang over twenty years ago, seems to be destined to continue with other

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important and large fields of intervention such as the former Expo, the areas now still occupied by the State University in the CittĂ Studi neighborhood, the system of the seven partially dismantled rail yards, the abandoned enclave of Bovisa and other suburban large and uncertain domains.

In these processes, those just past and those that are ongoing right now, the role of architectural design is of enormous importance. The new buildings have often been designed by world-renowned architects, international firms and the best Milanese professionals, and they are now being imposed on the city with their new images that are, in principle, highly characterized by belonging to a generic repertoire. That is, compositional and constructive modes that are very similar in all rapidly changing urban contexts, independently from their cultural and material characters. In this application of tastes, habits, and modes determined by an updated version of the International Style, we are experiencing, here in Mialn, a problem: that is, we note that such important transformations use randomly selected architectural references and, more precisely, that they are imposed by virtue of their proven planetary diffusion, acceptance and success.

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Tempio di Giove Statore, Rome; from Palladio A., I quattro libri dell'architettura, Venezia 1570, Libro quarto, p. 69.

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Our objection doesn't have any vernacular bias, since we do not believe that the new architecture of Milan should resume, or retain, or remember, the peculiar characters of the town’s architectural tradition. We believe, however, that the Milanese architectural culture, with its strong peculiarities and skills, should be met with the challenge of these rapid changes by proposing new architectural models.

We think that it is also necessary and urgent that to open a communication, that is now closed, between the image of these buildings and a reflection about the social condition and perspectives, which help to renew the criteria for the location and use, typologies and technologies, of the new Milanese architecture.

Therefore, we propose to address the design of one of these areas of transformation from a non-local tradition, that of Palladian architecture, and to apply it to the needs and possibilities of future Milan. It is therefore a theoretical forced, apparently unnatural in-vitro process, which follows the same route that took to the application of the principles of Roman architecture, drawn by Vitruvius and above all by the real innumerable exempla, to the architecture of the Italian cities of the sixteenth century. A forced, colonial practice based on an intellectual program,

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as it was the transposition of classical principles of Roman architecture in the Venetian countryside.

We believe that this effort, to be made with wide shut eyes to the today's conditions, will lead us to a new awareness of project tools, highlighting formal potentialities and a new typological wealth. The aim of this strategy is to obtain a clear impact in the construction of a part of the city, bringing it out of the international anonymity. We think of buildings and places which will not be necessary addressed, as in some cases of the Milanese center, to soccer players and stars of the show business, and that elaborates with the social and cultural fabric of the city a real relationship, based on understanding problems and potentiality of a Milanese shared lifestyle.

Lastly, a nod to the relationship with nature. Recent Milanese urban transformations have recognized the importance of this theme: new parks (Portello), green urban spaces and gardens (Porta Nuova), new and better relationships with the city's waters – thanks to the recovery of the Darsena and the proposals, now under discussion, for the reopening of Navigli.

And, least but not last, the Vertical Wood (Bosco verticale), a striking symbol of the artificial nature of the city and of biodiversity which, in the literal sense,

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Dell'ordine corinthio; from Palladio A., I quattro libri dell'architettura, Venezia 1570, Libro primo, p. 36.

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it is just, nothing more than, a façade. The example of Palladian villas, in our intentions, must be the guide for a recovering of a true, intense relationship – not just a bizarre representation of that – with the ground, with nature, with the place, understood in the complexity of its physical and productive features.

The areas that will be transformed over the next few years often have the charm, and also the ecological and economic problems, of terrains vagues, where the organized presence of man has been absent, for years and sometimes for decades, and where a spontaneous nature has developed, living together with the effects of pollution, with debris of abandoned buildings and infrastructures, with the presence of abusive invisibile inhabitants who learned to use the resources of these enclaves, deserted and empty as ghost towns. Today, we appreciate the wild charm of these places, with their strange landscape qualities, and often the transformation projects have sought to keep the elements of that strange beauty. For example, there have been many projects following this line of romantic appreciation applied for the recovery of German industrial areas, in the Ruhr region, for Berlin's rail yard and airport, for some abandoned and then restructured public buildings such as the

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Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Lingotto in Turin, for many factories converted into exhibition spaces, social centers, commercial spaces and college complexes.

Learning from the Palladian villas will also lead us to a non-superficial relationship with the places, towards an architecture that finds its own reason in the concrete idea of ​​a new world, of new social and ecological frame, in a true and sincere relationship with the present situation and with the future that you would be able to imagine, to design.

Alessandro Rocca

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FUOCO AMICO Architectural Review ISSN 2385-2291 Scientific Board Giovanni Corbellini (Università di Trieste) Luis Antonio Jorge (Universidade de Sao Paulo) Sébastien Marot (École Nationale d’Architecture & des Territoires à Marne-la-Vallée) Marco Navarra (Università di Catania) Alessandro Rocca (Politecnico di Milano) Teresa Stoppani (London South Bank University) Editor in Chief Alessandro Rocca ©2017 MMXII Press piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 7 20133 - Milano MMXIIpress@gmail.com

ISSN 2385-2291

Fuoco Amico

october 2017

Palladio

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Rotonda's plan; from Palladio A., I quattro libri dell'architettura, Venezia 1570, Libro secondo, p. 19.

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contents

A preamble: from Palladio to Garden City

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Measures and Proportions, in the Virgil's Dream

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Colin Rowe The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa Peter Eisenman The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End

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Rewriting Classicism

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Bibliography

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Alessandro Rocca Measures and Proportions, in the Virgil's Dream

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The idea that design is a mathematical exercise is fascinating and, at the same time, illusory. The result of this famous Colin Rowe text, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, is that, in different ways, architecture takes advantage of mathematics, uses it, folds it and transgresses it. But it is also true that this divide between the means (math) and the ends (architecture) does not diminish the importance of composition at all. On the contrary, is the architect's ease, the arbitrariness and the originality of his choices, which manage to transform mathematics into a process that generates order, proportion, form and meaning.

At first, at the beginning of his complex argument, Rowe is in perfect continuity with the classical culture and, using a statement by Christopher Wren, bases the legitimacy of architecture on the laws of the natural world. The quotation from Wren's Parentalia covers the role of an overture that, promptly, directs the reader to Rowe's reasoning: nature is not the occasional actor that, as in the story of Vitruvius about the birth of the Corinthian capital, suggests the architect a new architectural form. Rather, nature is the set of abstract rules, set by Neo-Platonic Humanism, which architecture alone is able to receive and return to a material representation of the world of ideas.

"Geometric figures are naturally more beautiful than

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irregular ones: the square, the circle are the most beautiful... There are only two beautiful positions of straight lines, perpendicular and horizontal" writes Wren, and Rowe seems to be warning us that all his reasoning will take place within these beliefs, trying to explore and explain the breadth of this territory through two apparently far-off masters, such as Andrea Palladio and Le Corbusier. Rowe's discourse resumes the idea of classical architecture as a discipline organized according to abstract laws of nature, but also engaged in a dialogue, specific, physical, with the most obvious and most architectural aspect of nature: that is, with landscape.

Christopher Wren's short text can sound astonishing, and even paradoxical, when it says that there is nothing more beautiful than the right angle, the square and the circle, because these are the most natural forms.

We know that this is not true, literally, and that, on the contrary, these forms represent exactly what in nature does not exist. The idea of the beauty of nature, declaimed in Virgilian terms by Palladio himself, thus coincides with the idea of an architecture that includes and incorporates the deepest, most hidden laws of natural beauty. The classical order is, for Palladio, and, perhaps, for Rowe too, the measure of all human things, the knowledge and the discipline that allow

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us to transform the world respecting its most secret oand truest rder. It is a non intuitive reasoning, based on an intimate adherence to the values of the classical age and to the conviction that, for modern culture, classicism is a living and working reference.

The Rowe’s parallel, between Palladio’s Rotonda and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, reveals a profound analogy on design, and also about the common confidence in the harmonic possibility of architecture, in its potentiality and vocation to present itself as a sublimated nature, such as visual focus and architectural reason of a natural landscape.

But, proceeding beyond the Virgilian idyll, Rowe leaves the two most known masterpieces and prefers to concentrate on two more complex, and maybe more difficult, projects. Then, he enters into the heart of the composition by comparing plans and facades of villa Foscari, the so-called Malcontenta, with those of Villa Stein in Garches. The analysis starts from the observation that both follow a similar scheme, based on the repetition of eight units, the alternation of simple and double spans, and a tripartite body. The adopted diagrams follow the theoretic principles of architects: Palladio considers the symmetry necessary for building stability, while Le Corbusier asserts that free plan is the inevitable consequence of the punctual

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structure and Rowe, not without malice, notes that there are buildings built in traditional masonry that are asymmetrical and perfectly stable, as well as there are perfectly symmetrical framed, punctual, structures. The relationship between structure and form, therefore suggests Rowe, is essentially a theoretical production and, moreover, we may say that, for these two masters, this relationship gives life to ideological, tendentious syllogisms that pretend to derive from imaginary technological constraints pure formal determinations.

This is especially evident for Le Corbusier, because of the clarity of its five points: the free plan and the free facade (thanks to the independent structure), the window in length or the glass pane, the pilotis, the roof garden; and we can also consider, for our discours, the interior service facilities that allow to free up space from the furniture. The Corbusian theory grows on a series of operations and goals where the keyword is 'to free', to make each building's fundamental element independent of one another: the plan, the facade, the structure. The project is therefore derived from the composition of parts that, in some way, have evolved and refined independently and are later assembled into the unit of the complete building.

After carefully measuring the observance and

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discretion that Palladio alternates with respect to the predetermined proportional relationships, Rowe comes to a remarkable observation that rescues the four centuries separating the two masters with one simple and convincing equivalence: Palladio found in section the same freedom which Le Corbusier, through the application of the five points, gained in plan. As Rowe writes: “Instead of the free plan (Palladio uses) the free section”. And it follows that, for Le Corbusier, the drawing that shows the formal matrix (proportional, but not only) of the project is the façade, while for Palladio is the plan, because is there that the rule wins, while the same rule is no more readable in the drawings related to the 'freed' parts, elevations and sections.

The beautiful dissertation of Rowe ends with the recognition of the mastery of both architects, whose works have generated, for good and for evil, a long series of replicas and imitations where rules are transformed in styles, leaving intact the incredible values of their theoretical and practical oeuvres.

In the following pages, the first publication of Colin Rowe's The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa. Palladio and Le Corbusier compared, in «The Architectural Review», March 1947.

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After Wittkower In the academic year 1945-46 Colin Rowe (1920-1999) was the lonely student of Rudolf Wittkower (1901-1971), at the Warburg Institute in London, where he obtained his Master in History of Arts with a thesis intitled The Theoretical Drawings of Inigo Jones: Their Sources and Scope. The relationship between the German historian of architecture and arts and the young architect from Liverpool was crucial, for the education of the second, and there is no doubt that there is a close continuity between the Wittkower's Principles of Palladio Architecture, the seminal essay published in two separate sections, in 1944 and 1945, in ÂŤThe Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld InstitutesÂť, and then included in the Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949), and Rowe's The Mathematics (1947). The Wittkower tractatus was based on a wide bibliographical and architectural research, and, along with the analysis of Alina Payne, was in a clear relationship, deeper than evident, with the themes of the architectural modernism that were under discussion in those years. In particular, Payne identifies two aspects which make the Wittkower' text completely different, in comparison with the prevoius studies on Italian Renaissance architecture, and absolutely modern.

The first aspect is the theoretical process adopted from Wittkower, who starts from a close reading of the texts which determined these architectural principles: first, the

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Leon Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria (first edition in 1450) and, of course, I quattro libri dell'architettura by Andrea Palladio. This narrow connection between the books and the buildings means, for example, a subterranean but clear parallel with the phenomenon of the Modernist architecture which, again, put the writing – books, essays and magazines – as a complement directly integrated in the process of definition of the new architecture. And this strong relation between theory, criticism and practice evolved especially thanks to the scholars of the German area who, for political reasons, gathered in London and in the United States, such as historians and theorists Sigfried Giedion, Nikolaus Pevsner, Ernst Gombrich, and leading architects such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

The second aspect which made of Principles a main reference book and a best seller in the modernist arena, was a quite loosian refusal of the ornament. Wittkower was radically indifferent to the materiality of the construction, to colors, textures and ornamental apparatus; Italian architecture of XV and XVI century, for him, was a refined and cerebral application of the sophisticated principles which were able to translate the myth of Roman architecture and culture in a brand new, 'modern', architectural language, a new classicism which becomes the timeless basis of our modern, and modernist, era.

Humanistic architecture, in the perfect Wittkower's enunciation, is absolutely similar and coherent with the

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methodological premises and formal aims of the rationalist and hermetic wing of modernist architecture, the modern mouvement, of the twenties and thirties of XX century.

The tools that really made Wittkower's arguments perfect to be tranferred and applied to contemporary architecture of his time were his meta-historical, timeless diagrams, which made immediately understandable the relationship between proportions, program, typology and spatial organization; eliminating, on the other side, any reference to technology, materials, and tridimensional perceptions.

The diagrams, imagined to explain the planimetric schemes of the Palladian villas, became a by-pass wich projected Renaissance architecture in the middle of the modernist debate. And it was his pupil Colin Rowe who, first, jumped over a gap of 450 years and compared the Palladian with the Corbusian diagrams as if they were made of the same matter, for the same world. This extremely abstracted approached allowed to go straight to the compositional questions, and, in its radical nakedness, it was perfectly aligned with two of the main currents of Modernism: the ideals of the Corbusian purism, and the funcionalist reduction to the typological schemes operated, in particular, by Ernst Neufert (19001986), the German architect who, in the Bauhaus years, was a collaborator of Walter Gropius and Otto Bartning.

Neufert's Bauentwurfslehre (Architect's Data), firstly published in 1936, sprawled widely the use of diagrams as a simplified and effectual international language for learning the principles of modernist architecture. It is also important

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Schematized Plans of Ten of Palladio's Villas, from: Rudolf Wittkower, Principles of Palladio's Architecture, in «Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes», vol. 7 1944, pp. 102-122.

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to remember that, in those years, one of the editors of «The Architectural Review» was Nikolaus Pevsner, the leading modernist historian and ideologist who, like Wittkower, arrived in London fleeing racial prosecution in Nazi Germany. In this perspective, in the Wittkower's Palladian diagrams we can see a reduction of the Renissance villas to an orthodox modernist approach and, of consequence, the starting point of the Palladio's transfer into the domain of modernist architecture operated, through the comparison with Le Corbusier, by Rowe.

The strong input generated by the texts of Rudolf Wittkower, first published in the «Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes» and then collected in Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949), a book which had a large, immediate and durable echo in the international architectural debate, took Andrea Palladio again at the center of the architectural scenario. The combined effects of the splendid Wittkower's diagrams and the Wölfflinian detailed comparative analysis which Rowe exploited between the Palladio's Malcontenta and the Le Corbusier's villa Stein de Monzie, put again the classical principles at the center of the modernist debate.

As described by Anthony Vidler, the English neopalladianism of the forties met a short life, quickly overpassed by the interest of other personalities, such as Reyner Banham and the Smithsons, towards technology and informality, tendencies which at the end led to the

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construction of the movement called New Brutalism, and, for other paths, to high-Tech architecture.

Nevertheless, the manneristic approach of Rowe found a direct representation, in his times, in the architectural design of James Stirling, who managed and manipulated the modernist images, matters and myths with the refined disenchantment of a modernist mannerist, an analogous of the Italian painters and architects of the second half of the XVI century studied and beloved by Rowe (see the Peter Eisenman's report on Perspecta 41).

Stirling shared with Rowe the same citizenship, both came from and were educated in Liverpool, at the same school of architecture, and Stirling got his degree in architecture under Rowe's supervision. But it was interesting another Rowe's link with a great architect, the American Peter Eisenman, who mentored in a memorable Grand Tour through Italy, in 1961. In some way Eisenman, through the intense frequentation of Rowe, arrived to the Wittkower's diagrams, something that he reinvented for his anaytical drawings of Giuseppe Terragni's architecture and, recently, for Palladio. And, coming back along the Warburg Institut's cultural origins, Eisenman fixes Heinrich WĂślfflin as a father of his own approach to architecture, considering that "WĂślfflin argues that Renaissance architecture was autonomous because it was governed by an idea of formal beauty internal to its discipline, one not deduced from the characteristic exhibited in the works of a particular style but that exists in its own right" (Eisenman, 2008).

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This full immersion of Eisenman in the classical Italian heritage can suggest the reason of his constant interest towards a classical idea of architectural composition, his fascination and, at the same time, his impossibility to accept a classical explicit influence.

A wide representation of this duplicity, the love and the refusal of the classical, is the reason of his seminal text, The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End. In this essay, published in the volume 21 of ÂŤPerspectaÂť (1984), Eisenman establishes a possibility of maintaining the Classical as a fundamental reference, finding for it a new life free of any historicism, nostalgia and revivalism.

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Before Eisenman: architecture as a cold case "Instead of focusing on typology, geometry, proportion, or history, the analytic drawings, models, and descriptive texts presented here place Palladio in a new light, marking a departure in a sense from contemporary concerns with aesthetic ideals of surface representation, parametric projection, or figure-ground reversals in favor of con­ ceptual and topological arrangements of solid and void that are other than the literal solid and void described by geometry and function" Peter Eisenman, Palladio Virtuel.

With his recent book about Palladian architectural principles, Eisenman explicitly keeps on the lessons of Wittkower's Principles and Rowe's Mathematics, but avoiding any trace of historical approach in favor of a pure formal analysis. As already explained in The End of the Classical, also in this last research Eisenman wants to act as an architect, as it is in his own words, establishing a strategical point of view: in his study, architectural samples are cleaned from any historical dust and dissected in an anathomical manner, such as pure formal constructs.

The bodies of evidence, the buildings, are transformed in cold cases that, indipendently from their origin and age, are available to be examined and (dis)solved. The buildings become corps which can be dissected, polished from any soft and liquid matter and reduced to their conceptual and geometric skeleton. Of course, in Eisenman's post-

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Rowian perspective, the skeleton is the mathematic ideal or, to better say, the pure spatial and topological idea of the building. Screening the Palladian villas, Eisenman produces a X-rays representation which is quite similar with Wittkower's and Rowe's schemes, but with a great difference. While the first are simply the schematic and univocal (closed) representation of the plan, the Eisenman's are deleuzian (open) series of variations which, tendendially, could be infinite. The matrix of the villa is a palimpsest, rather just a geometrical trace, whose greatness is exaclty in its generative capacity. It, the scheme, has the precise duty to proliferate, to incube and grow infinite possible compositions.

In the Eisenman's infinite jest, there is no difference between the original and the copies, or, to be more precise, there is no original, because Palladio is already working in a post-historical condition, being a Venetian Republic citizen of the XVI century working with forms, tools and images of the archeological – and literary – remains that he studied in Rome. The perfect description of this condition, that Eisenman shares not just with Palladio but, in a sense, with all of us contemporary architects, is dedicated to the end of classical, a text that establishes a possible useful link between us and the history of architecture.

In particular, Eisenman designs a continuity with classical principles through the permanence of three "fictions": representation, reason and history, which are the vehicles to simulate meaning, truth and timelessness. For his

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Geometric diagrams of Rotonda. From: Eisenman P., with Roman M., Palladio Virtuel, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2015, p.

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text, Modernism is in continuity, is still inside classical architecture because it did not cease to follow these three fictions. Now, for Eisenman, it is time to leave these fictions and start with a new beginning, with an architecture freed by these fictional aims and open to the risk of losing meaning, truth and timelessness. An architecture which can use, manipulates and reinvents the simulacra of the Classical as a basic, fundamental material which can gives representation, reason and historical meaning to our time.

Then, Eisenman's reasoning moves on two interlaced goals.

The first is the logical demonstration of the continuity of the classic from the Renaissance to the Modernism and, ultimately, the attestation that we do not have, in fact, an architecture, a history and a culture outside the classical.

The second goal is the institution of the possibility to rebuild architecture on a base that, to be quick, could be defined as postmodern, or post-historical, and that he calls with the term: non-classical. An architecture that is defined by subtraction, for its deliberately withdrawal from the simulation of classical architecture. After all, Eisenman's demonstration is based on a process of smuggling, demystification and radical burial, an alchemical distillation process at the end of which remains, it should remain, the essence of architecture. But it is also true that this process is based on the elements of its denial: the potentiality of nonclassical architecture can only be measured in relationship with the classical one, and therefore its reasoning is still a long, elliptical reference to representations, reasons and

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histories of classical narratives constructed by theorists and architects, as well as Andrea Palladio, of the Italian Renaissance.

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Colin Rowe The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa First published in the Architectural Review, March 1947.

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There are two causes of beauty – natural and customary.

Natural is from geometry consisting in uniformity, that is equality and proportion. Customary beauty is begotten by the use, as familiarity breeds a love for things not in themselves love­ly. Here lies the great occasion of errors, but always the true test is natural or geometrical beauty. Geometrical figures are naturally more beautiful than irregu­lar ones: the square, the circle are the most beautiful, next the parallelogram and the oval. There are only two beautiful positions of straight lines, perpendicular and horizontal; this is from Nature and consequently necessity, no other than upright being firm.

Sir Christopher Wren, Parentalia

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Plate 1. Villa Capra - Rotonda, Vicenza. Andrea Palladio, c. 1550.

Plate 2. Villa Savoye, Poissy. Le Corbusier, 1929-31.

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As the ideal type of centralized building Palladio's Villa Capra-Rotonda (Plate 1) has, perhaps more than any other house, imposed itself upon the imagination.

Mathematical, abstract, four square, without apparent function and totally memo­rable, its derivatives have enjoyed universal distribution; and, when he writes of it, Palladio is lyrical.

"The site is as pleasant and delightful as can be found, because it is on a small hill of very easy access, and is watered on one side by the Bacchiglione, a navigable river; and on the other it is encompassed about with most pleasant risings which look like a very great theatre and are all cultivated about with most excellent fruits and most exquisite vines; and therefore as it enjoys from every part most beautiful views, some of which are limited, some more extended, and others which terminate with the horizon, there are loggias made in all four fronts."1 When the mind is prepared for the one by the other, a passage from Le Cor­ busier's Précisions may be unavoidably reminiscent of this. No less lyrical but rather more explosive, Le Corbusier is describing the site of his Savoye House at Poissy (Plate 2).

"Le site: une vaste pelouse bombée en dôme aplati. ... La maison est une boîte en l'air ... au milieu des prairies dominant le verger .... Le plan est pur .... II

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Plates 3-4. Villa Malcontenta (Foscari), Malcontenta di Mira. Andrea Palladio, c. 1550-60.

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Plates 5-6. Villa Stein, Garches. Le Corbusier, 1927.

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a sa juste place dans l'agreste paysage de Poissy ....

Les habitants, venus ici parce que cette campagne agreste était belle avec sa vie de campagne, ils la contempleront, maintenue intacte, du haut de leur jardin suspendu ou des quatre faces de leurs fenêtres en longueur. Leur vie domestique sera inserée dans un rêve virgilien."2 The Savoye House has been given a number of interpretations. It may indeed be a machine for living in, an arrangement of interpenetrating volumes and spaces, an emanation of space-time; but the suggestive reference to the dreams of Virgil may put one in mind of the passage in which Palladio describes the Rotonda. Palladio's landscape is more agrarian and bucolic, he evokes less of the untamed pastoral, his scale is larger; but the effect of the two passages is somehow the same.

Palladio, writing elsewhere, amplifies the ideal life of the villa. Its owner, from within a fragment of created order, will watch the maturing of his possessions and savor the piquancy of contrast between his fields and his gardens; reflecting on mutability, he will contemplate throughout the years the antique virtues of a sim­pler race, and the harmonious ordering of his life and his estate will be an analogy of paradise.

"The ancient sages commonly used to retire to

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such places, where being oftentimes visited by their virtuous friends and relations, having houses, gardens, fountains and such like pleasant places, and above all their virtue, they could easily attain to as much happiness as can be attained here below."3 Perhaps these were the dreams of Virgil; and, freely interpreted, they have gathered around themselves in the course of time all those ideas of Roman virtue, excellence, Imperial splendor, and decay which make up the imaginative recon­struction of the ancient world. It would have been, perhaps, in the landscapes of Poussin – with their portentous apparitions of the antique – that Palladio would have felt at home; and it is possibly the fundamentals of this landscape, the poignancy of contrast between the disengaged cube and its setting in the paysage agreste, between geometrical volume and the appearance of unimpaired nature, which lie behind Le Corbusier's Roman allusion. If architecture at the Rotonda forms the setting for the good life, at Poissy it is certainly the background for the lyrically efficient one; and, if the contemporary pastoral is not yet sanctioned by conventional usage, apparently the Virgilian nostalgia is still present. From the hygenically equipped boudoirs, pausing while ascending the ramps, the memory of the Georgics no doubt interposes itself;

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Plate 7. Villa Stein, plan.

Plate 8. Villa Malcontenta, plan.

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and, perhaps, the historical reference may even add a stimulus as the car pulls out for Paris.

However, a more specific comparison which presents itself is that between Pal­ ladio's Villa Foscari, the Malcontenta of c. 1550-60 (Plates 3, 4), and the house which in 1927 Le Corbusier built for Mr. and Mrs. Michael Stein at Garches (Plates 5, 6).

These are two buildings which, in their forms and evocations, are superficially so entirely unlike that to bring them together would seem to be facetious; but, if the obsessive psychological and physical gravity of the Malcontenta receives no parallel in a house which sometimes wishes to be a ship, sometimes a gymnasium, this difference of mood should not be allowed to inhibit scrutiny.

For, in the first case, both Garches and the Malcontenta are conceived of as single blocks (Plates 7, 8); and, allowing for variations in roof treatment, it might be noticed that both are blocks of corresponding volume, each measuring 8 units in length, by 5½ in breadth, by 5 in height. Then, further to this, there is a com­parable bay structure to be observed. Each house exhibits (and conceals) an alter­nating rhythm of double and single spatial intervals; and each house, read from front to back, displays a comparable tripartite distribution of lines of support (Figure 1).

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But, at this stage, it might be better to introduce an almost. Because, if the dis­tribution of basic horizontal coordinates is, in both cases, much the same, there are still some slight and significant differences relating to the distribution of those lines of support which parallel the facades; and thus at Garches, reading from front to back, the fundamental spatial interval proceeds in the ratio of ½ : 1 ½ : 1 ½ : l½ : ½, while at the Malcontenta we are presented with the sequence 2 : 2 : 1 ½. In other words, by the use of a cantilevered half unit Le Corbusier obtains a compression for his central bay and thereby transfers interest elsewhere; while Palladio secures a dominance for his central division with a progression towards his portico which absolutely focuses attention in these two areas. The one scheme is, therefore, potentially dispersed and possibly equalitarian and the other is con­ centric and certainly hierarchical; but, with this difference observed, it might sim­ply be added that, in both cases, a projecting element-extruded terrace or at­ tached portico-occupies l½ units in depth.

Structures, of course, are not to be compared; and, to some extent, both archi­tects look to structure as a justification for their dispositions. Thus Palladio em­ ploys a solid bearing wall; and of this system he writes: "It is to be observed, that those (rooms) on the right

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Figure 1. Malcontenta and Garches. Analyti­cal diagrams.

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correspond with those on the left, that so the fabric may be the same in one place as in the other, and that the walls may equally bear the burden of the roof; because if the walls are made large in one part and small in the other, the latter will be more firm to resist the weight, by reason of the nearness of the walls, and the former more weak, which will pro­duce in time very great inconveniences and ruin the whole work."4 Palladio is concerned with the logical disposition of motifs dogmatically ac­cepted, but he attempts to discover a structural reason for his planning symme­ tries; while Le Corbusier, who is proving a case for structure as a basis for the formal elements of design, contrasts the new system with the old and is a little more comprehensive.

"Je vous rappelle ce 'plan paralyse' de la maison de pierre et ceci à quoi nous sommes arrivés avec la maison de fer ou de ciment armé. plan libre façade libre ossature indépendante fenêtres en longueur ou pan de verre pilotis toit-jardin et l'intérieur muni de 'casiers' et débarrassé de l'encombrement des meubles."5

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Palladio's structural system makes it almost necessary to repeat the same plan on every level of the building, while point support allows Le Corbusier a flexible arrangement; but both architects make a claim which is somewhat in excess of the reasons they advance.

Solid wall structures, Palladio declares, demand absolute symmetry; a frame building, Le Corbusier announces, requires a free arrangement: but these must be, at least partly, the personal exigencies of high style – for asym­metrical buildings of traditional structure remain standing and even frame build­ings of conventional plan continue to give satisfaction.

In both houses there is a piano nobile one floor up, which is linked to the gar­den by a terrace or portico and a flight (or flights) of steps. At the Malcontenta this main floor shows a cruciform hall with, symmetrically disposed about it, two suites of three rooms each and two staircases; but at Garches there is nothing so readily describable. At Garches there is a central hall and there are two staircases; but while one of the staircases occupies a similar position to those of the Malcon­tenta, the other has been turned through an angle of ninety degrees. Further, the entrance hall has been revealed from this level by an asymmetrical cutting open of the floor; and the terrace (which corresponds to the Malcontenta's portico) has

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become partly a reentrant volume obliterating a line of support, placed in distinct足ly less perceptible relationship to the principal room. Thus, at Garches, the cruci足form shape survives only vestigially (perhaps it may be thought to be registered by the apse of the dining room?); and therefore, instead of the centrality of Pal足 ladio's major space, a Z-shaped balance is achieved which is assisted by throwing the small library into the main apartment. Finally, while at the Malcontenta there is a highly evident cross axis, at Garches this transverse movement which is inti足mated by the central voids of the end walls is only allowed to develop implicitly and by fragments.

The wall at the Malcontenta comprises the traditional solid pierced by vertical openings with a central emphasis in the portico and subsidiary accents in the outer windows placed toward the extremities of the facade. The double bay in the center of the building which carries the upper pediments of the roof is expressed on the one front by a single door, on the other by a 'Roman baths' motif; and, horizontally, the wall also falls into three primary divisions: base; piano nobile, corresponding to the Ionic order of the portico; and superimposed attic. The base plays the part of a projecting, consistently supporting solid upon which the house rests; but, while the piano nobile and attic

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are rusticated, the base is treated as a plain surface and a feeling of even greater weight carried here is achieved by this highly emotive inversion of the usual order.

Again the situation at Garches is more complex; and there the exploitation of the structural system has led to a conception of the wall as a series of horizontal strips – a strategy which places equal interest in both center and extremity of the facade and which is then maintained by Le Corbusier's tendency to suppress the wider spans of the double bays. By these means any system of central vertical accent and inflection of the wall leading up to it is profoundly modified; and the immediate result in the garden elevation of Garches shows itself in the displacing of the elements which may be considered equivalent to the Malcontenta's portico and superimposed pediment. These become separate; and, transposed as terrace and roof pavilion, the one occupies the two (or three) bays to the left of the fa­cade, the other a central position in the solid but an asymmetrical one in the whole elevation.

On the other hand, the entrance front at Garches retains what could be regarded as the analogue of Palladio's upper pediment. This is the central element of the upper story; but then it is also noticeable, in spite of its symmetrical position, that the further

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development of this element within itself is not symmetrical. Nor does it promote symmetry in the facade as a whole; and, though it is responded to by the large central window of the entrance hall, since the horizontal gashes of the windows act to prohibit any explicit linking of these two manifestations, there ensues in the elevation something very like that simultaneous affirmation and denial of centrality which is displayed in the plan. Thus a central focus is stipulated; its development is inhibited; and there then occurs a displacement and a breaking up of exactly what Palladio would have presumed to be a normative emphasis.

Another chief point of difference lies in the interpretation of the roof. At the Malcontenta this forms a pyramidal superstructure which amplifies the volume of the house {Plate 9); while at Garches it is constituted by a flat surface, serving as the floor of an enclosure, cut out from – and thereby diminishing – the house's volume. Thus, in the one building the behavior of the roof might be described as additive and in the other as subtractive; but, this important distinction apart, both roofs are then furnished with a variety of incident, regular or random, pediment or pavilion, which alike enter into important – though very different – relationships with the vertical surfaces

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Plate 9. Villa Malcontenta, aerial view.

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of the walls below.

That mathematics and musical concord were the basis of ideal proportion was a common belief of the circles in which Palladio moved. Here there was felt to be a correspondence between the perfect numbers, the proportions of the human fig­ure and the elements of musical harmony;6 and Sir Henry Wotton, as British am­bassador to Venice at a slightly later date, reflects some part of this attitude when he writes: "The two principal Consonances that most ravish the Ear are, by the consent of all Nature, the Fifth and the Octave; whereof the first riseth radically, from the Pro­portion between two and three. The other from the double Interval, between one and two, or between two and four, etc. Now if we shall transport these Propor­ tions, from audible to visible Objects, and apply them as shall fall fittest ... , there will indubitably result from either, a graceful and harmonious Contentment to the Eye."7 It was not, in fact, suggested that architectural proportions were derived from musical harmonies, but rather that the laws of proportion were established mathe­matically and everywhere diffused.

The universe of Platonic and Pythagorean speculation was compounded of the simpler relationships of numbers, and such a cosmos was formed within

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the triangle made by the square and the cube of the numbers 1, 2, 3. Also, its qualities, rhythms, and relationships were established within this framework of numbers up to 27; and if such numbers governed the works of God, it was considered fitting that the works of man should be similarly constructed, that a building should be a representative, in microcosm, of the pro­cess exhibited at a larger scale in the workings of the world. In Alberti's words: "Nature is sure to act consistently and with a constant analogy in all her opera­tions";8 and, therefore, what is patent in music must also be so in architecture.

Thus, with proportion as a projection of the harmony of the universe, its basis­both scientific and religiouswas quite unassailable; and a Palladio could enjoy the satisfactions of an aesthetic believed to be entirely objective.

Le Corbusier has expressed similar convictions about proportion. Mathematics bring "des vérités réconfortantes," and "on ne quitte pas son ouvrage qu'avec la certitude d'être arrivé à la chose exacte";9 but if it is indeed exactness which Le Corbusier seeks, within his buildings it is not the unchallengeable clarity of Pal­ladio's volumes which one finds. It is, instead, a type of planned obscurity; and, consequently, while in the Malcontenta geometry is diffused throughout the

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in­ternal volumes of the entire building, at Garches it seems only to reside in the block as a whole and in the disposition of its supports.

The theoretical position upon which Palladio's position rested broke down in the eighteenth century when proportion became a matter of individual sensibility and private inspiration;10 and Le Corbusier, in spite of the comforts which math­ematics afford him, simply in terms of his location in history can occupy no such unassailable position. Functionalism was, perhaps, a highly Positivistic attempt to reassert a scientific aesthetic which might possess the objective value of the old, and the ultimately Platonic-Aristotelian critique. But its interpretation was crude. Results may be measured in terms of process, proportions are apparently acci­dental and gratuitous; and it is in contradiction to this theory that Le Corbusier imposes mathematical patterns upon his buildings.

These are the universal "vérités réconfortantes."

Thus, either because of or in spite of theory both architects share a common standard, a mathematical one, defined by Wren as "natural" beauty; and, within limitations of a particular program, it should therefore not be surprising that the two blocks should be of corresponding volume or that both architects should choose to make didactic advertisement of

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Figure 2. Garches, elevations.

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their adherence to mathematical formu­lae. Of the two – and, perhaps, characteristically – Le Corbusier is the more aggres­sive; and at Garches he carefully indicates his relationships by an apparatus of regulating lines and figures and by placing on the drawings of his elevations the ratio of the golden section, A : B = B : (A+ B) ( Figure 2).

But, if Le Corbusier's facades are for him the primary demonstrations of the virtues of a mathematical discipline, with Palladio it would seem that the ultimate proof of his theory lies in his plan. Throughout his Quattro libri, Palladio consist­ently equips both his plans and elevations with their numerical apologetic {Plate 8); but the cryptic little figures which he appends to his drawings seem always to be more convincing, or at least more comprehensible, when they relate to the plan. And this is, possibly, to be understood, for in a house such as the Malcon­tenta the plan may be seen as an exhibition of 'natural' beauty, as the pure thing, abstract and uncomplicated; but the facades are, of necessity, adulterated (though scarcely to their detriment) by an intrusion of 'customary' material.

The facades become complicated, their strict Platonic rationale may be ultimately vitiated by the traditional presence, in this case, of the Ionic order which possesses its own rationale and which inevitably

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introduces an alternative system of measurement (Plate 11).

The conflict between the 'customary' demands of the order and a series of 'nat­ural' relationships might be assumed to be the source from which the facades of the Malcontenta derive. They are suggestive, evocative, but they are not easily or totally susceptible to mathematical regulation; and, therefore, it is again toward Palladio's plan that one reverts. Provided with explanatory dimensions, the two suites comprising three rooms each can be read as a progression from 3 : 4 to a 2 : 3 relationship. They are numbered 12 : 16, 16 : 16 and 16 : 24.

And here, on the part of Le Corbusier and Palladio, we have to recognize, if not duplicity, at least wishful thinking; but, if the ratio of 3 : 5 = 5 : 8 is only an ap­proximation to that of the golden section, and if the ideal measurement of Pal­ladio's rooms does not concur with what is their actual size,11 this is to be ex­pected and it should not be considered useful to enlarge upon these inconsis­tencies. Instead it should be considered much more opportune to examine Pal­ladio's preference for the triple division and Le Corbusier's propensity to divide by four.

At the Malcontenta, as already noticed, the facades are divided vertically into three principal fields, those

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of the portico and the flanking walls, and horizontally the same situation prevails in the sequence, basement, piano nobile, attic; but at Garches, in spite of the comparable structural parti, it is always a situation if not of one, at least of two or, alternatively, of four fields of interest with which we are presented. Thus in the entrance elevation, it is a business of four and one which prevails; and, in the garden facade, this breakdown becomes a matter of four and two.

But, in both houses, there are elaborations in detail of the dominant schema which becomes complicated by its interplay with a subsidiary system. That is: it is by vertical extension into arch and vault, diagonal of roof line and pediment that Palladio modifies the geometrical asperities of his cube; and this use of the circu­lar and pyramidal elements with the square seems both to conceal and to amplify the intrinsic severity of the volumes. However, the arch, the vault, and the pyra­mid are among the prerogatives of solid wall construction. They are among the freedoms of the traditional plan, the "plan paralysé"; and the introduction of arched forms and pitched roofs is a liberty which at Garches Le Corbusier is un­able to allow himself. For in the frame building it is obviously not, as in the solid wall structure, the vertical planes which predominate. Rather it is the horizontal planes

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Plate 10. Villa Stein, axonometric view.

Plate 11. Villa Malcntenta, facades.

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Plate 12. Project, Maison Domino. Le Corbusier, 1914.

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of floor and roof slabs (Plate 12); and, therefore, the quality of paralysis which Le Corbusier noticed in the plan of the solid wall structure is, to some ex­ tent, transferred in the frame building to the section. Perforation of floors, giving a certain vertical movement of space, is possible; but the sculptural quality of the building as carving has disappeared and there can be nothing of Palladio's firm sectional transmutation and modeling of volume. Instead, following the predom­inant planes of the slabs, in the frame building extension and elaboration must occur horizontally. In other words, free plan is exchanged for free section; but the limitations of the new system are quite as exacting as those of the old; and, as though the solid wall structure has been turned on its side, with the former com­plexities of section and subtleties of elevation now transposed to plan, there may be here some reason for Palladio's choice of plan and Le Corbusier's choice of elevations as being the documents, in each case, most illustrative of elementary mathematical regulation.

The spatial audacities of the Garches plan continue to thrill; but it may some­times seem to be an interior which is acceptable to the intellect alone – to the intellect operating from within a stage vacuum.

Thus there is at Garches a perma­ nent tension

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between the organized and the apparently fortuitous.

Conceptually, all is clear; but, sensuously, all is deeply perplexing. There are statements of a hierarchical ideal; there are counter statements of an egalitarian one. Both houses may seem to be apprehensible from without; but, from within, in the cruciform hall of the Malcontenta, there is a clue to the whole building; while, at Garches, it is never possible to stand at any point and receive a total impression. For at Garches the necessary equidistance between floor and ceiling conveys an equal importance to all parts of the volume in between; and thus the development of absolute focus becomes an arbitrary, if not an impossible, proceeding. This is the dilemma propounded by the system; and Le Corbusier responds to it. He accepts the principle of horizontal extension; thus, at Garches central focus is consistently broken up, concentration at any one point is disintegrated, and the dismembered fragments of the center become a peripheral dispersion of incident, a serial instal­lation of interest around the extremities of the plan.

But it is now that this system of horizontal extension which is conceptually logical comes up against the rigid boundary of the block which, almost certainly, is felt to be perceptually requisite;12 and, consequently, with horizontal exten­sion checked, Le Corbusier is

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obliged to employ an opposite resource. That is, by gouging out large volumes of the block as terrace and roof garden, he introduces a contrary impulse of energy; and by opposing an explosive moment with an im­ plosive one, by introducing inversive gestures alongside expansive ones, he again makes simultaneous use of conflicting strategies.

By its complexities, the resultant system (or symbiosis of systems) throws into intense relief the elementary, geometrical substructure of the building; and, as a sequel, the peripheral incident which substitutes for the Palladian focus can also become compounded with the inversions (of terrace and roof garden) which rep­resent an essentially analogous development to Palladio's strategy of vertical ex­tension.

Finally, a comparable process to that which occurs in plan takes place also in the elevations, where there is the same regular diffusion of value and irregular development of points of concentration; and here, with the horizontal windows conveying an equality to both the center and verge of the facades, a disintegration of focus which is never complete causes a brisk oscillation of attention. Here, as in the plan, there is nothing residual, nothing passive, nothing slow moving; and the extremities of the block, by this

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means, acquire an energetic clarity and tautness, as though they were trying to restrain the peripheral incident from flying out of the block altogether.

A detailed comparison is less easy to sustain between the two houses which, initially, seemed to invite their linking together: the Savoye House and the Villa Rotonda; and, conceivably, this is because neither of these buildings is so entirely condensed in its structure and its emotional impact as are, respectively, the earlier Garches and the later Malcontenta. The Savoye House and the Rotonda are both more famous; but they are also, in each case, more obviously Platonic and easy to take. Possibly this is because they are both in the round; and that, therefore, what is concentrated in two fronts at Garches and the Malcontenta is here diffused through four, resulting in far greater geniality of external effect. But, if there is a noticeable easiness and lack of tension to be found in these facades, there are analogous developments to those in the other houses. Such are Palladio's concern, both in plan and elevation, with central emphasis and Le Corbusier's determined dispersal of focus. At Poissy, just possibly, the complicated volumes of the upper roof garden replace the Palladian pitched roof and cupola; and again, just possi­bly, Palladio's four projecting loggias are subsumed within the block as the en­closed terrace

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which, alternatively, as the dominant element of the piano nobile, could also be considered to correspond to the domed salon of the Rotonda.

But, symbolically and in the sphere of 'customary' beauty, Palladio's and Le Corbusier's buildings are in different worlds. Palladio sought complete clarity of plan and the most lucid organization of conventional elements based on sym­metry as the most memorable form of order, and mathematics as the supreme sanction in the world of forms. In his own mind his work was essentially that of adaptation, the adaptation of the ancient house; and, at the back of his mind were always the great halls of the Imperial thermae and such buildings as Hadrian's villa at Tivoli. He had several schemes of archaeological reconstruction of Greek and Roman domestic buildings, based on Vitruvius and Pliny, incorporating elements which in Greek and Roman practice would have been found only in public buildings, but which he regarded as general. Indeed, Rome for him was still supremely alive; and, if the ancients had adapted the temple from the house, their large scale planning was, no doubt, similarly reflective.

Notoriously, Le Corbusier has an equal reverence for mathematics and he would appear also, sometimes, to be tinged with a comparable historicism. For his plans

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he seems to find at least one source in those ideals of convenance and commoditĂŠ displayed in the ingenious planning of the Rococo hotel, the background of a social life at once more amplified and intimate.

The French, until recently, pos­sessed an unbroken tradition of this sort of planning; and, therefore, one may often discover in a Beaux Arts utilization of an irregular site, elements which if they had not preceded Le Corbusier might seem to be curiously reminiscent of his own highly suave vestibules and boudoirs. Le Corbusier admires the Byzantine and the anonymous architecture of the Mediterranean world; and there is also present with him a purely French delight in the more overt aspects of mechanics. The little pavilion on the roof at Garches is, at the same time, a temple of love and the bridge of a ship. The most complex architectural volumes are fitted with running water.

Geometrically, both architects may be said to have approached something of the Platonic archetype of the ideal villa to which the fantasy of the Virgilian dream might be supposed to relate; and the realization of an idea which is repre­sented by the house as a cube could also be presumed to lend itself very readily to the purposes of Virgilian dreaming. For here is set up the conflict between the absolute and the contingent, the abstract and the natural; and the gap between the ideal

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world and the too human exigencies of realization here receives its most pathetic presentation. The bridging must be as competent and compelling as the construction of a well-executed fugue; and, if it may be charged, as at the Malcon­tenta with almost religious seriousness, or, as at Garches, imbued with sophisti­ cated and witty allusion, its successful organization is an intellectual feat which reconciles the mind to what may be some fundamental discrepancies in the program.

As a constructor of architectural fugues, Palladio is the convinced classicist with a sixteenth century repertory of well-humanized forms; and he translates this received material with a passion and a high seriousness fitting to the continued validity that he finds it to possess. The reference to the Pantheon in the superim­posed pediments of the Malcontenta, to the thermae in its cruciform salon, the ambiguity, profound in both idea and form, in the equivocal conjunction of tem­ple front and domestic block; these are charged with meaning, both for what they are and what they signify; and their impression is poignant.

By such apparatus the ancient house is not recreated, but something far more significant is achieved: a creative nostalgia evokes a manifestation of mythical power in which the Roman and the ideal are equated.

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By contrast Le Corbusier is, in some ways, the most catholic and ingenious of eclectics. The orders, the Roman references, were the traditional architectural clothing of authority; and, if it is hard for the modern architect to be quite so emphatic about any particular civilization as was Palladio about the Roman, with Le Corbusier there is always an element of wit suggesting that the historical (or contemporary) reference has remained a quotation between inverted commas, possessing always the double value of the quotation, the associations of both old and new context. In spite of his admiration for the Acropolis and Michelangelo, the world of high classical Mediterranean culture on which Palladio drew so ex­ pressively is largely closed for Le Corbusier. The ornamental adjuncts of human­ ism, the emblematic representations of the moral virtues, the loves of the Gods and the lives of the Saints have lost their former monopoly; and as a result, while allusion at the Malcontenta is concentrated and direct, at Garches it is dissipated and inferential. Within the one cube the performance attempts the Roman; but, within the other, no such exclusive cultural ideal is entertained. Instead, as the sponsors of his virtuosity, Le Corbusier largely selects a variety of hitherto undis­criminated phenomena.

He selects the casual incidents of Paris, or Istanbul,

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or wherever it may be; aspects of the fortuitously picturesque, of the mechanical, of objects conceived to be typical, of whatever might seem to represent the present and the usable past; and all those items, while transformed by their new context, retain their original implications which signify maybe Platonic ideality, maybe Rococo intimacy, maybe mechanical precision, maybe a process of natural selec­tion. That is, one is able to seize hold of all these references as something known; but, in spite of the new power with which they become invested, they are only transiently provocative. Unlike Palladio's forms, there is nothing final about any of their possible relationships; and their rapprochement would seem to be af­fected by the artificial emptying of the cube in which they find themselves lo­cated, when the senses are confounded by what is apparently arbitrary and the intellect is more than convinced by the intuitive knowledge that, despite all to the contrary, here problems have been both recognized and answered and that here there is a reasonable order.

The neo-Palladian villa, at its best, became the picturesque object in the English park and Le Corbusier has become the source of innumerable pastiches and of tediously amusing exhibition techniques; but it is the magnificently realized qual­ity

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of the originals which one rarely finds in the works of neo-Palladians and ex­ponents of 'le style Corbu.'

These distinctions scarcely require insistence; and no doubt it should only be sententiously suggested that, in the case of the derivative works, it is perhaps an adherence to 'rules' which has lapsed.

Addendum 1973 Though a parallel of Schinkel with late Corbu might not be so rewarding as the comparison of early Corbu and Palladio, much the same arguments as those sur­facing in this article might quite well be found developing themselves if, for the Villa Malcontenta, one were to substitute the Berlin Altes Museum and, for Garches, the Palace of the Assembly at Chandigarh. Illustrations (Plates 13-16) might suffice to make the point: a conventional classical parti equipped with tra­ditional poché and much the same parti distorted and made to present a competi­tive variety of local gestures – perhaps to be understood as compensations for traditional poché.

A criticism which begins with approximate configurations and which then pro­ceeds to identify differences, which seeks to establish how the same

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general motif can be transformed according to the logic (or the compulsion) of specific analytical (or stylistic) strategies, is presumably Wölfflinan in origin; and its limitations should be obvious. It cannot seriously deal with questions of iconography and content; it is perhaps over symmetrical; and, because it is so dependent on close analysis if protracted, it can only impose enormous strain upon both its con­sumer and producer. However, if one would not like to imagine oneself con­fronted with the results of an intensive critical workout on the materiel provided by the Altes Museum and the Palace of the Assembly, this reservation should not be understood as depreciating the limited value of such an exercise. For the two buildings incite comparison and can also, both of them, stimulate further parallel with certain productions of Mies van der Rohe. But, if normal intuition might suggest so much, a Wölfflinan style of critical exercise (though painfully belonging to a period c. 1900) might still possess the merit of appealing primarily to what is visible and of, thereby, making the minimum of pretences to erudition and the least possible number of references outside itself. It might, in other words, possess the merits of accessibility – for those who are willing to accept the fatigue.

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Notes 1 Isaac Ware, The Four Books of Palladio's Architecture, London, 1738, p. 41.

2 Le Corbusier, Précisions sur un état pre­sent de l'architecture et de l'urbanisme, Paris, 1930, pp. 136-38.

3 Ware, p. 46.

4 Ware, p. 27.

5 Le Corbusier, Précisions, p. 123.

6 For these particular observations I am highly indebted to Rudolf Wittkower, Archi­tectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, London, 1949.

7 Sir Henry Wotton, The Elements of Archi­tecture, published in John Evelyn, Parallel of the Ancient Architecture with the Modern, 3rd ed., London, 1723, p. xv.

8 Giacomo Leoni, Ten Books on Modern Architecture by Leon Battista Alberti, 3rd ed., London, 1755, p. 196.

9 Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre complète 1910-1929, 3rd ed., Zurich, 1943, p. 144. These remarks refer to Garches.

10 "The break away from the laws of har­monic proportion in architecture" is exten­ sively discussed in Wittkower (see n. 6), but the parallel disintegration of the Platonic­Aristotelian critical tradition is somewhat more laconically observed by Logan Pearsall Smith: "There are great youths too whose achievements one may envy; the boy David who slew Goliath and Bishop Berkeley who annihilated, at the age of twenty five, in 1710, the external world in an octavo vol­ume; and the young David Hume, who, in 1739, by sweeping away all the props of the human understanding, destroyed for ever and ever all possibility of knowledge."

Lo­gan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia, London, 1947, p. 159.

11 For the actual rather than the ideal in­ternal measurements of the Malcontenta see Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi, Les bâtiments et les desseins de André Palladio, Vicenza 1776-83.

12 It is possible to suppose that the rigid boundaries of Garches were considered to be perceptually necessary. The house is pre­sented as one of 'the four compositions' in Oeuvre complète 1910-1929, p. 189; and, in Précisions, p. 73, Le Corbusier writes of Garches: "Pour s'imposer a

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l'attention, pour occuper puissament l'espace, il fallait d'abord une surface première de forme par­faite, puis une exaltation de la platitude de cette surface par l'apport de quelques saillies ou de trous faisant intervenir un mouvement avant-arrière."

Plate 13. Altes Museum, Berlin. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1823.

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Plate 14. Altes Museum. Plan.

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Plate 15. Palace of the Assembly, Chandigarh. Le Corbusier, 1953-63.

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The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End First published in «Perspecta», vol. 21, 1984

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1 Jean Baudrillard, «The Order of Simulacra,» «Simulations,» New York City, Semiotext(e) 1983 p83.

Jean Baudrillard portrays the period beginning in the fifteenth century by three different simulacra: counterfeit, production, and simulation. He says that the first is based on the natural law of value, the second on the commercial law of value, and the third on the structural law of value.

2 The term «classical» is often confused with the idea of the «classic» and with the stylistic method of «classicism.» That which is classic, according to Joseph Rykwert, invokes the idea of «ancient and exemplary» and suggests «authority and distinction»; it is a model of what is excellent or of the first rank. More importantly, it implies its own timelessness, the idea that it is first rank at any time. Classicism, as opposed to the classical, will be defined here as a method of attempting to produce a «classic» result by appealing to a «classical» past. This accords with the definition given by Sir John Summerson, for whom classicism is not so much a set of ideas and values as it is a style. He maintains that while much of Gothic architecture was based on the same proportional relationships as the «classical» architecture of the Renaissance, no one could confuse a Gothic cathedral with a Renaissance palazzo; it simply did not have the look of classicism. In contrast, Demetri Porphyrios argues that classicism is not a style, but instead has to do with rationalism: «as much as architecture is a tectonic discourse, it is by definition transparent to rationality the lessons to be learned today from classicism, therefore, are not to be found in classicism's stylistic wrinkles but in classicism's rationality.» Porphyrios here confuses classicism with the classical and the classic, that is, with a set of values privileging the «truth» (that is, rationality) of tectonics over «expression» and error. The fallacy of this approach is that classicism relies on an idea of historical continuity inherent in the classical; therefore it does not produce the timelessness characteristic of the classic. The classical, by implication, has a more relative status than the classic; it evokes a timeless past, a «golden age» superior to the modern time or the present.

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Architecture from the fifteenth century to the present has been under the influence of three «fictions. » Notwithstanding the apparent succession of architectural styles, each with its own label – classicism, neoclassicism, romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, and so on into the future – these three fictions have persisted in one form or another for five hundred years. They are representation, reason, and history.1 Each of the fictions had an underlying purpose: representation was to embody the idea of meaning; reason was to codify the idea of truth; history was to recover the idea of the timeless from the idea of change. Because of the persistence of these categories, it will be necessary to consider this period as manifesting a continuity in architectural thought.

This continuous mode of thought can be referred to as the classical.2 It was not until the late twentieth century that the classical could be appreciated as an abstract system of relations. Such recognition occurred because the architecture of the early part of the twentieth century itself came to be considered part of history. Thus it is now possible to see that, although stylistically different

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3 Michel Foucault, «The Order of Things,» New York City, Random House, 1973.

It is precisely Michel Foucault's distinction between the classical and modern that has never been adequately articulated in relationship to architecture. In contrast to Foucault's epistemological differentiation, architecture has re,nained an uninterrupted mode of representation from the fifteenth century to the present. In fact, it will be seen that what is assumed in architecture to be classical is, in Foucault's terms, modern, and what is assumed in architecture to be modern is in reality Foucault's classical. Foucault's distinction is not what is at issue here, but rather the continuity that has persisted in architecture from the classical to the present day.

4 Foucault, pxxii. While the term «episteme» as used here is similar to Foucault's use of the term in defining a continuous period of knowledge, it is necessary to point out that the time period here defined as the classical episteme differs from Foucault's definition. Foucault locates two discontinuities in the development of Western culture: the classical and the modern. He identifies the classical, beginning in the midseventeenth century, with the primacy of the intersection of language and representation: the value of language, « its meaning,» was seen to be self-­ evident and to receive its justification within language; the way language provided meaning could be represented within language. On the other hand, Foucault identifies the modern, originating in the early nineteenth century, with the ascendance of historical continuity and self-generated analytic processes over language and representation.

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from previous architectures, «modern» architecture exhibits a system of relations similar to the classical.3 Prior to this time, the «classical» was taken to be either synonymous with «architecture» conceived of as a continuous tradition from antiquity or, by the mid-nineteenth century, an historicized style. Today the period of time dominated by the classical can be seen as an «episteme», to employ Foucault's term – a continuous period of knowledge that includes the early twentieth century.4 Despite the proclaimed rupture in both ideology and style associated with the modern movement, the three fictions have never been questioned and so remain intact. This is to say that architecture since the mid-fifteenth century aspired to be a paradigm of the classic, of that which is timeless, meaningful, and true. In the sense that architecture attempts to recover that which is classic, it can be called «classical».5 The «fiction» of representation: the simulation of meaning The first «fiction» is representation. Before the Renaissance there was a congruence of language and

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5 «The End of the Classical» is not about the end of the classic.

It merely questions a contingent value structure which, when attached to the idea of the classic, yields an erroneous sense of the classical. It is not that the desire for a classic is at an end, but that the dominant conditions of the classical (origin, end, and the process of composition) are under reconsideration. Thus it might he more accurate to title this essay «The End of the Classical as Classic. » 6 Franco Borsi, «Leone Battista Alberti,» New York City, Harper and Row, 1977 The facade of the church of Sant'Andrea in Mantua by Alberti is one of the first uses of the transposition of ancient building types to achieve both verification and authority. It marks, as Borsi says, «a decisive turning away from the t'ernacular <to the Latin.» (p272) It is acceptable in the «vernacular» to revive the classical temple front because the function of the temple in antiquity and the church in the fifteenth century was similar.

However, it is quite another matter to overlay the temple front with the triumphal arch. (See R. Wittkower, «Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism,» New York City, W.W. Norton, 1971, and also D. S. Chambers, «Patrons and Artists in the Renaissance,» London, MacMillan & Co., 1970) It is as if Alberti were saying that with the authority of God in question, man must resort to the symbols of his own power to verify the church. Thus the use of the triumphal arch becomes a message on tbe facade of Sant'Andrea rather than an embodiment of its inherent meaning.

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representation. The meaning of language was in a «face value» conveyed within representation; in other words, the way language produced meaning could be represented within language. Things were; truth and meaning were self-evident. The meaning of a romanesque or gothic cathedral was in itself; it was de facto. Renaissance buildings, on the other hand – and all buildings after them that pretended to be «architecture» – received their value by representing an already valued architecture, by being simulacra (representations of representations) of antique buildings; they were de jure.6 The message of the past was used to verify the meaning of the present.

Precisely because of this need to verify, Renaissance architecture was the first simulation, an unwitting fiction of the object.

By the late eighteenth century historical relativity came to supersede the face value of language as representation, and this view of history prompted a search for certainty, for origins both historical and logical, for truth and proof, and for goals. Truth was no longer thought to reside in representation but was believed to exist outside it, in the processes of

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7 Jeff Kipnis, from a seminar at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, 28 February 1984. ÂŤForm cannot follow function until function (including but not limited to use) has first emerged as a possibility of form.Âť

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history. This shift can be seen in the changing status of the orders: until the seventeenth century they were thought to be paradigmatic and timeless; afterwards the possibility of their timelessness depended on a necessary historicity. This shift, as has just been suggested, occurred because language had ceased to intersect with representation – that is, because it was not meaning but a message that was displayed in the object.

Modern architecture claimed to rectify and liberate itself from the Renaissance fiction of representation by asserting that it was not necessary for architecture to represent another architecture; architecture was solely to embody its own function. With the deductive conclusion that form follows function, modern architecture introduced the idea that a building should express – that is, look like – its function, or like an idea of function (that it should manifest the rationality of its processes of production and composition).7 Thus, in its effort to distance itself from the earlier representational tradition, modern architecture attempted to strip itself of the outward trappings of «classical» style. This process of reduction was called abstraction. A column without

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a base and capital was thought to be an abstraction.

Thus reduced, form was believed to embody function more «honestly. » Such a column looked more like a real column, the simplest possible load-carrying element, than one provided with a base and capital bearing arboreal or anthropomorphic motifs.

This reduction to pure functionality was, in fact, not abstraction; it was an attempt to represent reality itself.

In this sense functional goals merely replaced the orders of classical composition as the starting point for architectural design. The moderns' attempt to represent «realism» with an undecorated, functional object was a fiction equivalent to the simulacrum of the classical in Renaissance representation. For what made function any more «real» a source of imagery than elements chosen from antiquity? The idea of function, in this case the message of utility as opposed to the message of antiquity, was raised to an originary proposition – a self-evident starting point for design analogous to typology or historical quotation. The moderns' attempt to represent realism is, then, a manifestation of the same fiction wherein meaning and value reside outside the world of an architecture «as is, » in which representation is about its own

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meaning rather than being a message of another previous meaning.

Functionalism turned out to be yet another stylistic conclusion, this one based on a scientific and technical positivism, a simulation of efficiency. From this perspective the modern movement can be seen to be continuous with the architecture that preceded it. Modern architecture therefore failed to embody a new value in itself.

For in trying to reduce architectural form to its essence, to a pure reality, the moderns assumed they were transforming the field of referential figuration to that of non-referential «objectivity. » In reality, however, their «objective» forms never left the classical tradition. They were simply stripped down classical forms, or forms referring to a new set of givens (function, technology). Thus, Le Corbusier's houses that look like modem steamships or biplanes exhibit the same referential attitude toward representation as a Renaissance or «classical» building. The points of reference are different, but the implications for the object are the same.

The commitment to return modernist abstraction to

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8 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven lzenour, «Learning from Las Vegas: the f,,rgotten symbolism of architectural form,» rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 1977 p87 9 See the film «Beyond Utopia: Changing Attitudes in American Architecture,» New York City Michael Blackwood Productions, 1983

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history seems to sum up, for our time, the problem of representation. It was given its «Post-Modem» inversion in Robert Venturi's distinction between the «duck» and the «decorated shed. »8 A duck is a building that looks like its function or that allows its internal order to be displayed on its exterior; a decorated shed is a building that functions as a billboard, where any kind of imagery (except its internal function) – letters, patterns, even architectural elements – conveys a message accessible to all. In this sense the stripped-down «abstractions» of modernism are still referential objects: technological rather than typological ducks.

But the Post-Modernists fail to make another distinction which is exemplified in Venturi's comparison of the Doges' Palace in Venice, which he calls a decorated shed, and Sansovino's library across the Piazza San Marco, which he says is a duck.9 This obscures the more significant distinction between architecture «as is» and architecture as message. The Doges' Palace is not a decorated shed because it was not representational of another architecture; its significance came directly from the meaning embodied in the figures themselves; it

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was an architecture «as is. » Sansovino's library may seem to be a duck, but only because it falls into the history of library types. The use of the orders on Sansovino's library speaks not to the function or type of the library, but rather to the representation of a previous architecture. The facades of Sansovino's library contain a message, not an inherent meaning; they are sign boards. Venturi's misreading of these buildings seems motivated by a preference for the decorated shed. While the replication of the orders had significance in Sansovino's time (in that they defined the classical), the replication of the same orders today has no significance because the value system represented is no longer valued. A sign begins to replicate or, in Jean Baudrillard's term, «simulate» once the reality it represents is dead.10 When there is no longer a distinction between representation and reality, when reality is only simulation, then representation loses its a priori source of significance, and it, too, becomes a simulation.

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10 Baudrillard pp8, 9.

In referring to the death of the reality of God, Baudrillard says, «... metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, ... but actually perfect simulacra... »

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The «fiction» of reason: the simulation of truth The second «fiction» of postmedieval architecture is reason. If representation was a simulation of the meaning of the present through the message of antiquity, then reason was a simulation of the meaning of the truth through the message of science.

This fiction is strongly manifest in twentieth-century architecture, as it is in that of the four preceding centuries; its apogee was in the Enlightenment.

The quest for origin in architecture is the initial manifestation of the aspiration toward a rational source for design. Before the Renaissance the idea of origin was seen as self-evident; its meaning and importance «went without saying»; it belonged to an a priori universe of values. In the Renaissance, with the loss of a self-evident universe of values, origins were sought in natural or divine sources or in a cosmological or anthropomorphic geometry. The reproduction of the image of the Vitruvian man is the most renowned example. Not surprisingly, since the origin was thought to contain the seeds of the object's purpose and thus its destination, this belief in the existence of

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an ideal origin led directly to a belief in the existence of an ideal end. Such a genetic idea of beginning/end depended on a belief in a universal plan in nature and the cosmos which, through the application of classical rules of composition concerning hierarchy, order, and closure, would confer a harmony of the whole upon the parts. The perspective of the end thus directed the strategy for beginning. Therefore, as Alberti first defined it in Della Pittura, composition was not an open-ended or neutral process of transformation, but rather a strategy for arriving at a predetermined goal; it was the mechanism by which the idea of order, represented in the orders, was translated into a specific form.11 Reacting against the cosmological goals of Renaissance composition, Enlightenment architecture aspired to a rational process of design whose ends were a product of pure, secular reason rather than of divine order.

The Renaissance vision of harmony (faith in the divine) led naturally to the scheme of order that was to replace it (faith in reason), which was the logical determination of form from a priori types.

Durand embodies this moment of the supreme authority of reason. In his treatises formal orders

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11 Leone Battista Alberti, «On Painting,» New Haven Yale University Press, 1966 pp68-74 12 Morris Kline, «Mathematics, The Loss of Certainty,» New York City, Oxford University Press, 1980 p5

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become type forms, and natural and divine origins are replaced by rational solutions to the problems of accommodation and construction. The goal is a socially «relevant» architecture; it is attained through the rational transformation of type forms. Later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, function and technique replaced the catalogue of type forms as origins. But the point is that from Durand on, it was believed that deductive reason – the same process used in science, mathematics, and technology – was capable of producing a truthful (that is, meaningful) architectural object. And with the success of rationalism as a scientific method (one could almost call it a «style» of thought) in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, architecture adopted the self-evident values conferred by rational origins. If an architecture looked rational – that is, represented rationality – it was believed to represent truth. As in logic, at the point where all deductions developed from an initial premise corroborate that premise, there is logical closure and, it was believed, certain truth. Moreover, in this procedure the primacy of the origin remains intact. The rational became the moral and aesthetic basis of modern architecture. And the

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representational task of architecture in an age of reason was to portray its own modes of knowing.

At this point in the evolution of consciousness something occurred: reason turned its focus onto itself and thus began the process of its own undoing.

Questioning its own status and mode of knowing, reason exposed itself to be a fiction.12 The processes for knowing – measurement, logical proof, causality – turned out to be a network of value-laden arguments, no more than effective modes of persuasion. Values were dependent on another teleology, another end fiction, that of rationality.

Essentially, then, nothing had really changed from the Renaissance idea of origin. Whether the appeal was to a divine or natural order, as in the fifteenth century, or to a rational technique and typological function, as in the post-Enlightenment period, it ultimately amounted to the same thing – to the idea that architecture's value derived from a source outside itself. Function and type were only value-laden origins equivalent to divine or natural ones.

In this second «fiction» the crisis of belief in reason eventually undermined the power of self-evidence.

As reason began to turn on itself, to question its own

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status, its authority to convey truth, its power to prove, began to evaporate. The analysis of analysis revealed that logic could not do what reason had claimed for it – reveal the self-evident truth of its origins. What both the Renaissance and the modern relied on as the basis of truth was found to require, in essence, faith.

Analysis was a form of simulation; knowledge was a new religion. Similarly, it can be seen that architecture never embodied reason; it could only state the desire to do so; there is no architectural image of reason.

Architecture presented an aesthetic of the experience of (the persuasiveness of and desire for) reason.

Analysis, and the illusion of proof, in a continuous process that recalls Nietzsche's characterization of «truth, » is a never-ending series of figures, metaphors, and metonymies.

In a cognitive environment in which reason has been revealed to depend on a belief in knowledge, therefore to be irreducibly metaphoric, a classical architecture – that is, an architecture whose processes of transformation are value-laden strategies grounded on self-evident or a priori origins – will always be an architecture of restatement and not of representation, no matter how ingeniously the origins are selected

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for this transformation, nor how inventive the transformation is.

Architectural restatement, replication, is a nostalgia for the security of knowing, a belief in the continuity of Western thought. Once analysis and reason replaced self­-evidence as the means by which truth was revealed, the classic or timeless quality of truth ended and the need for verification began.

The «fiction» of history: the simulation of the timeless The third «fiction» of classical Western architecture is that of history. Prior to the mid-fifteenth century, time was conceived non dialectically; from antiquity to the middle ages there was no concept of the «forward movement» of time. Art did not seek its justification in terms of the past or future; it was ineffable and timeless. In ancient Greece the temple and the god were one and the same; architecture was divine and natural. For this reason it appeared «classic» to the «classical» epoch that followed. The classic could not be represented or simulated, it could only be. In its straightforward assertion of itself it was nondialectical

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and timeless.

In the mid-fifteenth century the idea of a temporal origin emerged, and with it the idea of the past. This interrupted the eternal cycle of time by positing a fixed point of beginning. Hence the loss of the timeless, for the existence of origin required a temporal reality. The attempt of the classical to recover the timeless turned, paradoxically, to a time-bound concept of history as a source of timelessness. Moreover, the consciousness of time's forward movement came to «explain» a process of historical change. By the nineteenth century this process was seen as «dialectical. » With dialectical time came the idea of the zeitgeist, with cause and effect rooted in presentness – that is, with an aspiredto timelessness of the present. In addition to its aspiration to timelessness, the «spirit of the age» held that an a priori relationship existed between history and all its manifestations at any given moment. It was necessary only to identify the governing spirit to know what style of architecture was properly expressive of, and relevant to, the time. Implicit was the notion that man should always be «in harmony» – or at least in a non-disjunctive relation – with his time.

In its polemical rejection of the history that preceded

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it, the modem movement attempted to appeal to values for this (harmonic) relationship other than those that embodied the eternal or universal. In seeing itself as superseding the values of the preceding architecture, the modem movement substituted a universal idea of relevance for a universal idea of history, analysis of program for analysis of history. It presumed itself to be a value-free and collective form of intervention, as opposed to the virtuoso individualism and informed connoisseurship personified by the post-Renaissance architect. Relevance in modern architecture came to lie in embodying a value other than the natural or divine; the zeitgeist was seen to be contingent and of the present, rather than as absolute and eternal.

But the difference in value between presentness and the universal – between the contingent value of the zeitgeist and the eternal value of the classical – only resulted in yet another set (in fact, simply the opposite set) of aesthetic preferences. The presumedly neutral spirit of the «epochal will» supported asymmetry over symmetry, dynamism over stability, absence of hierarchy over hierarchy.

The imperatives of the «historical moment» are always evident in the connection between the representation

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of the function of architecture and its form. Ironically, modern architecture, by invoking the zeitgeist rather than doing away with history, only continued to act as the «midwife to historically significant form. » In this sense modern architecture was not a rupture with history, but simply a moment in the same continuum, a new episode in the evolution of the zeitgeist. And architecture's representation of its particular zeitgeist turned out to be less «modern» than originally thought.

One of the questions that may be asked is why the moderns did not see themselves in this continuity.

One answer is that the ideology of the zeitgeist bound them to their present history with the promise to release them from their past history; they were ideologically trapped in the illusion of the eternity of their own time.

The late twentieth century, with its retrospective knowledge that modernism has become history, has inherited nothing less than the recognition of the end of the ability of a classical or referential architecture to express its own time as timeless. The illusory timelessness of the present brings with it an awareness of the timeful nature of past time. It is for

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this reason that the representation of a zeitgeist always implies a simulation; it is seen in the classical use of the replication of a past time to invoke the timeless as the expression of a present time. Thus, in the zeitgeist argument, there will always be this unacknowledged paradox, a simulation of the timeless through a replication of the timeful.

Zeitgeist history, too, is subject to a questioning of its own authority. How can it be possible, from within history, to determine a timeless truth of its «spirit»?

Thus history ceases to be an objective source of truth; origins and ends once again lose their universality (that is, their self-evident value) and, like history, become fictions. If it is no longer possible to pose the problem of architecture in terms of a zeitgeist – that is if architecture can no longer assert its relevance through a consonance with its zeitgeist – then it must turn to some other structure. To escape such a dependence on the zeitgeist – that is, the idea that the purpose of an architectural style is to embody the spirit of its age – it is necessary to propose an alternative idea of architecture, one whereby it is no longer the purpose of architecture, but its inevitability, to express its own time.

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Once the traditional values of classical architecture are understood as not meaningful, true, and timeless, it must be concluded that these classical values were always simulations (and are not merely seen to be so in light of a present rupture of history or the present disillusionment with the zeitgeist). It becomes clear that the classical itself was a simulation that architecture sustained for five hundred years. Because the classical did not recognize itself as a simulation, it sought to represent extrinsic values (which it could not do) in the guise of its own reality.

The result, then, of seeing classicism and modernism as part of a single historical continuity is the understanding that there are no longer any selfevident values in representation, reason, or history to confer legitimacy on the object. This loss of selfevident value allows the timeless to be cut free from the meaningful and the truthful. It permits the view that there is no one truth (a timeless truth), or one meaning (a timeless meaning), but merely the timeless. When the possibility is raised that the timeless can be cut adrift from the timeful (history), so too can the timeless be cut away from universality to produce a timelessness which is not universal. This

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separation makes it unimportant whether origins are natural or divine or functional; thus, it is no longer necessary to produce a classic – that is, a timeless – architecture by recourse to the classical values inherent in representation, reason, and history.

The not-classical: architecture as fiction The necessity of the quotation marks around the term «fiction» is now obvious. The three fictions just discussed can be seen not as fictions but rather as simulations. As has been said, fiction becomes simulation when it does not recognize its condition as fiction, when it tries to simulate a condition of reality, truth, or non-fiction. The simulation of representation in architecture has led, first of all, to an excessive concentration of inventive energies in the representational object. When columns are seen as surrogates of trees and windows resemble the portholes of ships, architectural elements become representational figures carrying an inordinate burden of meaning. In other disciplines representation is not the only purpose of figuration.

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13 Martin Heidegger, «On the Essence of Truth» from «Basic Writings,» New York City, Harper & Row Publishers, 1977.

«Errancy is the essential counter-essence to the primordial essence of truth. Errancy opens itself up as the open region for every opposite essential truth... Errancy and the concealing of what is concealed belong to the primordial essence of truth.»

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In literature, for example, metaphors and similes have a wider range of application – poetic, ironic, and the like – and are not limited to allegorical or referential functions. Conversely, in architecture only one aspect of the figure is traditionally at work: object representation. The architectural figure always alludes to-aims at the representation of-some other object, whether architectural, anthropomorphic, natural, or technological.

Second, the simulation of reason in architecture has been based on a classical value given to the idea of truth. But Heidegger has noted that error has a trajectory parallel to truth, that error can be the unfolding of truth.13 Thus to proceed from «error» or fiction is to counter consciously the tradition of «mis-reading» on which the classical unwittingly depended – not a presumedly logical transformation of something a priori, but a deliberate «error» stated as such, one which presupposes only its own internal truth. Error in this case does not assume the same value as truth; it is not simply its dialectical opposite.

It is more like a dissimulation, a «not-containing» of the value of truth.

Finally, the simulated fiction of modern movement

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history, unwittingly inherited from the classical, was that any present-day architecture must be a reflection of its zeitgeist; that is, architecture can simultaneously be about presentness and universality.

But if architecture is inevitably about the invention of fictions, it should also be possible to propose an architecture that embodies an other fiction, one that is not sustained by the values of presentness or universality and, more importantly, that does not consider its purpose to reflect these values. This other fiction/object, then, clearly should eschew the fictions of the classical (representation, reason, and history), which are attempts to «solve» the problem of architecture rationally; for strategies and solutions are vestiges of a goal-oriented view of the world. If this is the case, the question becomes: What can be the model for architecture when the essence of what was effective in the classical model – the presumed rational value of structures, representations, methodologies of origins and ends, and deductive processes –has been shown to be a simulation?

It is not possible to answer such a question with an alternative model. But a series of characteristics can be proposed that typify this aporia, this loss

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14 Gilles Deleuze, «Plato and the Simulacrum,» «October» no. 27, Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, winter 1983.

Deleuze uses a slightly different terminology to address a very similar set of issues; he discusses the Platonic distinction between model, copy, and «simulacrum» as a means of assigning value and hierarchical position to objects and ideas. He explains the overthrow of Platonism as the suspension of the a priori value-laden status of the Platonic copy in order to: «raise up simulacra, to assert their rights over icons or copies. The problem no longer concerns the distinction Essence/Appearance or Model/Copy. This whole distinction operates in the world of representation... The simulacrum is not degraded copy, rather it contains a positive power which negates both original and copy, both model and reproduction. Of the at least two divergent series interiorized in the simulacrum neither can be assigned as original or as copy. It doesn't even work to invoke the model of the Other, because no model resists the vertigo of the simulacrum.» (pp 52, 53) Simulation is used here in a sense which closely approximates Deleuze's use of copy or icon, while dissimulation is conceptually very close to his description of the pre-Socratic simulacra.

15 Baudrillard p2.

In the essay «The Precession of Simulacra» Baudrillard discusses the nature of simulation and the implication of present-day simulacra on our perception of the nature of reality and representation: «Something has disappeared; the sovereign difference between them (the real and... simulation models) that was the abstraction's charm.»

16 Baudrillard p5.

Distinguishing between simulation and what he calls dissimulation, Baudrillard says that «to dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has.

To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't... <Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and make believe he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms. (Littre)>

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in our capacity to conceptualize a new model for architecture. These characteristics, outlined below, arise from that which can not be; they form a structure of absences.14 The purpose in proposing them is not to reconstitute what has just been dismissed, a model for a theory of architecture – for all such models are ultimately futile. Rather what is being proposed is an expansion beyond the limitations presented by the classical model to the realization of architecture as an independent discourse, free of external valuesclassical or any other; that is, the intersection of the meaning-free, the arbitrary and the timeless in the artificial.

The meaning-free, arbitrary, and timeless creation of artificiality in this sense must be distinguished from what Baudrillard has called «simulation»:15 it is not an attempt to erase the classical distinction between reality and representation – thus again making architecture a set of conventions simulating the real; it is, rather, more like a dissimulation.16 Whereas simulation attempts to obliterate the difference between real and imaginary, dissimulation leaves untouched the difference between reality and illusion.

The relationship between dissimulation and reality is

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Thus feigning is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between <true> and <false,> between <real> and <imaginary>. Since the simulator produces <true> symptoms, is he ill or not?» According to Baudrillard, simulation is the generation by models of a reality without origin; it no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. While this sounds very much like my proposal of the not-classical, the not-classical is fundamentally different in that it is a dissimulation and not a simulation. Baudrillard discusses the danger in the realization of the simulacra – for when it enters the real world it is its nature to take on the «real» attributes of that which it is simulating.

Dissimulation here is defined differently: it makes apparent the simulation with all of its implications on the value status of «reality» without distorting the simulacra or allowing it to lose its precarious position, poised between the real and the unreal, the model and the other.

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similar to the signification embodied in the mask: the sign of pretending to be not what one is – that is, a sign which seems not to signify anything besides itself (the sign of a sign, or the negation of what is behind it). Such a dissimulation in architecture can be given the provisional title of the not-classical. As dissimulation is not the inverse, negative, or opposite of simulation, a «not-classical» architecture is not the inverse, negative, or opposite of classical architecture; it is merely different from or other than. A «notclassical» architecture is no longer a certification of experience or a simulation of history, reason, or reality in the present. Instead, it may more appropriately be described as an other manifestation, an architecture as is, now as a fiction. It is a representation of itself, of its own values and internal experience.

The claim that a «not-classical» architecture is necessary, that it is proposed by the new epoch or the rupture in the continuity of history, would be another zeitgeist argument. The «not-classical» merely proposes an end to the dominance of classical values in order to reveal other values. It proposes, not a new value or a new zeitgeist, but merely another condition – one of reading architecture as a text. There is

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nevertheless no question that this idea of the reading of architecture is initiated by a zeitgeist argument: that today the classical signs are no longer significant and have become no more than replications. A «notclassical» architecture is, therefore, not unresponsive to the realization of the closure inherent in the world; rather, it is unresponsive to representing it.

The end of the beginning An origin of value implies a state or a condition of origin before value has been given to it. A beginning is such a condition prior to a valued origin. In order to reconstruct the timeless, the state of as is, of face value, one must begin: begin by eliminating the timebound concepts of the classical, which are primarily origin and end. The end of the beginning is also the end of the beginning of value. But it is not possible to go back to the earlier, prehistoric state of grace, the Eden of timelessness before origins and ends were valued. We must begin in the present – without necessarily giving a value to presentness. The attempt to reconstruct the timeless today must be a fiction which recognizes the fictionality of its own task – that

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17 What is at issue in an artificial origin is not motivation (as opposed to an essential or originary cause, as in an origin of the classical) hut rather the idea of self-evidence. In deductive logic reading backward inevitably produces self-evidence. Hence the analytic process of the classical would always produce a self-evident origin. Yet there are no a priori self-evident procedures which could give one origin any value over any other. It can he proposed in a not-classical architecture that any initial condition can produce self-evident procedures that have an internal motivation.

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is, it should not attempt to simulate a timeless reality.

As has been suggested above, latent in the classical appeal to origins is the more general problem of cause and effect. This formula, part of the fictions of reason and history, reduces architecture to an «added to» or «inessential» object by making it simply an effect of certain causes understood as origins. This problem is inherent in all of classical architecture, including its modernist aspect. The idea of architecture as something «added to» rather than something with its own being – as adjectival rather than nominal or ontological – leads to the perception of architecture as a practical device. As long as architecture is primarily a device designated for use and for shelter – that is, as long as it has origins in programmatic functions – it will always constitute an effect.

But once this «self-evident» characteristic of architecture is dismissed and architecture is seen as having no a priori origins – whether functional, divine, or natural – alternative fictions for the origin can be proposed: for example, one that is arbitrary, one that has no external value derived from meaning, truth, or timelessness. It is possible to imagine a beginning internally consistent but not conditioned

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18 The idea of arbitrary or artificial in this sense must be distinguished from the classical idea of architecture as artificial nature or from the idea of the arbitrariness of the sign in language. Arbitrary in this context means having no natural connection. The insight that origins are a contingency of language is based on an appeal to reading; the origin can be arbitrary because it is contingent on a reading that bri1,gs its own strategy with it.

19 Jonathan Culler, «On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism,» Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1982.

This is basically similar to Jacques Derrida's use of graft in literary deconstruction. He discusses graft as an element which can be discovered in a text through a deconstructive reading: «deconstruction is, among other things, an attempt to identify grafts in the texts it analyses: what are the points of juncture and stress where one scion or line or argument has been spliced with another?... Focusing on these moments, deconstruction elucidates the heterogeneity of the text.» (p150) The three defining qualities of graft as it is used in this paper are: (1) graft begins with the arbitrary and artificial conjunction of ( 2) two distinct characteristics which are in their initial form unstable. It is this instability which provides the motivation (the attempt to return to stability) and also allows modification to take place. (3) In the incision there must be something which allows for an energy to he set off by the coming together of the two characteristics. Culler's discussion of deconstructive strategy contains all of the elements of graft: it begins by analysis of text to reveal oppositions. These are juxtaposed in such a way as to create movement, and the deconstruction (graft) is identifiable in terms of that motivation.

This paper, which concentrates on transposing these ideas from a pure analytic framework to a program for work, is more concerned with what happens in the process of consciously making grafts than finding those that may have been placed unconsciously in a text. Since a graft by definition is a process of modification, it is unlikely that one could find a static or undeveloped moment of graft in an architectural text; one would be more likely to read only its results. Graft is used here in a way that

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closely resembles Culler's analysis of Derrida's method for deconstruction of opposition: «To deconstruct an opposition is not to destroy it... To deconstruct an opposition is to undo and displace it, to situate it differently. » (p150) «This concentration on the apparently marginal puts the logic of supplementarity to work as an interpretive strategy: what has been relegated to the margins or set aside by previous interpreters may be important precisely for those reasons that led it to be set aside. » (p140) Derrida emphasizes graft as a non-dialectic condition of opposition; this paper stresses the processual aspects which emerge from the moment of graft. The major differences are of terminology and emphasis.

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by or contingent on historic origins with supposedly self-evident values.17 Thus, while classical origins were thought to have their source in a divine or natural order and modern origins were held to derive their value from deductive reason, ÂŤnot-classicalÂť origins can be strictly arbitrary, simply starting points, without value. They can be artificial and relative, as opposed to natural, divine, or universal.18 Such artificially determined beginnings can be free of universal values because they are merely arbitrary points in time, when the architectural process commences. One example of an artificial origin is a graft, as in the genetic insertion of an alien body into a host to provide a new result.19 As opposed to a collage or a montage, which lives within a context and alludes to an origin, a graft is an invented site, which does not so much have object characteristics as those of process. A graft is not in itself genetically arbitrary. Its arbitrariness is in its freedom from a value system of non-arbitrariness (that is, the classical). It is arbitrary in its provision of a choice of reading which brings no external value to the process. But further, in its artificial and relative nature a graft is not in itself necessarily an achievable result, but merely a site that contains motivation for

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action-that is the beginning of a process.20 Motivation takes something arbitrary – that is, something in its artificial state which is not obedient to an external structure of values – and implies an action and a movement concerning an internal structure which has an inherent order and an internal logic.

This raises the question of the motivation or purpose from an arbitrary origin. How can something be arbitrary and non-goal oriented but still be internally motivated? Every state, it can be argued, has a motivation toward its own being – a motion rather than a direction. Just because architecture cannot portray or enact reason as a value does not mean that it cannot argue systematically or reasonably. In all processes there must necessarily be some beginning point; but the value in an arbitrary or intentionally fictive architecture is found in the intrinsic nature of its action rather than in the direction of its course.

Since any process must necessarily have a beginning and a movement, however, the fictional origin must be considered as having at least a methodological value – a value concerned with generating the internal relations of the process itself. But if the beginning is in fact arbitrary, there can be no direction toward

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20 Culler p99.

«The arbitrary nature of the sign and the system with no positive terms gives us the paradoxical notion of an «instituted trace,» a structure of infinite referral in which there are only traces-traces prior to any entity of which they might be the trace.»

This description of «instituted trace» relates closely to the idea of motivation as put forth in this paper. Like Derrida's «instituted trace,» motivation describes a system which is internally consistent, but arbitrary in that it has no beginning or end and no necessary or valued direction. It remains a system of differences, comprehensible only in terms of the spaces between elements or moments of the process. Thus, motivation here is similar to Derrida's description of difference – it is the force within the object that causes it to be dynamic at every point of a continuous transformation. Internal motivation determines the nature of modification for the object and is rendered readable through trace.

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closure or end, because the motivation for change of state (that is, the inherent instability of the beginning) can never lead to a state of no change (that is, an end). Thus, in their freedom from the universal values of both historic origin and directional process, motivations can lead to ends different from those of the previous value-laden end.

The end of the end Along with the end of the origin, the second basic characteristic of a ÂŤnot-classicalÂť architecture, therefore, is its freedom from a priori goals or ends â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the end of the end. The end of the classical also means the end of the myth of the end as a value-laden effect of the progress or direction of history. By logically leading to a potential closure of thought, the fictions of the classical awakened a desire to confront, display, and even transcend the end of history. This desire was manifest in the modern idea of utopia, a time beyond history. It was thought that objects imbued with value because of their relationship to a self-evidently meaningful origin could somehow transcend the present in moving toward a timeless future, a utopia.

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This idea of progress gave false value to the present; utopia, a form of fantasizing about an «open» and limitless end, forestalled the notion of closure. Thus the modem crisis of closure marked the end of the process of moving toward the end. Such crises (or ruptures) in our perception of the continuity of history arise not so much out of a change in our idea of origins or ends than out of the failure of the present (and its objects) to sustain our expectations of the future. And once the continuity of history is broken in our perception, any representation of the classical, any «classicism, » can be seen only as a belief. At this point, where our received values are «in crisis, » the end of the end raises the possibility of the invention and realization of a blatantly fictional future (which is therefore non-threatening in its «truth» value) as opposed to a simulated or idealized one.

With the end of the end, what was formerly the process of composition or transformation ceases to be a causal strategy, a process of addition or subtraction from an origin. Instead, the process becomes one of modification – the invention of a non-dialectical, non-directional, non-goal oriented process.21 The

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21 Jeff Kipnis, ÂŤArchitect11re Unbo11ndÂť 11np11blished paper, 1984.

Modification is one aspect of extension which is defined by Kipnis as a component of decomposition. While extension is any movement from an origin (or an initial condition), modification is a specific form of extension concerned with preserving the evidence of initial conditions (for example, through no addition or subtraction of materiality). On the other band, synthesis is an example of extension which does not attempt to maintain evidence of initial conditions but rather attempts to create a new whole.

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«invented» origins from which this process receives its motivation differ from the accepted, mythic origins of the classicists by being arbitrary, reinvented for each circumstance, adopted for the moment and not forever. The process of modification can be seen as an open-ended tactic rather than a goal-oriented strategy. A strategy is a process that is determined and value-laden before it begins; it is directed. Since the arbitrary origin cannot be known in advance (in a cognitive sense), it does not depend on knowledge derived from the classical tradition and thus cannot engender a strategy.

In this context architectural form is revealed as a «place of invention» rather than as a subservient representation of another architecture or as a strictly practical device. To invent an architecture is to allow architecture to be a cause; in order to be a cause, it must arise from something outside a directed strategy of composition.

The end of the end also concerns the end of object representation as the only metaphoric subject in architecture. In the past the metaphor in architecture was used to convey such forces as tension, compression, extension, and elongation; these were

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qualities that could be seen, if not literally in the objects themselves, then in the relationship between objects. The idea of the metaphor here has nothing to do with the qualities generated between buildings or between buildings and spaces; rather, it has to do with the idea that the internal process itself can generate a kind of non-representational figuration in the object.

This is an appeal, not to the classical aesthetic of the object, but to the potential poetic of an architectural text. The problem, then, is to distinguish texts from representations, to convey the idea that what one is seeing, the material object, is a text rather than a series of image references to other objects or values.

This suggests the idea of architecture as «writing» as opposed to architecture as image. What is being «written» is not the object itself – its mass and volume – but the act of massing. This idea gives a metaphoric body to the act of architecture. It then signals its reading through an other system of signs, called traces.22 Traces are not to be read literally, since they have no other value than to signal the idea that there is a reading event and that reading should take place; trace signals the idea to read.23 Thus a trace is a partial or fragmentary sign; it has no objecthood. It signifies

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22 The concept of trace in architecture as put forward here is similar to Derrida's idea in that it suggests that there can be neither a representational object nor representable «reality.» Architecture becomes text rather than object when it is conceived and presented as a system of differences rather than as an image or an isolated presence. Trace is the visual manifestation of this system of differences, a record of m0vement (without direction) causing us to read the present object as a system of relationships to other prior and subsequent movements. Trace is to be distinguished from Jacques Derrida's use of the term, for Derrida directly relates the idea of «difference» to the fact that it is impossible to isolate «presence» as an entity. «The presence of motion is conceivable only insofar as every instant is already marked with the traces of the past and future... the present instant is not the past and future... the present instant is not something given but a product of the relations between past and future. If motion is to be present, presence must already be marked by difference and deferral.»

(Culler p97) The idea that presence is never a simple absolute runs counter to all of our intuitive convictions. If there can be no inherently meaningful presence which is not itself a system of differences then there can be no value-laden or a priori origin.

23 We have always read architecture. Traditionally it did not induce reading but responded to it. The use of arbitrariness here is an idea to stimulate or induce the reading of traces without references to meaning but rather to other conditions of process – that is, to stimulate pure reading without value or prejudice, as opposed to interpretation.

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an action that is in process. In this sense a trace is not a simulation of reality; it is a dissimulation because it reveals itself as distinct from its former reality. It does not simulate the real, but represents and records the action inherent in a former or future reality, which has a value no more or less real than the trace itself.

That is, trace is unconcerned with forming an image which is the representation of a previous architecture or of social customs and usages; rather, it is concerned with the marking – literally the figuration – of its own internal processes. Thus the trace is the record of motivation, the record of an action, not an image of another object-origin.

In this case a «not-classical» architecture begins actively to involve an idea of a reader conscious of his own identity as a reader rather than as a user or observer. It proposes a new reader distanced from any external value system (particularly an architecturalhistorical system). Such a reader brings no a priori competence to the act of reading other than an identity as a reader. That is, such a reader has no preconceived knowledge of what architecture should be (in terms of its proportions, textures, scale, and the like); nor does a «not-classical» architecture aspire to make itself

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understandable through these preconceptions.24 The competence of the reader (of architecture) may be defined as the capacity to distinguish a sense of knowing from a sense of believing. At any given time the conditions for «knowledge» are «deeper» than philosophic conditions; in fact, they provide the possibility of distinguishing philosophy from literature, science from magic, and religion from myth. The new competence comes from the capacity to read per se, to know how to read, and more importantly, to know how to read (but not necessarily decode) architecture as a text. Thus the new «object» must have the capacity to reveal itself first of all as a text, as a reading event. The architectural fiction proposed here differs from the classical fiction in its primary condition as a text and in the way it is read: the new reader is no longer presumed to know the nature of truth in the object, either as a representation of a rational origin or as a manifestation of a universal set of rules governing proportion, harmony, and ordering. But further, knowing how to decode is no longer important; simply, language in this context is no longer a code to assign meanings (that this means that). The activity of reading is first and foremost

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24 Previously, there was assumed to be an a priori language of value, a poetry, existing within architecture. Now we are saying that architecture is merely language. We read whether we know what language we are reading or not. We can read French without understanding French. We can know someone is speaking nonsense or noise. Before we are competent to read and understand poetry we can know something to be language. Reading in this context is not concerned with decoding for meaning or for poetic content but rather for indication.

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in the recognition of something as a language (that it is). Reading, in this sense, makes available a level of indication rather than a level of meaning or expression.

Therefore, to propose the end of the beginning and the end of the end25 is to propose the end of beginnings and ends of value – to propose an other «timeless» space of invention. It is a «timeless» space in the present without a determining relation to an ideal future or to an idealized past. Architecture in the present is seen as a process of inventing an artificial past and a futureless present. It remembers a nolonger future.

This paper is based on three non-verifiable assumptions or values: timeless (originless, endless) architecture; non-representational (objectless) architecture; and artificial (arbitrary, reasonless) architecture.

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25 C. F. Franco Rella «Tempo della fine e tempo dell'inizio» (The Age of the End and the Age of the Beginning) «Casahella, » 489/499 Jan/Feb 1984 pp106-108 The similarity to the title of Franco Rella's article is coincidental, for we use the terms «beginning» and «end» for entirely different purposes.

Rella identifies the present as the age of the end, stating that the paradoxical result of progress has been to create a culture that simultaneously desires progress and is burdened with a sense of passing and the chronic sense of irredeemable loss. The result is a culture which «does not love what has been but the end of what has been. It hates the present, the existing, and the changing. It therefore loves nothing.» Rella's article poses the question of whether it is possible to build today, to design in a way that is with rather than against time. He desires the return to a sense of time-boundedness and the possibility of living in one's own age without attempting to return to the past. The mechanism by which he proposes to re-create this possibility is myth. He differentiates myth from fiction, and it is this difference which illuminates the opposition between his proposal and the propositions of this paper. Myth is defined as a traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the worldview of a people in the traditional value-laden sense, giving history and thus value to timeless or inexplicable events.

Rella dismisses fiction as verisimilitude, merely creating the appearance of truth. Instead of attempting to return to the past, myth attempts to create a new beginning merely situating us at an earlier, and less acute, state of anxiety. But a myth cannot alleviate the paradox of progress. Against both of these, «The End of the Beginning and The End of the End» proposes dissimulation, which is neither the simulation of reality as we know it nor the proposal of an alternate truth, which appeals to the identical verifying structures of belief – that is, origins, transformations, and ends. «The End of the Classical» insists on maintaining a state of anxiety, proposing fiction in a self-reflexive sense, a process without origins or ends which maintains its own fictionality rather than proposing a simulation of truth.

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The author wishes to thank the following people who have helped in the preparation of this article: Carol Burns, Giorgio Ciucci, Kurt Forster, Judy Geib, Nina Hofer, Jeff Kipnis, Joan Ockman, and Anthony Vidler.

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Instructions for use Images from the second book of "I qattro libri dell'architettura", Venezia, 1570

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Palladio did not publish his buildings as an autobiographical contribution.

He made a statement to this effect in the preface to the Quattro libri with these words: "In the second (book) I shall treat of the quality of the fabricks that are suitable to the different ranks of men: first of those of a city; and then of the most convenient situation for villas... And as we have but very few examples from the antients, of which we can make use, I shall insert the plans and elevations of many fabricks I have erected..." In this light many differences between buildings and plates can be explained.

Rudolf Wittkower (1945), p. 86.

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Rewriting Classicism In this section you find a large selection of the drawings, mostly plans and sections, that Palladio collected in the Second Book, with the aim to offer inspirational samples and repeatable models. In his words, the book "contains drawings of many houses designed by Palladio himself inside and outside town, and drawings of the old houses of Greeks and Romans." Drawings are done with the metric scale, all measures are done with the Vicentin feet, and often sections are described in words, with indication of the hight of the rooms and of the architectural character of the ceiling: domed, vaulted, flat. In this selection, we report short excerpts from the two essays that we consider more important, the Rudolf Wittkower's and Peter Eisenman's (complete biblographic reference at the end of this volume), where available, together with other our notes which want to put in evidence some specific character of that drawing. The aim of this review is to offer a practical synthetic tool to approach, understand and reuse, in design activity, the peculiarity and richness of Andrea Palladio's architecture.

Alessandro Rocca

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Andrea Palladio, frontispiece of the Secondo Libro (Second Book).

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Palazzo Antonini Libro secondo, p. 5.

Entry porticos are compressed, with two minimal stairs that occupy little space outside the main facades' vertical plans. The main halls are both strongly underlined by four columns, disposed in two different ways. The four columns of the entrance hall, just behind the small entrance stairs, are placed at the four corners, leaving free the two main axis of symmetry.

The four columns of the second hall, maybe open towards a garden, determine the relationship between inside and outside with a monumental diaphragm which transform the hall in a loggia open towards the landscape. Kitchen is put outside of the cube, while restrooms and stairs form a clear central core and an elaborate passageway between the urban entrance hall and the more private hall open to the garden.

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Palazzo Chiericati Libro secondo, p. 6.

Palladio Virtuel, pp. 80-91.

Even though it is not, strictly speaking, a villa, it can be classified as a compressed villa type that descends from Pompeii. The palazzo has an actual frontispiece, a two-story arcade that acts as a loggia on the ground floor. The conceptual readir\g of this building is initiated by the portico, which is compressed into the loggia. The regular rhythm of columns across the facade is interrupted when the portico and loggia intersect, which creates a doubled column: one column literally pressed into another.

Palladio Virtuel

The block is entirely developed in parallel with the main facade, with a reduced deepness in the other direction. The colonnade, that takes the whole facade, is replicated at the second level. There is no pediment, but a more urban solution based on the longitudinal alignment and repetition of the facade's elements. As usual, section is described in the short text, which specifies the height and the kind of ceilings, which are vaulted in the main spaces and flat in the minor ones. The two central double stairs are nobilitated by a pair of columns that prepares the transition to a lower elongated space.

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Palazzo dalla Torre Libro secondo, p. 11.

Because of the double access from two parallel streets, tha palace is duplicate in two blocks, attributed to different kind of users: one is for the family and the other one for visitors. Both accesses are squared atriums based on four columns, and introduce to a passage to the central court. In this project, stairs don't acquire the monumental relevance that often have.

The central court has a columnade of double hight, gigantic, with an intermediate passageway supported by pillars wich make part of the columns' body.

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Palazzo Thiene Libro secondo, p. 13.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 60-69.

The most unusual feature in Thiene, however, is the doubled front A bay, a series of rooms that runs as a frontispiece across the entire width of the facade and extends forward from the main building volume in the middle as an entry portico. Giuseppe Terragni will use this same strategy of the elongated frontal bay in the Casa de! Fascio in Como (1936), though in that case it is internal to the structure. In a sense, Thiene and the Casa del Fascio share the same diagram; four corner towers (although the symmetrical side bay is absent in Como), a cross-axial stair arrangement, the location of the internal stair or circulation bay, and columns framing the central space.

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This palace uses two orders of space. The bigger one, is that of the big atrium, a monumental connection with the urban street, and the square courtyard, defined by a doulbe level, rusticated and composite. The smaller important spaces are the octagonal rooms, which enphasizes the four corners, and the three elongated halls wich, as the portico, stay in the middle of the three sides of this urban block, completely surrounded by streets.

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Villa Capra â&#x20AC;&#x201C; La Rotonda Libro secondo, p. 19.

Palladio Virtuel, pp. 34-47.

The relationship of the portico of the Pantheon to the portico of Rotonda illustrates Palladio's transposition of elements as notational signs and their use in creating heterogeneous spatial conditions. For example, the lower pediment of the Pantheon is similar in size to that of Rotonda. However, instead of eight Corinthian columns, at Rotonda there are six Doric columns comprising the portico. The shift is not, then, in the actual size or width of the column, but in the space between them.

Another subtle transformation of the precedent is evident in the relationship of the portico to the main building volume.

Palladio Virtuel

The perfect quadrilateral symmerty of the volume, a clear cube standing at the crossing point of four identical stairs, cannot be replicated in plan, where the symmetry is reduced to a bilateral one. The templar reference, so evident in the pediments, is fragmented by the impossibility to make a walk around the central core. The strangeness is that this fabric doesn't follow the linear templar scheme, but it is a montage of four templar main fronts which introduces, from the four directions, to the same, unique central dome.

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Palazzo dell'atrio toscano (of the Tuscan atrium) Libro secondo, p. 25.

This is a conjectural prototype of the Roman house based on the Tuscan atrium. Organized along the main axis, which start at the six columns' entrance, in the middle of the left side of the plan, and goes ahead thorugh the tablinum, the main courtyard (peristilium) and then towards a not specified second courtyard. The palace is based on the repetition of court spaces, designed in different configurations.

On both sides of tablinum stay two half courts which, as specified in the text, could look towards gardens.

The center of the palace is the large peristilium, the rectangular courtyard whose sides have a ratio of 3 by 2.

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Villa Pisani Libro secondo, p. 47.

The political core of the villa is the first floor, the piano nobile, of the central block. All the other indoor and outdoor spaces, the lower and higher levels of the main block and the porticos, serve to practical functions related to the padronal life and agricoltural activities. The templar entrance, with four columns, pediment, high base and three monumental stairs, signs the focus of the entire composition, furtherly underlined by the huge thermal window that, behind the pediment, takes natural light in the vaulted central space of the villa. The porticos establish a comfortable and well ordered (Doric) open space which acts as a buffer between the domestic domain of the patrician mansion and the countryside.

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Villa Badoer Libro secondo, p. 48.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 238-251.

It is tethered to its barcbesse with a figured, semicircular arcade that fronts the barchesse to create an entry ensemble. l.ike the Villa Thiene, there is a tripartite entry stair, but Badoer also has an extra flight of stairs before the portico, again compressed into the villa body, is reached. While most of the articulation would seem to be in the front, Badoer also has a trpartite stair configuration in the back, like the Villa Trissino, with which it shares many similarities. It must be noted, Badoer is the only villa drawn with the garden wall surrounding, in profile, the entire forrn of the villa body.

Palladio Virtuel

It is a kind of variation on the same theme of La Rotonda, with two axial, in this case not identical, entrances with six columns porticos, monumental staircases which climb the podium to reach the level of the piano nobile, and a pediment with sculptures.

The remarkable plus of this villa is the system of two barchesse, the continuous portico that, splitted in two symmetrical branches, put the villa at the center of the classical form of the exedra. See, in example, the Traianus' markets in the Roman Fora. This form, largely used for different programs in Roman architecture, will find its most celebrate exploit in the Gian Lorenzo Bernini's piazza San Pietro.

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Villa Zeno Libro secondo, p. 49.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 156-168.

Similar to the more developed villa Pisani, Zeno introduces a tripartite stair motif: one center and one to each side, but oddJy scaled, as if for interior circulation. In the development of the barchessa projects Zeno is also strange, because the typical entry sequence at the fro nt of the villas, framed by the barchesse or a forecourt,is inverted. Here the main entry portico is at the rear of the villa, and the front has little exterior facade articulation other than the trace of an arch flattened into a plane and denoted as windows, and the three staircases.

Palladio Virtuel

The villa offers a monumental entrance with staircase and four huge pillars, and a more domestic approach on the other side, facing the portico. All the outdoor stairs, necessary to reach the piano nobile, are completely not integrated with the cubic volume. The portico is rectangular, designed with a lightness of proportion which contrasts the compact and closed body of the mansion.

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Villa Foscari â&#x20AC;&#x201C; La Malcontenta Libro secondo, p. 50.

Wittkower R. (1945), p. 87.

Palladio Virtuel, pp. 116-129.

"The ratios of Palladio's later structures are somewhat more complicated as can be illustrated in the Villa Malcontenta. The smallest room on either side of the cross-shaped hall measures 12 X 16 feet, the next one 16 x 16 and the largest 16 x 24, while the width of the hall is 32 feet. Thus, the harmonic series 12, 16, 24, 32 is the key-note to the building."

Rudolf Wittkower

The villa's section offers the typical tripartition with the basement, utilitarian functions, the piano nobile, home to the noble family, and an upper level dedicated to the conservation and drying of wheat.

The central space, covered with a dome, is crossshaped, mixing the traditional hall perpendicular to the entrance portico and the parallel connection with the lateral wings. In this case, the outdoor spaces are not in front but on both sides of the villa, producing a long, flat, linear facade with the villa, and especially is pedimented portico, which establishes a strong point of centrality.

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Villa Barbaro Libro secondo, p. 51.

Wittkower (1945), p. 91.

Palladio Virtuel, pp. 252-265.

The long wings behind the main building contain three groups of three rooms each-two of these groups are repeated at each side of the third central one-the widths of which are inscribed as 16, 12, 16; 20, 10, 20; 9, 18, 9. It is obvious that the ratios in each set of rooms are consonant (4:3:4; 2:I:2; 1 :2:1). But one can go a step further. In the front of the main building are three rooms – of which the middle one is part of the cruciform hall – all 12 feet wide (together 36); in the corresponding part of the wing the three rooms reappear with the different orchestration 9, 18, 9 (together 36).

Rudolf Wittkower

A quite particular scheme which separates two different outdoor spaces. Behind, against the sloping hill, a private garden with fountain and pond. On the other side, towards the open landscape of the countryside, barchesse acquire a strong architectural dignity. The central body of the villa pops up from the line of the barchesse to occupy the center of the garden. The front towards the main garden is not a real portico, but just a classical temple-like facade, with four Ionic columns, traced in contact with the surface of the wall, a projection of the classical order through the continuous material screen of the wall.

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Villa Francesco Pisani Libro secondo, p. 52.

Palladio Virtuel, pp. 182-195.

A grand extended composition of three buildings where the central body, with a templar facade with Doric and Ionic orders, is accompanied by two symmetrical wings which, connected with bridges overpassing two existing streets, enlarge the whole building to a bigger size. The two wings are for facilities and servants. In the central fabric, the main axis cross a vaulted hall, a corridor and a large four columns portico, with two identical elliptical stairs at each sides.

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Villa Cornaro Libro secondo, p. 53.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 102-113.

A rather ordinary villa with traces of the classical cruciform plan that appears in Rotonda, save for two lateral extensions, which can be seen as proto-barchesse. Like several other villas, it is basically symmetrical from front to back. But when the lateral extensions across the front are taken into consideration, Comaro can be seen to introduce the problem of differentiating the front and back porticos.

Palladio Virtuel

The templar facade is not designed in relief over the wall facade but generates a real important space, a portico extruded from the facade's vertical plan. The main hall is located in the central part, far from the perimetral walls. The rear part and facade follow the same scheme of the prevoius project, with a portico included inside the cubic volume and the couple of elliptical stairs.

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Villa Mocenigo Libro secondo, p. 54.

The barchesse complete the main volume in a unitarian extended front. It is peculiar the disposition of the main hall, a lonely longitudinal space accessible through a six columns facade, which is crossed, at the center, by the stairs. The thickness of the cube is of four rooms.

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Villa Emo Libro secondo, p. 55.

Wittkower R. (1945), p. 88.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 130-143.

"In the Villa Emo rooms of 16 x 16, I2 x 16, I6 X 27 frame the portico (also 16 X 27) and the hall (27 x 27). The ratio 16:27 can only be understood by splitting it up in the way Alberti has taught us; it has to be read as 16:24:27, i.e. as a fifth and a major tone (=2:3 and 8:9) and similarly the compound ratio 12:27 can be generated from 12:24:27, i.e. an octave and a major tone (= 1:2 and 8:9)."

Rudolf Wittkower (1945)

Here the barchesse, the porticos for agricoltural facilities, take a size and relevance comparable with the main volume, and the composition is readable as an unitarian building with a dominant horizontal extension. The central fabric has a four columns, elevated templar access, a corridor which passes through the non symmetrycal stairs, and another important hall open towards the countryside. The thickness of the cube is of three rooms.

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Villa Sarraceno Libro secondo, p. 56.

Main block, domestic and agricoltural facilities are aligned in a continous urban front. As usual, the palace stands in the center, elevated and glorified by a pediment with sculptures. The central spaces of the villa are just two, without the intermediate functional rooms, and the deepness of the fabric is of two rooms.

The deep large portico controls the open space of a huge esplanade: to be noted that the arms have not a clear end.

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Villa Ragona Libro secondo, p. 57.

Not a Palladian project, it is quite a perfect cube, extremely rational and less monumental than usual.

Pratically, there is no main hall, the two stairs are imposing and related to the exceptional height of the building. Also the level of the ground floor is exceptionally high, 12 feet instead of the ususal 5.

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Villa Poiana Libro secondo, p. 58.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 144-155.

With only a pair or columns supporting an arched opening set into the face of the building, the entry seems more like the residual imprint or a triumphal arch than it does a portico. This interpretation is sustained by the pyramidal build-up or the facade from the periphery to the center, which is echoed in plan where the volumes project forward from a rear garden-wall datum... In fact, it is possible to see this villa as a "wall house" type.

Palladio Virtuel

The two main halls have a disposition in "T", and are sorrounded by other important vaulted rooms. The cube has lateral extensions, symmetrical, which are intermediate, in size and monumentality, between the main body of the villa and lower continuous portico of the barchesse.

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Villa Valmarana Libro secondo, p. 59.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 92-101.

It includes the suggestion of an arcaded barchessa, and in many respects, like the Palazzo Chiericati, presents an idea of compression from front to back, which creates a series of implied parallel layers in plan. Its differences from Chiericati help define Valmarana. Like Chiericati, Valmarana has a two-story portico with a heavy architrave and a balustrade that extends beyond the porticoed pediment... the columns that sit slightly outboard of the loggia columns at Chiericati are here projected outward perpendicular to the main body of the villa, producing a protoforecourt, a hint or precursor of the barchessa projects to follow.

Palladio Virtuel

The palace has a central core based on a rotated "H" scheme, with two longitudinal loggias, of limited deepness, and a perpendicular hall. One loggia opens towards a garden and the oher to the countryside, but their architecture is exactly the same. Stairs are not in the middle of the fabric but are disposed on the facades, on both loggias'sides. The central templar facades are closed between by four angular towers.

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Villa Trissino Libro secondo, p. 60.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 196-209.

A variation on the Rotonda theme, the villa is based on a double symmetrical scheme with four identical porticos reinforced with a double column at each corner. Some exception, in symmetry, is visible in the disposition of the huge exterior stairs which lead to the porticos. It is completely different, in respect with the original Rotonda, the large architectural precinct of the open space, realized with a double order of barchesse: first two round arms, with an imposing platform and stair in the middle, and then another couple of lower rectilinear arms.

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Villa Repeta Libro secondo, p. 61.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 266-277.

With the exception of the two higher volumes at the corners of the building, the villa is hidden in the continuity of the facilities, with a just a pediment on the central axis to indicate the main entrance. Like in a farm, or in a factory, the organization of the open space is stronger than the hyerarchy of the different characters and uses of the architectural spaces.

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Villa Thiene Libro secondo, p. 62.

Wittkower R. (1945), p. 88.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 212-223.

The Villa Thiene at Cicogna has 4 as module (diameter of columns) and the rooms are based on the harmonic series 12, 18, 36. In the four corners are square rooms measuring 18 x 18 feet; they flank a double square room, 18 x 36, and this ratio is repeated in the two porticos which flank the hall, being the square of the small corner rooms, 36 X 36. The progression 18:18, 18:36, 36:36 is broken between the small squares and the porticos by rooms measuring 12 feet in width, so that the sequence 18, 12, 18 (3:2:3) is repeated four times.

Rudolf Wittkower

The main axis is occupied by an elaborate sequence of spaces: a monumntal stair, a platform, a four columns/ pillars loggia, a squared central hall, another identical loggia and, missing the platform, another monumental stair. The platform, the lonely element which is not repeated, is point of observation and control of the open space comprised by the barchesse, which follow a double geometry, round and rectilinear.

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Villa Angarano Libro secondo, p. 63.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 170-181.

Not a Palladian project, the settlement express the harmonic unity of the productive agricoltural compound, especially fitted for wine production. At the same time, architectural characters divide clearly the boss' noble house from the utilitarian facilities.

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Villa Ottavio Thiene Libro secondo, p. 64.

The entrance gate is composed by a double loggia divided in two halves by a continuous wall, and introduces inside a large courtyard. The palace is organized in two identical blocks, three courts, and another separate fabric with a central pediment with sculptures and barchesse.

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Villa Godi Libro secondo, p. 65.

Wittkower (1945), p. 86-87.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 224-237.

The early Villa Godi at Lonedo contains the gist of the story in a simple form. Each of the eight small rooms – four at each side of the hall – measures 16 X 24 feet, i.e. the length is equal to 1,1/2 width which is one of the seven shapes of rooms recommended

by Palladio. The ratio of width to length is 2:3. The portico has the same size of 16 X 24, while the hall behind it measures 24 X 36; its ratio – I:I or 2:3 – is therefore equal to that of the small rooms and the portico.

Rudolf Wittkower

Being the entire compound based on an extended central axis, the villa's core is a deep hall, divided in two different parts, which connects a porticated court with a rear private terraced garden. The deepness of the block is of two rooms only. Court and garden are rigidly separated by the outdoor workplaces in front of barchesse.

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Villa Marc'Antonio Sarego Libro secondo, p. 67.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 279-288.

A sequence of three courtyards: the first open to the countryside, the second a palatial space, the third a private garden. The villa doesn't have a real center, being trapassed by the continuous central axis, and the porticoed large court stands in place of teh traditional main hall.

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Villa Annibale Sarego Libro secondo, p. 68.

Wittkower (1945), p. 90.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 70.

In the Villa Sarego at Miega the sequence 12:16, 16:16, 16:27, which we have met in a different order in the Villa Emo, is to be found again. But the central part of the building, between the three framing rooms of each side, seems to follow a different system of ratios. In the portico are inscribed the numbers 10, 15 and 40, in the hall 20 and 40 and in the rooms connecting the hall with the wings 9 and 24.

Rudolf Wittkower

The monumental templar entrance is based on a double order of eight columns, with stairs and an elongated shallow portico. Behind, one deep hall takes the entire deepness of the fabric. On both sides, stand the symmetrical stairs and three proportional rooms.

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Palazzo Trissino Libro secondo, p. 74.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 196-209.

A large deep entrance with eight free standing columns takes to a courtyard, where have access the two stairs and rooms. The main halls stay at both side of the entrance.

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Palazzo della Torre Libro secondo, p. 76.

Palladio Virtuel, p. 28.

Palladio transformed the idea of the portico from a mutable sign of a sacred public building to a component of a secular private dwelling. In so doing, the iconic value of the portico is transgressed, and it becomes notational. Because of its many variations in size, location, and dimension, the portico becomes an important component of the Palladian lexicon.

Palladio Virtuel

The main axis crosses a series of large central spaces: the portico of the entry, the main columnade hall with secundary stairs, the main stairs. The all rooms are relegated a the four corners, as closed isolated elements connected by the grand central space.

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Palazzo Garzadore Libro secondo, p. 77.

Two six columns loggias indicate the main axis and entrances; the stairs stay at both side of the first loggia, while the main hall, reinforced with four free standing columns, is pushed towards the second loggia.

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Villa Mocenigo Libro secondo, p. 78 (66).

Four round porticos define two grand open spaces (above and bottom in the drawing) while their rectilinear back limit two rectangular open courts.

The villa itself is built around a smaller more private squared court, it is based on a double symmetry and face, in different ways, the two different couple of courtyards. The entire complex is based on the continuous passing through different conditon of inside and outside, barely differentiated in use and form.

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In the following pages are exposed the results of the first exercise of architectural composition, where each student is requested, individually, to redesign a sample taken from the Second Book of the Quattro libri dell'architettura by Andrea Palladio. Inside this book, is presented a sequence of buildings, with a plan and a facade, which have various source. Some of them are projects designed and built by Palladio, others are Palladian projects which remained unbuilt, and other are conjectural reconstruction of Roman villas and palaces.

The students have the assignment to take the Palladian sample as a source of inspiration but also, more

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literally, as a guideline for the formal, logistic and structural characters of their projects. The program, for all buildings, is the construction of a place based on the concept, established by Andy Warhol, of the Factory: a place where people decide to share their work, free time and domestic life, in a communality of feelings, skills, and goals. These Factories want to be a contemporary answer to the growing demand for spaces which allow to mix work and home, family and friends, labor time and leisure time. In some way, the extreme formalism of architectural characters correspond to a maximum of informality, in terms of lifestyles, activities, social relationships.

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Ackerman J.S., Palladio, Penguin books, London 1966.

Aureli P.V., The Geopolitics of the Ideal Villa, in: The possibility of an absolute architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2011, pp. 47-83.

Eisenman P., The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End, «Perspecta», vol. 21, 1984, pp. 154-173.

Eisenman P., Foreword (Bracket)ing history, in Vidler A., Mannerist Modernism: Colin Rowe, in: Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism, 1930-1975, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2008.

Eisenman P., with Roman M., Palladio Virtuel, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2015.

Marzo M. (editor), L'architettura come testo e la figura di Colin Rowe, Marsilio, Venezia 2010; with English texts by Peter Eisenman, Sébastien Marot, and others.

Interview with Peter Eisenman: The Last Grand Tourist: Travels with Colin Rowe, in: «Perspecta 41» "Grand Tour", Edited by Gabrielle Brainard, Rustam Mehta and Thomas Moran, December 2008.

Palladio A., I quattro libri dell'architettura, Venezia 1570.

Payne A., Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Modernism, in «Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians», Vol. 53, No. 3 (Sep., 1994), pp. 322-342.

Rowe C., The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa. Palladio and Le Corbusier compared, in «The Architectural Review», March 1947.

Vidler A., Mannerist Modernism: Colin Rowe, in: Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism, 1930-1975, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2008.

Wittkower R., Principles of Palladio's Architecture, in «Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes», Vol. 7, 1944, pp. 102-122.

Wittkower R., Principles of Palladio's Architecture II, in «Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes», Vol. 8, 1945, pp. 68-106.

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