Palladio Oggi

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

In conjunction with Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Morgan Library in New York City hosted a symposium on Palladio. Highlights below:

Guido Beltramini's presentation entitled Five Palladio Drawings and a Faun places Palladio in an historical context. Transparent elevations with distinctive foreground and background relationships as well as locating plans below elevations were a few of his many formalized drawing styles. Palladio established architectural drawing conventions used to this very day.

Interestingly, Beltramini connects Palladio's plan schematics with military exercise formation as diagrammed in the Bizantine Manuscript of Aelian. He additionally cites influences of troop movement representations in Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

Beltramini argues that Palladio's Venetian Bridge plan demonstrated the emergence of an architectural idea / conceptual agenda. His plan for the bridge demolished existing shops on either side of bridge by placing plazas on both ends. These moves contributed to his idea to make the bridge a "place".

Because their buildings were identified with royalty, architects, at the time, were more important than generals--which actually means Palladio was also a schmoozer. Beltramini claims that Palladio was anti-war even though he was born during the war period.

As Beltramini's presentation described Palladio's formal relationships, Erica Naginski focuses upon the anti-Palladio as a reaction against mathematical form generators. She cites Piranesi as a refutation of systems because his drawings place moldings in the wrong places, are overly ornate and mixes and matches the Greek orders.

James Ackerman basically told charming stories based on his tenure and breadth of knowledge.

• The double entablature on the Pantheon was actually an accident because they built it before they realized that tall enough columns couldn't be easily transported.
• Country homes and the San Francisco city hall are some of the American influences.
• Palladio represented a pre-democratic society, so we should ask ourselves if we should truly be mimicking it.
• Vignola puts buildings together by combining orders and often misses the big picture.

Alina Payne attempts to trace Palladio's influence over the past 500 years

• Neo-classicism is Palladio's legacy.
• He wasn't the only game in town; Giacomo da Vignola was one of many competitors.
• In the 19th century, neo-Baroque eclipses Palladio.
• Simplicity, restraint, and repetition means Palladio is back.
• Colin Rowe brings him back in the 1900s with the Mathematics of the Ideal Villa as it was trying to create order and composition in a wild landscape.

K. Michael Hays begins with Palladio as an authority figure, but then proceeds to de-construct the role of the Architect as an expert.

• Schematized - Architect as the imagination whose job it is to schematize
• Grid Diagram becomes the structure so the schema becomes the building.
• An EX-trinsic structure imposes itself as defined by the Architect.
• The Architect creates the system/diagram which carries information
• The Architect is the Big Other with the "big idea"
• Gregg Lynn links the grid to non-totalized heterogenaiety
• Parametric/Plannametric relationships - indifferent attitude---architectural features can be attached to other disciplines.

Therefore, there is no relation between the drawing and Architect because the current technology allows form to become random and not necessarily specific to architecture. Architecture has gone beyond form to performance which coincides with the demise of the authority of the Big Other leading to a multi-media diffusion of devices.

Preston Scott Cohen's examines the changing view of the stair.

• For Palladio's centralized plan, the stair is pushed off to the side.
• In modernity, the car disturbs the grid.
• The Guggenheim is the antithesis of it all.