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The Beauty of the Place |
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Witold Rybczynski's Palladian pilgrimage. |
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July 1, 2003
By: Beth Kephart |
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On a fateful day in 1537 or 1538, a young stonemason by the name of Andrea di Pietro dalla Gondola came to the attention of Count Giangiorgio Trissino, a linguist, scholar, poet, and nobleman who was in the midst of remodeling a villa in Vicenza. Trissino had power. He had connections, fame, a reputation, and a plan "to introduce the progressive culture of Rome to the young men of his native Vicenza."
Somehow or another, that young stonemason became a candidate for Trissino's mentoring. Somehow or another, he found himself in the possession of borrowed books, in the swirl of conversation about Roman architecture and Vitruvius, and in the company of Trissino's friends, who introduced Andrea to new places, new ideas, and brand new ways of thinking. Somehow or another, he both evolved and emerged.
Over time, of course, the stonemason named Andrea matured into the architect known as Palladio. Eager to learn, to draw, and to design, by all accounts charming as well as gracious, Palladio evolved an aesthetic that eventually inspired countless facsimiles around the world. The English architect Inigo Jones introduced Roman and Italian Renaissance architecture to Britain in the early 1600s. Thomas Jefferson was a fan of Palladio's work. And American Palladianism is a widely recognized style, not only in the residential architecture of Virginia and the Carolinas, but in churches, banks, and the great portico of the White House.
"The Perfect House," the 12th book by Witold Rybczynski, the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism and Real Estate, takes its readers on a tour of the Palladian villas of Italy. At least partly inspired by Goethe's command that, "You have to see these buildings with your own eyes to realize how good they are," Rybczynski's purpose, with this book, is to weave the little that is known about Palladio's life into a travelogue of sorts that documents and evaluates the standing villas. Rybczynski himself journeys from villa to villa, reporting on the commission, the client, the floor plan, the materials, and whatever can be gleaned about Palladio's design philosophy and ambitions.
It's not always an easy fit -- the small personal diary outtakes on the contemporary fare of local restaurants, say, interspersed with the architectural history, theory, and biography -- but Rybczynski is such a careful and informed guide, such an enthusiastic presence on the page, that the book is a pleasure to read. Not only that, but the book informs. By stepping readers through every accessible villa, Rybczynski presents a clear case for both the "rules" of Palladian architecture and the inventive, thoughtful way that their maker consistently broke them.
The villas of Palladio signal a brand new era of "domestic architecture," Rybczynski suggests, when "an architectural language previously reserved for temples and palaces was introduced to residential buildings. Much of the potent architectural symbolism associated with the home, whether it is the grand porch of the stockbroker's mansion in Connecticut or the modest pediment over the front door of an American Colonial bungalow, is derived from these sixteenth-century structures. It all starts with Palladio."
The few glimpses history affords of Palladio himself are seductive ones. Rybczynski presents him as a man who cares enormously about a building's relationship to its site, as a man obsessed with details, and as a man who is capable of leading his clients toward good design without relying on arrogance or bullying. Likewise, Palladio is a man who is never so thoroughly satisfied with his own ideas that he doesn't later challenge them himself and a man who, in addition to making fastidious drawings of proposed villas, also negotiated with contractors, kept the books, chose the building materials, and oversaw the villas' construction -- all for the kind of rather lousy wages that architects are all too-used to getting paid today.
Palladio is also a man, marvelously enough, who never seemed to lose touch with his own origins in the building profession, at least according to the eyewitness Paolo Gualdo, who provides this rare, animated view of the man in action:
"He kept [his workmen] constantly cheerful, treating them with so many pleasant attentions that they all worked with the most exceptional good cheer. He eagerly and lovingly taught them the best principles of art, in such a way that there was not a mason, a stone cutter, or carpenter, who did not understand the measurements, elements, and rules of true architecture."
The final chapter of "The Perfect House" is dedicated to the eight days Rybczynski, his wife, and two friends actually live in a Palladian villa by the name of Villa Saraceno at Finale di Agugliaro. This is, Rybczynski tells us, an early villa to which not a lot of fame is attached. Still, living in the house would give Rybczynski a chance, he says, to know the place through all hours of the day and night, through the many moods that a house is meant to finally contain. It would also give Rybczynski a chance, he hoped, to uncover Palladio's secret -- to answer, in other words, "What made his houses so attractive, so imitated, so perfect?"
That question, as it turns out, is not so easy for Rybczynski to answer. He knows, he says, that the house "feels good" and that the "peasantlike roughness of the materials contrasting with the elegantly carved stone details has something to do with it; so does the commodiousness of the rooms and their pleasing overall proportions."
But there must be more to it than that, and as Rybczynski walks the house, walks the grounds, sits and watches the light of the rooms fade and burn, he tries to put his finger on an answer. Finally Rybczynski concludes that the beauty of the place has something to do with ratios, equilibrium, something akin to harmony.
"He pleases the mind as well as the eye," Rybczynski writes. "His sturdy houses, rooted in their sites, radiate order and balance, which makes them both of this world and otherworldly. Although they take us out of ourselves, they never let us forget who and what we are. They really are perfect." |
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Source:
For Additional Information Contact:
University Communications
at 215-898-8721.
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