Villa Almerico-Capra by Andrea Palladio, "La Rotunda," Vicenza, Italy

I completed Palladio’s Second Book of Architecture last week. I’ve decided to take a break and read Le Courbusier before finishing Palladio’s Four Books. A Courbusier/Palladio comparison might be interesting.

The Second Book book is primarily comprised of 45 short analyses of Palladio’s designs for city and country residences. Although these analyses are all cursory, combined they provide a definition of Palladio’s architecture, philosophy, and rules for precise mathematical proportions. His most famous villa, for Monsignor Paolo Almerico, known as “La Rotonda,” (plate 13 in the Second Book) is included, accompanied by an single-paragraph analysis. This one building inspired architects for hundreds of years, including the design of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

Architecture, especially Palladian architecture, is metaphorically described as “frozen music,” and I can understand this metaphor thanks to the overview this book provides. I began writing music when I was six years old, and began to develop my interest in architecture and drawing shortly thereafter, and have heard many comparisons between architecture and composition but only considered it conceptually. But it seems that there are really more literal similarities.

The most striking aspect to his design system is the fact that everything is related to everything else. All aspects of the design are proportional to each other. If one piece of a design changes, the rest of the design must change in kind. Palladio makes this clear in his detailed descriptions of the Five Orders of architecture in his First Book. All the details of the orders, including the ornamentation, must be in proportion to each other. The Second Book demonstrates this notion applied to the spaces of the overall design. Additionally, Palladio establishes a hierarchy of spaces, primary and secondary spacial sequences like primary and secondary lines of musical counterpoint.