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All these elements are found in the Villa Emo. Of course, even before Palladio, there had been farms consisting of the landowner’s house, the barchesse, dovecots, and the yard for threshing wheat. We must bear in mind that the Palladian villa was not simply a summer retreat but a place of production, organized for the purpose of work in the fields. One good example comes from the villas and the way that Palladio fuses together the landowner’s house, the barchesse (the outbuildings) and all the buildings generally involved in farm production, such as those containing the stables, stalls, cellars, farm equipment, and the rooms where the silkworms were raised. So I would like to reflect with you on some specific elements of Palladianism, cases in which architects have truly captured the spirit of Palladio’s way of designing and building. I tried to point out to him that the dome had been inspired by Bramante’s dome at Saint Peter’s, as published by Sebastiano Serlio in 1540. I remember having an argument a few years ago with an American colleague while we were working on an exhibition on Palladio in the USA he described the Capitol in Washington as Palladian. There is a risk that Palladianism becomes everything vaguely inspired by ancient classical architecture. Therefore, when we assess Palladio’s heritage in subsequent architecture-what we call Palladianism-it is easy to be excessively generic. We can use the metaphor of language to say that the ruins showed architectural Latin as a dead language, while the illustrations in the Four Books showed architectural Latin as very much alive, a language that could still be spoken.īut Palladio also constructed his own buildings. But Palladio published them reconstructed, and partly reinvented. Of course, at that time the ancient monuments were in ruins they were fragmented remains. In Books Three and Four, he published very careful drawings of the principal ancient monuments.

In Book One, Palladio illustrated the language of the five orders of architecture. He did so mainly through his treatise, the Quattro Libri dell’Architettura-the Four Books of Architecture. Palladio made the great heritage of ancient Roman architecture available to architects for modern uses.

So what are the irreducible elements in his language that make it recognizable despite changes of context, function, clients, and climate? The theme of the images presented here is what remains in that two-way process: what has survived of American architecture despite Jefferson’s attempt to transform Palladio into a model for the architecture of a new nation, but also what has survived of Palladio in the American translation, confused by vague classicalism, British idioms, French modernity, and the quest for convenience. A translation can often bring out the deep, innermost nature of a culture that cannot be transferred from one linguistic context to another.