 We're going to continue talking about the Baroque today, but we're going to shift a bit north. We're going to shift to the town of Turin over here. And Turin is sort of interesting. It's tucked in around France, and you have the Savoia there, and you have all these different chunks of Italy carved up. You don't have Italy as a unified country at this point. That doesn't happen really until the 19th century. The political map of Europe is quite different in the Baroque period than it is now. We're going to talk about a very interesting guy called Guarino Guarini. Here he is. And if we had to compare Guarini to anybody we've looked at so far in this class, I think the closest parallel would be to someone like Alberti. Because both Alberti and Guarini are scholars. Both Alberti and Guarini do not come from architecture inside the discipline. And this is really quite rare. We were looking at Baroque Rome, for example, and we began by talking about Domenico Fontana, great architect of VI and V. Then we moved on to the extension of the nave and the building of the façade of St. Peter's. The architect there was Carlo Maderno, nephew of Domenico Fontana. When Carlo Maderno died, a new architect came onto the scene Francesco Borromini, nephew of Carlo Maderno. So these architecture families are fairly tight clans. And the kinds of things you learn in those clans are the techniques of building, the techniques of working with stone, the structural techniques. And it's really funny because throughout the Renaissance and continuing into the Baroque, architects are trying hard to carve out status for themselves. They do not want to be seen as manual laborers. They want to be seen as thoughtful people. They want to be seen as mathematicians. Hence some of this preoccupation with proportion, for example, harmonic proportion. Hence some of this preoccupation with Neoplatonic thought and how these complex meanings can be encoded into an architectural organism. That's what the architects write about. They write about how architecture is like a mathematical art. But nobody writes about how architecture is technical. So people like Alberti and people like Borromini are at the margin of the discipline because there's really no way to enter in except by being incredibly smart. And luckily they were both incredibly smart. Guarini was a papal legate. And as a papal legate, he went traveling around representing the Pope. Of the work that Guarini is recorded as having built or at least done projects for, it's all over the place. We've looked at Borromini and it's pretty much Rome. We've looked at Brunelleschi and it's pretty much Florence. For Guarini, we have projects in Sicily, in northern Italy, in Turin, in the Czech Republic, in France, in Portugal. So the world is opening up. The regionalism or the tight local styles that we saw in forming works like the work of Alberti and Brunelleschi, even when Tuscan vernacular comes in. Or Bramante, when Lombard vernacular comes in, becomes much broader. There are more styles out there, there are more things to see. And somebody like Guarini has the opportunity to go out and see those things. He eventually comes up to Turin and begins to do all kinds of things. And continue to write theoretically on every topic under the sun. Guarini wrote a treatise on architecture, of course, but he also wrote a treatise on mathematics. He wrote a treatise on astronomy. He wrote a funny play. He wrote a treatise on the family. There was no topic that he wouldn't theorize about. And his treatise on architecture is really interesting, because he does try to cover this territory that no other theory had taken account of. And that is, how do you build this stuff? What is the strategy that makes it possible to lift stone up and have it stay there? How do you build a vault? Guarini's theory is like a mess, because he doesn't have any of the biases that everybody else came to architecture with. He's really just trying to figure it out for himself and has a very orderly mind. So when I say it's a mess, I mean it covers territory that no other treatise did. And Guarini knew perfectly well what the other treatise has covered, because it's possible to say that he read every book that was available. There weren't that many books, he just read them all. His treatise, called Civil Architecture, Architecture Civile, takes into account and confronts all these other treatises. So these are some of the most interesting pages that you see in Guarini's treatise. These are pages where he's speculating on what it is to build a vault. And some of these vaults we see here, and we'd say, gee, you didn't have to write a treatise, that's just a dome, Guarini. What are you thinking? But actually, he's looking at a couple of different domes. You might say, F here is a pantheonic dome, it's the half sphere. It's the dome authorized by Neoplatonic thought, because it's closest to the ideal geometry. D here is probably a little bit more like Brunelleschi's dome, or Michelangelo's dome at St. Peter's, an ovoid dome, that begins to pull toward the vertical. So he's critical, he's looking at what the possibilities are. He's also got cones here, which opens up an interesting conversation about what kind of forms you can get through cones. And Guarini is enough of a mathematician, and conversant enough with things going on with other mathematicians, like say Descartes, for example, to know that you can take sections through a cone and get things like ellipses. Authorized within Guarini's idea about mathematics are some forms that we haven't seen yet, like comic sections. Down here, you see something, well, OK, this is a barrel vault, but what are these things? And the answer is, these things are ribbed structures. Guarini is somehow looking at architecture and beginning to include things that had been excluded, because if you think about it, ribbed structures are the architecture either of the barbarians up north or the infidel, Islamic architecture. And so why would people trying to recover the treasures of the Roman antiquity ever look at those sources? Guarini has no prejudice. He's saying I'm looking at these sources because they're fairly spectacular. And the architecture built with ribbed structures like these Islamic domes that he might have seen, he might have been to Cordoba and seen the great mosque there. He's interested in exploring how these things can work. He probably saw Notre Dame. He probably saw Bohemian Gothic in Prague. His range of sources is much wider. Even the way his treatise begins to catalog things is pretty screwball. He has all these different variations. And the variations are not so much derived from archaeology, going to the Roman Forum, trying to see how many slight proportional variations of the Corinthian he can find, but they all almost become like a study in naturalism where different platforms are being marshaled in to the task of making a column capital. His study on the orders is really bizarre, because not only does he have things like Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, but he also has a column that he calls the Saracenic, which would be really the Islamic order. So he's expanding the orders. He has one order that he calls the Dwarf order. It's really bizarre. He just doesn't really care that much for tradition. He's moving forward. If we could say, following Christian Norwalk-Schultz, that one of the great accomplishments of the Baroque period was this skill in systematization, in finding large organizational structures to put together lots of disparate information, then Guarini is doing that in his treatise Architectura Civile. He's putting together things that had never been categorized before, and it becomes an interesting story. Or even the way Guarini looks at geometry is pretty indicative of this notion of systematization. This is an unbuilt project. What's going on? You look at the plan, and you see, well, it's a centralized plan. Everybody can do centralized plans. But in the case of Guarini, it's not simply about the possibility of acknowledging and celebrating one center, but it's trying to find a system that will sponsor multiple centers. So the plan is binary. There is this big, centric organization developed here, and then at the perimeter, we have a series of centric cells. On the axis, bang, out pops a new center. So it's almost like cell division, or it's almost like thinking about the world as a potentialized geometrical field that can be activated into architecture. I think it's also interesting to look at this diagram where we see a series of rotated squares that locate different elements within this little church. That's a diagram we've seen before. We saw that when we were looking at Gothic architecture. We saw it when we were looking at the sketchbook of Vial Donco, where he was trying to indicate this great secret that the medieval masons had of how to proportion things in the field. And Guarini, probably measuring things, probably thinking mathematically on his own, comes up with this system to begin to organize his drawing. So this is pretty cool. And you would say, yeah, that's one. What else have you got? And the answer is quite a lot. A Italian scholar called Mario Passanti wrote a book called Nelmondo Magico di Guarino Guarini in the magical world of Guarino Guarini. And in that book, he begins to do a series of diagrams that look at the method of sponsoring church plans in the work of Guarini. They're very systematic. This is the Baroque systematization, par excellence. In the case of centralized churches, you start with a circle and you begin to elaborate the circular form. But that's not the only geometrical form you can use as your source. You can also begin with a triangle and begin to elaborate the geometrical form of the triangle. Or you could have this kind of six-pointed element or five-pointed element or eight-pointed element or square or grid. And it's fairly relentless and fairly systematic in the way he fleshes these things out. I think it's also possible to say that Guarini's longitudinal plans are even more interesting and more provocative than his centralized plans. You look at these, and these are more of Passanti's diagrams. He's kind of elaborating the basic Latin cross. This could be a plan of a Brunelleschi church in Florence, quite frankly. You got the square module, you're running with the square module. These are two different churches that he did, neither of which are with us today for various reasons. One, because it never got constructed, and the other because it fell down. Look what he's doing. In a sense, he's substituting circles for squares. And that's funny, or let's not say funny. That's smart because all the Renaissance obsessed about. Guarini has read these Renaissance treatises. He's read Cerelio, he's read Palladio. He knows what people are trying to accomplish. People want to build the centralized church. And now it is forbidden in the Baroque period. So what can you do? So Guarini seems to have this idea that you can actually make a longitudinal church out of circles, that you can simultaneously have this microcosmic expression of the great vault of heaven. And you can have a processional space. So one way he manages to accomplish that is by expanding the circles and allowing them to overlap. And of course, that's not enough. He begins to activate on the interstitial space, on the space in between things, to create this kind of caterpillar of a church plan, which is Latin cross, but also continuous, and also capable of expanding and contracting to make multiple centers as you march through the church. So if a big dilemma with the centralized church was where do you put the altar? How do you express hierarchy? Where is the clergy? Where is the congregation? In a sense, Guarini has synthesized these things with these strange centralized church plans. Now this is a basic Guarini-esque diagram for the space of the world. If we drew this diagram for Brunelleschi, it would be graph paper. If we drew this diagram for Palladio, it would be the tartan grid. But the diagram for Guarini is really this potentialized fields of centers, a grid of circles, which gives you not simply the round, but also the concave space between the circles. Here's an unbuilt church by Guarini, represented here. This is a plate from his treatise, Architettura Civile. And it's kind of fabulous. It's this activation of the field. It is the finding of form within this field of overlapping circle. If you look at the plan, you'll see it's even better than this little diagram shows you, because he doesn't simply mark edge, but he marks edge in a perforated way and in a double way, so that you get these four columns that are constantly switching allegiance from one figure to another. This is his church in Lisbon, which I think is really great, Santa Maria della Divina Providenza, St. Mary of Divine Providence. This church has very strange language. This is Lisbon, and Lisbon, of course, is in Iberia. And Iberia, for a good chunk of its history, was ruled by the Nazareth dynasty, an Islamic dynasty. There is a kind of acknowledgement, you might say, of that history in Guarini's use of what he would call the Saracenic Order, this kind of undulating order. I don't know how well you can see this, but it goes wobble, wobble, wobble, wobble, wobble. And even the cornice goes wobble, wobble, wobble. And by the way, there's wobbling, or undulation on the roof plane as all of these circles intersect with each other. It's kind of like the effect that Boramini got in building the façade of San Carlo Le Quattro Fontane. You put together these concave and convex systems, and the result is an undulating wave shape. And he gets that up here. He even gets that in the walls. It's amusing, given all this undulation and wobbling, that the church fell down in an earthquake. Whoopsie. It's like he was anticipating it and drawing the collapse of the church when he designed the undulating plasters. However, it should also be mentioned that Lisbon is a very seismic area. In the 18th century, most of Lisbon fell down, and this church was one of the many things that fell down. But I think it's also true that Boramini was trying to do structure within the limits of what structure could do. I think he was fascinated by how statics move through material, through these ribbed structures, through these delicate balances of thrusts and parries. And most classical architecture is way overstructured. It is so overstructured that you can kind of shake up the pantheon and it will probably stay put. You shake up something that is really balanced at the extreme capabilities of material, and it might fall down. So too bad Boramini. I once had a structures professor when I was in school who said, really in structures, plus or minus 100% is pretty much okay. So if your answer is wrong, as long as you're within 100%, you're probably okay because everything is so overstructured. But that's not the case in Guarini. I'm just showing you San Carlo like Quatro Fontane, Boramini. To give you a sense that Guarini isn't alone in making these complex geometries through superposition. He easily could have been looking at something like San Carlo, which comes before him by a couple of decades. The ability to conceptualize complex form, not simply by making things up, but by superimposing other clear geometries. And in the case of San Carlo, the idea of the oval, the cross, and the octagon, which projects itself to the facade and gives you this undulating form. Or in the case of Santivo a la Sapienza, the superposition of the star of David and these concave and convex circular lobes that pull through. There's a lot of Boramini in Guarini. There's a lot of Boramini even in this attitude about how the dome of Santivo a la Sapienza gets organized, not through looking at the repertoire of classical domes and picking one and amplifying or elaborating on it, but by creating a new kind of dome almost as if it's a narrative telling a story. Episode one, episode two, episode three, episode four. As all of these iconologically driven dome forms stack up one on top of another. And he's probably also looking at somebody like, say, Bernini. This is the Baldichino. The Baldichino is this covering over the altar in St. Peter's. Notice the geometry of the columns. These are called Solomonic columns. Biblical accounts of the Temple of Solomon suggest that maybe there were these kinds of undulating columns going on there too. Guarini is looking around. Guarini is picking things up when he can and Guarini is perfectly happy to move out into new territory. Let's go to Turin, where Guarini's built work can best be observed. This is the plan of a church called San Lorenzo. It adheres fairly well to those diagrams that Pasanti gave us about geometrical forms that get acted upon within this extensible grid of circles. We have a center, but we don't simply have the center, we have these clipping in of circles that begin to give us a more irregular form, a kind of concave octagonal form. And not only do we have one center, but we have the seeds of miniaturized versions of that geometry planted at the margin. So here we have, and this dotted stuff that makes a star, is a reflected ceiling plan. It's giving us information about what the ribs up above are doing. Here we have this fabulous eight-pointed star. And then over here, in the margins, we have these little fabulous six-pointed stars. And bang! Over here, for the chancel, for the place where you put the altar, we have another thing that begins to individuate itself as a circle. And by the way, this circle is beginning to commandeer part of the wrapper of the original circle. And again, it's this binary system. It's this tug of war. It's this kind of unstable condition between two things fighting for dominance that gets synthesized. Guarini's pretty good. And here's what it looks like on the outside. And the answer is, it doesn't look that great, I have to say. There's a lot of this strange wiggling and wobbling. The idea of the surrounds are no longer cononic in the sense that they do not give you little sangalo-esque temple edicules with two little columns and a little pediment happily sitting there, but the geometry becomes lumpy. There are some windows that look like upside down rounded hearts. And you would think, well, that's a crazy-looking geometry unless you've ever graphed a cardioid equation. And if you have, Guarini windows look like graphs that you might make in Cartesian space. So I think not only with conic sections, but also with graphing equations, Guarini might be trying to amplify the range of forms and the kinds of geometries that are authorized as reflections of divine order. It would not be acceptable just to make a squiggly thing. Because what does that mean? It means nothing. But if you can take something and find a mathematical provenance for it, then you're on good territory. Let's look inside the church. Ah, fabulous. This is what it looks like. We have this stacky, stacky, stacky system of interior space becoming more and more dematerialized as we move up. And this is what we find as the condition of the dome. You're prepared for this because we saw the ribs in the reflected ceiling plan. So it's like a basket weave of a dome. We were so pleased when, say, Brunelleschi was able to get some windows in all on the side. Now Guarini has almost no material because the system of the ribbed dome just evacuates all the space in between the ribs and allows light to pour through. Also look at the geometry of this thing. This is not a singular geometry. This is not a geometry you get from simple geometrical figures. But this is a kind of conic section that he's got going on through here. And it plays well with vision. The tapering space begins to become like a cone of vision. Looking up at this thing, it seems higher up than it really is. It's also sort of super duper clever because it's always nice to see light pouring in from above. These gothic experiences that you get when you walk into a gothic church and you think, this is not possible. I do not know how this happened. You get that here, too. And you not only get that, but there's also this kind of funny building of ornament out of structure. Do you guys all see the little monster faces in here? Like, ah! Do you see the little grimacing guy with his little nose? Instead of adding sculpture like Bernini would have, like little angels crawling down from the ceiling, the whole church becomes a kind of anthropomorphic projection of these strong feelings that you're meant to feel experienced when you're there. You see that there is this strange idea that there are systems coming together, that this is not all about the center, but rather the center is the product of these things coming in from the periphery. In articulating it, Bernini's pretty clear about keeping these things independent. He makes these funny joints where one system comes slipping through and you understand this as part of a system and this part as part of another system. You feel the tension between this kind of slippery margin and this extraordinary center. It's also true that he's doing something really clever in terms of the structure. Because look at how small these columns are, given how fabulous this dome is. And the answer to the structural conundrum is that the structure actually takes place in these triangular corner piers, lots of mass here. But you don't see it. The stuff that you experience spatially when you're walking through the church is this delicate, delicate, little spindly column. And you get the same effect that you would have in a Gothic church, which is how is that possible? How can something like that be held up on something that delicate? Notice also the color palette here. This is the color palette of a Bernini. These are the deeply polychromatic saturated tones of dark reds and greens and gold leafs and so forth. So just as a point of comparison, I'm showing you the great mosque in Cordoba, which we looked at before. And in the great mosque of Cordoba, you have certain spaces like the Mirab Dome, which are a series of these ribs organized around an octagon. There is no existent record of Guarini going to Cordoba, but we know he went to Portugal, and it's not so far away. Or there may have been other Islamic architecture that he could have seen. He could have seen this idea about making a dome, but he also could have seen this idea about making a space, which I think is a pretty amazing space. The space of the mosque is not a thing but a field, a field that gets activated in. In the case of the mosque, the field is a series of striations into which a few of these special figures like the domes have been placed. And so Guarini's architecture also seems like a field that gets acted upon. The domes in Cordoba are pretty spectacular, but not as spectacular or, let's say, structurally exploratory as Guarini's domes. These domes are mostly surface. By the time you get to the Guarini dome, these domes are mostly rib. Guarini has found a way to extract material from the domes, and one way he does that is through geometry. His domes, because they are so vertical, because he did not go for a little round guy, but rather for extreme verticality, is able to rely more on the ribs to do the work that needs to get done, unless on the continuous membrane of the dome. Brace yourself, because this one's really good. The church we're going to look at now is another church in Turin called the Holy Shroud, the Santissimo Sin Dome. This is a church that is attached to the palace, and here's the church of the Holy Shroud. The Savoia, the ruling family of Turin, came into possession of one of these great relics of Christendom, the Holy Shroud. A shroud is the cloth that you wrap a dead person in, for burial, and in this case, the dead person was Jesus. Because of Jesus' great spiritual strength, his image was burnt into the Holy Shroud. The Holy Shroud is this very weird relic that has kind of like an x-ray image of a human body on it. I don't know if you guys have ever seen this thing. They bring it out once every 25 years and look at it and then wrap it up again. Because it's cloth, it's really fragile, and it can be eroded and eaten up by light and air. So it's in a very protected environment. But the Savoia had this and they wanted to have a chapel where this thing, this great relic could be seen. The project is to build a chapel or giant architectural reliquary in this knuckle between the church, which is existent, and the palace, which is existent. So this is what Guarini gets. See, Guarini gets the project and the foundations are already there. It's already a round thing. And all Guarini has to do is figure out how to operate on this round thing. By the way, look at what it looks like on the outside. It I think looks pretty much like Dairy Queen, right? Kind of like the Guarini dome at Santivo la Sapienza, but with the difference that this is a perforated dome because nobody could do structures, like the really smart guy who writes treatises on mathematics and astronomy and everything else. Let me just explain to you how this plan works because this is a shroud. This is a really important pilgrimage site. You have people walking into the church and then they walk in in one direction and they walk out in another direction. The double entry system on one level specific about moving pilgrims through. Then there is this kind of special entry point that if people in the palace want to venerate the shroud, they can come through here and see it also. The shroud, by the way, has been subject of great scrutiny and it is an amazing thing. It's a medieval image though. They've done carbon dating on it and they think that it probably dates from around 1400. It does not date back to the time of Christ but it's still amazing because they've done three-dimensional analyses on it and find that it is not something that was painted there but it can reconstruct the three-dimensional image of a person. And there's also a professor in Cornell who has invented something to wrap on his face to make shrouds of himself. So there must have been some kind of chemical that made this thing happen. It's pretty cool. The shroud is still considered to be an important relic and it's kept right here in a big reliquary in the middle of this thing. Let me just break to tell you something really sad or let me just break to tell you that something about why it's better to be me than you. There are many answers to that question. You think that by the time you get to the 21st century all these treasures of architecture are going to be there forever. So I have visited this several times but you will never get to visit it because there was a fire in the church and you think that stone can't burn but actually stone loses strength if it burns. They were doing restoration inside of it and there was this huge conflagration and it burnt for days. And it's amazing because you have the holy shroud in this reliquary in the middle of the church and in this area right over here there was like, I don't know, three inch thick bulletproof glass to protect the shroud in case any crazies came and wanted to steal it or do anything like that. However, when the fire started a workman kind of banged with an ax on the bulletproof glass and managed to break it and get the shroud out before the shroud burnt but there was no stopping the fire in the church and the church burnt and it has not been open to the public since. The fire was probably maybe about 10 or 12 years ago and they haven't made progress and it's hard to know how they will make progress because this thing is really a delicate basket weave of ribs and if the stones don't have their proper structural value anymore they would have to completely rebuild it and it's not so clear that they could do it anymore because it's amazing is all that I can say. So let's look for a moment at the plan and let's consider for a moment what the holy shroud is. We said that it was the burial cloth of Christ and if you think about biblical accounts of the crucifixion of Christ there's a lot of what might be called pathetic fallacy. Pathetic fallacy means nature expresses these emotions of sorrow. So the way nature expresses its emotions of sorrow are through a storm and through an earthquake and through an eclipse and all of these events are discussed in the gospels. They become part of the theme I think that Guarini is working with in the church. This whole image of the star that we see over and over again on the floor or that we even see as a kind of description of the vault are all indicative of this great vault of heaven but also a kind of transformation and your perception of it. You start low and you move high up these little umbilical flights of stairs and inside these umbilical flights of stairs and I say umbilical because you're in this little tube like birth and you come out and the stone on the inside is black shiny marble. To me it looks like slabs of liver. That is to say it looks like something alive but it doesn't quite have a form that you can name but it looks organic and it looks like it's about to form itself into something. So you walk through these little slime tubes and you pop into a little star. It's getting lighter, it's getting clearer. You move into this space and then suddenly this opens up in front of you, this huge, huge vault of ceiling and it's amazing. And it's amazing also because it's not simply this notion of the eclipse of moving from dark to moving toward light. That life, the closest to the ground is the darkest, the most obscure, the most ill-formed and as you turn your gaze toward heaven things become clear and things become luminous. It's not simply that but it's also interesting to look at this diagram which is Guarini's diagram from his astronomy treatise where he begins to study the geometry of the eclipse. So it's almost as if the plan diagram that Guarini uses for the church of the holy shroud is the same plan diagram that he uses to explain how an eclipse works. And the church is just loaded with all of this kind of stuff. This is a column capital that he uses on these Corinthian pilasters and he makes specific the Corinthian pilasters to involve a crown of thorns and a passion flower. Things that you would never find in Roman antiquity but things that are specific to the program at hand. You also have the idea of the earthquake going on and really Guarini should stay away from the idea of the earthquake. He's had really bad luck. But if you look at the section here you'll begin to see that one thing Guarini is doing is kind of thinking of the church as discs that slide differentially with respect to each other. That is to say here we have a pediment and the columns in the middle that these pediments wrapping the base of the church slip away from the columns that are supposed to engage and as you get higher and higher up it keeps happening that you have an arch and springing from the center of the arch is another arch and springing from the center of another arch is another arch. So the whole geometry of this thing is something that happens through slippage, through displacement, through the trembling of the earth or at least the representation of the trembling of the earth. I think here maybe you can see this pediment on top of a column rather than supported by columns. Here's another example of that kind of slipping or here the slipping of the arch you have a keystone in the middle and the keystone becomes the spring block for the next arch. Guarini is really loading on the symbolism just like Boramini is loading on the symbolism. I mean your first take when you look at this thing would be to say, wow, this is spectacular. I'm sort of dazzled. I don't quite know what's going on but the more you look at it, the more you see that every apparently flamboyant act or departure from the norm that Guarini puts into play is aimed at making more dense and more complete the symbolic program. Look at this whole idea of kind of coffering. The coffering is the star and look at the way the volutes work here. These flattened volutes begin to mimic the folding of the shroud in the reliquary. Simultaneously it's a volute but it also is more than that. This is the space of a little tube that you walk through coming up to the church and as you walk through there the geometry that you see on the underside of this vestibule is a triangle with a circle in the middle of it which is a symbol of the trinity. Here in the darkness and obscurity you're already beginning to get a clue about what will be your salvation and that will be the trinity that will bring you to the light. And the light blows apart. You have your craziness at the base. You have your perfect luminous circle in the center. Great little church. Palazzo Carignano is an example of domestic architecture that Guarini did also in the town of Turin and just showing it to you because there aren't that many Guarini buildings out there. And also it's pretty interesting. It's a pretty interesting elaboration on the theme of Baroque Palace and a exploration of how Guarini can begin to use this strategy of the center or the field of activated centers to organize something as typologically normative as the Palazzo. When I say Palazzo is typologically normative what's the normative type? How would anybody describe what a Palazzo is? Not a fancy Guarini Palazzo but just a normal Palazzo. Corey, did you say something Palazzo like? No, don't say Paladio. Paladio's a name. What's a Palazzo? If you had to tell me the geometry of a Palazzo what would that be? It's a man-made extruded rectangle? Okay, good. Who can help him? Yes, sir. A square donut. It's topologically, it has a void in the middle of it. So to simply talk about it as a square rectangle it's just too general. Square donut is the memorable food reference way to talk about something that is organized around a void. You would think that the idea of the palace would be something that is stuck with its figureality happening completely on the inside and the exterior changes. But when we looked briefly at the Barbarini Palace we saw that there's a transformation in the type of palace when we get into the Baroque. And that has to do with the pavilionization of edge and the increasing figureality of center, particularly the idea that the center begins to pull away and become an object that reveals itself in the courtyard. And we get that happening here too. We have normal, normal, normal, normal, normal, normal and crazy. Notice how this pavilionization of corner begins to perform an operation kind of like the operation we saw in some Baroque churches, like San Andrea Quirinale, where there is a scoop. There is a scoop, a concavity, and into the concavity you get a convexity. And this inner penetration of concave and convex that synthesize together to give you a kind of undulating figure. Here we have it happening in a palace. It's also kind of interesting to see the activated field of potential centers get used for a building that really doesn't want to have all that many centers. He plays with the wrapping, these concentric layers that get really densely deployed. For example, you walk in through here and you're in the central ovalized pavilion looking into the courtyard. But the ovalized pavilion is not singular but double. There's this little plenum of space, this little slot of space that begins to coagulate a dome within a dome. So there's a really narrow ambulatory here. And that's not all. Because there's also another slot of space around it and stairs wrapping up. So it's a space and a space and a space. And these little spaces keep expanding. And also the spaces keep pulling away from the original center and organizing themself around new centers as if something different will happen. So this is kind of what it looks like. This is the central space where you get a sense of a figure as a occupiable figure experienced from the interior. But simultaneously, you can experience that figure from the exterior when you walk through that little plenum of space right over here. And these are the stairs that wrap around. Fabulous. I find Guarini to be really spectacular because he's just willing to do almost anything. By now, we're in the 1680s. And what does architecture look like? What does the world look like? And you would have to say, the world looks pretty good. The world has, for example, North America in it by now. Christopher Columbus has come and gone. People know about things like potatoes and tobacco and tomatoes. People know about things like Indians. And so he has these windows that kind of look like little Indian chief heads here. I don't know if that's what he's going for, but that's what they look like to me. As though he's trying to say, I can represent things that were even unknown in the days of the Ancients. The world is my oyster. The language of the palasters becomes really crazy also. Taking the heraldic symbol of the Carignano family, which involves the star, the palasters become this kind of activated field of stars. So the palasters are much, much less about expressing the module or expressing the tectonic forces through the buildings and much more about this kind of dense ornamental program. Guarini is kind of super-duper and a genius and did not have very many followers because you had to be really smart to do what Guarini did. He had this kid in the office, let's say, or he had this one guy who took charge of publishing the second edition of Arquitetura Civile after Guarini's death. And that guy was Vittone. Vittone worked closely with Guarini and early, early Vittone buildings stay kind of close to what Guarini is after. This is the Valinotto Chapel by Vittone. I don't know, what do you guys think? I think he's got it kind of right, which is to say we have a center and we have a center that seems capable of spawning a secondary order of centers and we have a particularly dominant cell that becomes centric in and of itself. So in terms of the plan organization, I think he's got Guarini pretty well understood. But if you look at the way the vault is manipulated, it's pathetic. And by pathetic, I mean bad. No, I don't mean bad. I simply mean he doesn't have the extensive geometry. He doesn't have it pulling up. And therefore he's not able to perforate it. This is way closer to an Islamic vault that would have been someplace like Cordoba than a Guarini vault, which is truly a skeletal structure. I mean, it's good. Don't get me wrong. It's fine. But it's really little, so it should be pretty easy to do. It's not at the scale of the Guarini churches. And it is very modest in terms of what it accomplishes. It's interesting also that when Guarini published the second edition of the Architetura Civile, he removed from it all of the really crazy plans that were in the original Architetura Civile. Some of the really crazy plans are these binary plans that are like pulling apart. Or there is a plan for a church that Guarini designed where half of it seems to be doing one thing and half of it seems to be doing another thing. You typically get the idea of the concave and the convex being superimposed on each other. And in the case of this church plan, they're kind of fighting each other along the central axis of the church. His influence in Italy pretty much ends. And in the next generation, the dominant architect is a guy called Filippo Yuvara. And Yuvara is already dialectically pulling back to things that Guarini discarded, like the normative classical language of architecture. And finding a way, I would say, to use those elements, maybe with a Guarini-esque sensibility. And by Guarini-esque sensibility, I mean, if you look at the plan of Yuvara's major church, the Church of La Superga in Turin, it's not so different from a Guarini church. It's a circle with these little ovalized chapels at the perimeter and a cell pulling forward. However, if you look at the way this church gets expressed three-dimensionally, you see something quite different going on. You see big old temple, big old, let's say, Michelangelesque dome. And I say Michelangelesque dome because we have these pairs of columns on a drum supporting a really tall dome up above. We have a couple of towers, but we do have some weird language going on. Like, if you look at the top of these towers, these are not anything that would have been seen in classical antiquity. These towers are much more like something that would have been seen on a painted porcelain teacup imported from China. New sources are coming in. With Guarini, we already had this opening up of an eclectic sensibility. Eclectic, eclecticism means picking and choosing for many sources. The first generation, let's say, of the Renaissance people were really trying to get their archeology right. And the farther you move into the Cicuecento, the more playful people became. By the time you get to the Baroque, they're inventing like crazy. But inventing variations on the theme of classical examples they might have seen, or expanding the repertoire of classical examples they might have seen to things from Hadrian's Villa, or crazy little tombs on the Appian Way. In Guarini, we see the range of examples that are being used, extending to Gothic and Islamic sources. And here in Yuvaro, we begin to see a beginning of Chinoiserie, this kind of interest in Chinese sources or exotic sources. And this is consistent because by this period, the Jesuits have been all over the place. And the Jesuits are smart, and they're writing books. They're writing books about what they see. They're writing books about the gardens. They're writing books about the architecture. They're documenting the temples. And trade between China and Europe is increasing. And there's this great taste for these little decorative items that come from there. And they find their way into architecture. Let's look at the plan for a moment of La Superga, because I think this is a great plan. I think this is the kind of plan that people would enjoy diagramming on a test, for example. Things that are so interesting about it aren't just specific to the church, but also specific to the way the monastic compound and the cloister and the church work together. I mean, look at this, there is such a strong lock between whatever this is as a thing and whatever this is as a void. And if we wanted to say, well, what is this thing? Can anybody think of any kind of geometrical organization that explains kind of, let's say, an ideal point of origin that has been transformed to get you this kind of nutty thing? Do you see any structure there? Yeah? I think you're absolutely right. And I think everybody's trying to rebuild the pantheon. The pantheon is this provocation that nobody can escape from. So certainly we have the idea of a round thing and a temple front. But that only explains a little bit of it. And it doesn't explain the specific terms of engagement of the round thing and the temple front. Yes, Ryan? I don't know what you said, but I'm gonna say what I think you said. Because I think the first thing you said was pretty interesting. You said, maybe it's like a vignola villa. And in that case, I'm thinking specifically about something like the Villa Giulia, which could be described as the pickle and the pickle jar. That there's some relationship between the void and the thing that's been removed from the void. You look at all of this thing and you look at all of this thing and you think there's some kind of reciprocal action going on, that this is the void that this has been pulled from. I think you said that. If you look at this thing, there's a structure to it also. And it seems to be kind of nine square gritty, but a crazy nine square grid. Because when the pickle begins to pull out of the pickle jar, or when the nine square grid liberates itself from the confines of the wrapper, it becomes explosively deformed. There's a slipping, there's a displacement of center. Things begin rushing outward and a cell explodes. It's as though this was the original center of the nine square grid. It gets popped out into this big old, ovalized church and then the original missing piece of the nine square grid gets popped out and becomes porch. Even the side pavilions get popped out and become towers. So it looks like there's this real fight for dominance among the pieces here. On the interior, there are some moves, but moves that seem more closely allied with the Roman Baroque than with the Baroque in Turin that we had seen before. Like here, the lanterns along the dome seem to be pulling out of the wall and forming little edicules. It's a little Guarini idea of perimeter cells having a life of their own and beginning to proliferate. Now let's look at an example of domestic architecture by Filippo Juvara. And when I say domestic, I mean, a very strange kind of domestic because it is a royal residence for the House of Savoy, originally built for Vittorio Aladeo, the second of Savoya, who was king of Sardinia, a member of this Piedmontese dynasty. The house was commissioned in 1729 and Juvara has a particularly Guarini-esque attitude toward plan making here, as you can see. It's really hard in looking at a plan like this one to really begin to see where the building ends and the landscape begins. It's almost like a brocade or a pattern work of diagonally placed bars sponsoring these large domed spaces at the intersection. Everything seems to be a tangle of hexagons, hexagonal spaces, hexagonal solids, and radiating lines. This is another example where Guarini is coming into play not so much as a giver of form, but as a giver of plan-making strategies, this idea that a plan organization can begin to proliferate and reproduce itself at particular moments within the scheme. This building is a little bit of a hybrid, and part of that has to do with the fact that Juvara did the exterior. And in the exterior, you can see something kind of similar to the language we saw at La Superga. But the interiors were handled by a group of designers in Venice, and there's a much, much more, let's say, hyper-refined sensibility. And when I say hyper-refined sensibility, I mean the taste is shifting. We no longer have a very clear description of the tectonic forces moving through the building. Tectonic, remember, means constructional, having to do with demonstrating the way the thing is held up, the joinery. Instead, for example, look at the room over here, or even look at this dome over here, the structural system seemed to be disguised, or there seems to be a deliberate attempt to make things seem as flat and planar and immaterial as possible. In Italy, Guarini's legacy did not last long or spread very far. However, in central Europe, just to the north, his style of plan-making and his exuberant willingness to transform ordinary forms through superposition and overlap into things that were quite bulbous and quite extraordinary became a commonplace theme. And next time, we will look a little bit more carefully at how Guarini's legacy gets developed abroad.