 We're going to continue talking about Palladio, because Palladio really is an important and interesting character. Interesting because his architecture is, well, you would have to call it mannerist. He's always playing games. He's trying to deploy all of the elements of Roman antiquity, the types, the orders. But he's doing it in this masterfully inventive style of recombining things. And part of what he's doing with his recombination is trying to really make the proportions home. He's very interested in architecture as a mathematical art, something that has, in its sphere of interest, this precise deployment of proportion and harmonic ratios. But he also has this incredible plastic sensibility. And by plastic sensibility, I mean really interesting ways of manipulating three-dimensional form and playing with tension between the idea of flatness and the idea of volume. And we'll see that as we move forward. Just wanted to show you a map of Italy in case you've completely forgotten what it looks like. And the answer is boot. Venice is up here in this northern corner of Italy. And the yellow circle loosely represents an area called Veneto, which is the terra firma, the solid ground surrounding Venice. And Venice, of course, is this little mush pile over here floating on artificial ground and surrounded by water. And as a point of reference, these are the other cities that we've been looking at briefly. Of particular interest is the city of Vicenza, on the terra firma. This is the hometown of Palladio. And so as the hometown of Palladio, it has a good collection of Palladio buildings. And we will look at some of these buildings in Vicenza a bit later on in the class. I just want to remind you of some of the things we said last time, particularly pertaining to the idea of this diagram, this diagram that Rudolf Wittkauer gives us. Does anybody want to tell me what this diagram is all about? OK, yes? Tartan grid, right. And Platt is fine, but because this comes from Wittkauer and he lived in England, he uses the word tartan grid. Very British, although he was a German. This is a pattern not made up of even cells, all of which have the same dimensions, but there is a built-in variability here. And that variability begins to allow Palladio to build in the idea of a proportional system. It's not a modular system that keeps spinning itself out same, same, same, but it is a proportional system that has to do with all this difference. And he has a method of recombining it in interesting and different ways. Does anybody remember the words we used to describe Little Bay? And how does Palladio use the Little Bays to help him shape his spaces? Danielle. Ancillary spaces is OK. The word that I used specifically was interstitial space. And interstitial simply means the space in between. And in many ways, you could think of the interstitial space here kind of like a pochet. And pochet is the thickness of the wall that can be carved. And here, it's a kind of thickness of a wall between major spaces that can either be carved to create an extra spatial feature to a room like here in the Villa Malcontenta, or it can be used as a service space. This notion of served and service spaces is a really useful concept to carry with you even into the design studio. That what Palladio is doing here is building in a strategy to allow him to put in service spaces without undermining the clarity of his major spaces. So they get to have their perfect proportions. They get to have their perfect geometry. They get to have their perfect vault because Palladio preloaded the diagram with this relationship of served and service spaces. So sometimes the service spaces get full of service stuff like stairs or foyers. And sometimes the service spaces get absorbed into a larger central figure, like here at the Villa Coronara where the center gets big or here at Malcontenta. Fabulous. So there you have that. This is sort of boring by now, but at one point it was thought to be marvelous. And that point was when people could barely make computers do anything. And a few people came together and wrote a shape grammar. They studied Palladio's drawings and they studied his plans and they wrote a little program that could make you as many Palladian villas as you wanted based on those rules. And I think that they look bad, but they have proportions that have some kind of clarity to them. We looked at the villas and we saw that in Palladio's attempt to deal with this building type of the country house, the villa, he's working through ideas about what that might be. And he's working through those ideas based on a desire to find a decorous solution to the problem. And by decorum, I mean the right material, the right cheerfulness or gravity, the right imagery, the right way to express the stature of somebody here like Gian Giorgio Trisino, Palladio's patron for whom this early house was designed. By the way, Trisino was the one who gave Palladio his cute nickname, Palladio. Palladio refers to Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom. And Palladio was such a clever little guy that Gian Giorgio Trisino said, hey, you like Pallas Athena, that's who you are, I'm gonna call you Palladio. And so we all call him Palladio. I don't remember even what his last name is, it's fallen through the cracks of history. In looking at the villa Trisino, we thought this is fairly timid, it stays close to a traditional typology of a castellated country house, a big solid block with corner towers. And we looked at a slightly later house, the Villa Gordi in Loneido, and saw that he's still dealing with this typology of tower, but the tower now becomes embraced within the overall geometry of the house. But still in terms of a characteristic expression, Palladio is struggling with it. And eventually he comes up with what we know as his major strategy, and that is the idea of taking this pagan religious form, the temple, and somehow fusing it, or superimposing it on the blocky rustic farmhouse. This is probably the most spectacular example of Palladio's, well, one of the most spectacular examples of Palladio using this strategy to begin to organize a large country house. And this country house is for Daniele Barbero, who wrote his own Vitruvius, and this is what it looks like, with temple in the middle and these wings of farm buildings on either side. Full of this great painting by the painter Veronese, very important, and we saw a number of other things. We paused a bit longer to look at two of the villas because they are sort of ones that exemplify his ambitions. One is the Villa Rotanda, really just about three kilometers out of the center of Vicenza, but far enough a way to be called country house. It's a little bit different than many of the other villas that we looked at insofar as it's not really a working farm. The Villa Barbero is a working farm, so it has its wings spreading out. The Villa Amo is a working farm, so it has all of its service wings spreading out. Villa Rotanda is really just a country retreat, suburban house, you might say, rather than a real rural working farm. And because of that, it can attain a condition of ideality not available to the other ones. It really has nothing to do but be fabulous. And so since that's its task, it can assume this ideal geometry of square and circle and cross in a way that really exemplifies many of the ambitions of Renaissance architects to deal with these perfect forms. And this is just a site plan to show you how it's situated on its site. And I think this is really useful because you see it's on the high ground here. And so in this direction, it commands these long views. This is that little sunken road that approaches it from the front. And also from this direction, if we look at it this way, it's also on the high ground. So fabulous. A thing we noticed when we looked at the Villa Rotanda, not Ron Tanda, but Rotanda, is there's a funny attitude or revealing attitude about how the portico, this classical feature, this pagan temple front, gets stuck on the farmhouse. And it is an ambiguous strategy and it involves this piece of the wall that seems to come from the interior and come out so that you understand the temple not simply as an ideal piece clipped on as a perfect thing, but somehow negotiating between these two different conditions. Fabulous. Here you can see, I think, the topography pretty well about how this thing sits on its hill and really becomes this focus for the landscape at a great distance. Palladio here is interested in the planarity of the portico and he's emphasizing that by using a ionic order. And he's using it in a straightforward way where the ionic order with its curling volumes emphasizes the plane. Plane, plane, plane. As it moves around the corner, it doesn't inflect in a different direction because it wants to establish the plane as the dominant feature. Proportion, proportion. We also looked at the Villamel Contenta, which has a different site than any of the other Palladian villas and that is because it's on a canal. It's on the Brenta Canal, one of these canals that extends all the way into Venice. And if you ever want to spend a lot of money, you could buy the cruise on the Brenta Canal boat where they give you lunch and take you to a bunch of villas. I have never done that because I think it's too expensive. Anyhow, here you see the same strategy. We see this condition that the villa sits in between the canal on this side and a garden that extends back on this side. So in terms of the front elevation, if you were to look very quickly at Malkontenta over here and Rotunda over here, you would say, it looks like Palladio has solved this problem of how to decorously deal with the question of the country house. From a certain vantage point, they look very similar. There is this attic story up here and then there is this major floor with the vaulted rooms down below and a portico. I guess one big difference. Well, there are a lot of big differences. One big difference is how you approach the house. In the case of the Villa Rotunda, all four porches have this axial flight of stairs that takes you straight to the center. In the case of the Malkontenta, the stairs slip behind the portico in a different way. And that's one difference. An implication of the way the stairs engage the portico is that the portico hits the side of the building in a different way. This is Malkontenta, where we do have this free portico and this is Villa Rotunda, where the wall comes dragged behind it. This is the Wittkauer diagram showing us how Malkontenta gets its figureality of its central space by embracing Little Bay and absorbing it into this cross vaulted hall. And these are the different facades as Malkontenta meets the river and the garden. I just want to show you a detail of the material because it's pretty interesting. There is this exaggerated rustication of the material and it's funny because it's stucco. It's not made of stone or anything like this. Palladio is giving you the image of rustication simply by incising the stucco with these markers. And here we have the fabulousness of the central hall, the cross vaulted hall. I think Palladio's stuff gets pretty interesting the less ideal the site is. Because I would say Malkontenta is already more interesting than Rotunda because Rotunda is kind of porch, porch, porch, done. Whereas in the case of Malkontenta, there's this difference. What is it to meet the canal? What is it to meet the garden? What is it to pull the figure of the portico out? What is it to suppress it in flatness? As Palladio begins to build in cities, he has a lot more conditions to negotiate and he comes up with pretty interesting solutions. This is the Palazzo Chiricati in Vicenza. And it's at the edge of town. It's absolutely at the edge of town. If we were to look at our little map, it's kind of a hybrid building. It's half Palazzo, half villa. A Palazzo is all about edge. A Palazzo is all about suppressing its own figureality in the interest of shaping spaces. So certain things that we've come to expect in Palladian villas like these nice porticoes that pop out all over the place, not happening here. However, typologically and actually functionally, he wants something like that. He wants to have a gracious, decorous way to enter the building. He begins to perform a different operation with a facade. And that is he carves. Instead of adding a portico, he subtracts a portico. In fact, there's a colonnade that is continuous along the ground level and then he subtracts up above to give you little balconies that you can stand on. If you look at the facade as a kind of figure ground, it's almost a figure ground reversal of what you would see in something like Malcontenta. Here we have wall, wall, wall, wall, bunch of columns in the middle. And here we have columns, columns, columns, columns, wall in the middle. And wall in the middle is the major chamber. This, because it's an urban building, operates on the system of Piano Nobile. Major spaces go up higher where you're away from the clamor of the street, where you're away from all of the disturbances and you get the long view and the fresh breezes. If you look at the plan of Kedikati, the plan also just looks incredibly squashed. It's like somebody sat on an ideal villa or something. It constellates itself as a series of bars. So much so that this is the courtyard. The courtyard is this like residual little slice of bread in this highly varied loaf that we have here. Palladio has frequently been thought of as a Renaissance guy, somebody who perfected the use of the orders, who perfected the use of the types. But in a building like Kedikati, where the site is difficult, he begins to make adjustments to these ideal things. I'm just showing you here the side of this colonnade as it pulls out, gives us that characteristic arch motif that we saw on the villas. You probably can't see very well what's going on here, but make an effort to. This is the point where the center, this portico thing, ever so slightly, pulls out from the colonnade thing and individuates itself as a figure. So how does he do that? Because he wants to have this continuous colonnade at ground level. So you can walk, walk, walk, walk, walk. But he also wants it to read and he comes up with this funny idea of a column. Where that little column pulls out, you begin to get something that's a double. If you looked at the plan of the column, it wouldn't be singular, it wouldn't be circular, it would look like an eight. It would look like a kind of double figure. So Palladio is playing fast and loose with the rules of architecture. Palladio is sly. He's also doing some things that are somewhat conventional, which is to say he's got a two-story building. So what would be a good way to make a two-story building in terms of using the orders? Anybody have an idea? If you had a two-story building, what order would your first story be? What order would your second story be? Yes, absolutely right. Doric on the ground and Ionic above it. And that's exactly what he does. Doric on the ground, Ionic above it. And here, he's got a kind of wilder idea about what happens with the Ionic. That is to say, in something like Rotunda, he's really interested in the plane. But here, he wants to make some kind of relationship between this slightly extended piece of the building and the piece behind it. So he cranks out a volume at a 45 degree angle so that it can turn the corner so that it can operate spatially. Oh, Palladio, you're so sly. Sadly, the interiors of this building are badly eroded and you don't get the same clear expression of Palladio's language as you do in some of the villas. Let's look at some of his churches because I think his churches are really his most interesting buildings. San Giorgio Maggiore is over here. It's over here in Venice. Remember Venice? Everybody make a map of Venice in case you're ever there and you get lost? Good. It's actually not even quite in Venice. It's on a little island called the island of San Giorgio Maggiore floating out over here. And what's nice about that is you get these big, long views of the façade from across over here in the Piazzetta of St. Mark's Square. This is the Ducal Palace. And if you stand right over here, your view is something like this of the façade. This is a really interesting condition for a façade to operate in because really the problem with most façades is you can't get far enough away from them to see them. Or let's say you're so close to them you see them obliquely. You can't read them as an elevation. But in the case of these façades on the canal in Venice, you're across so much water that you can really read this thing as an elevation. And so Palladio plays with the elevational quality of it and makes it really legible. This I think is a good view of it as elevation. And what's his strategy for making this elevation? How does he use classical typology to organize a building that deals with a basilican section? Any ideas? What types is he using here? And what does he do? What's his trick? Tom. He's just got one temple going on there? Just one large temple? Okay, so you're saying there's a large temple and that's it. And he organizes his door through the temple. Can anybody see anything other than a large temple? Yes. Good. You're saying he uses two temples and he uses a technique of layering. So you can read one temple against another temple and that begins to organize your procession. So the temple that Tom talked about up here is the forward layer and Ryan identified that there's also a backward layer over here. And look what he does with the ground plane. It's pretty clever. We've already seen this kind of syncopation going on, say in Santa Maria della Pace in Rome where different scales are manipulated. We have the scale of the skinny temple helped along and kept proportional by situating the columns on plinths, these big blocks that allow a ground plane more or less here to be established. For the low temple, the ground plane is the ground plane. He's got not only the layering, but he's got the slipping up and the slipping down. Perfect. You get something that works like a basilica, but you do it in terms of classical language. I just wanna show you how paper thin these facades are. If you look at the church obliquely, you'll see that Palladio didn't waste marble on the side. It really looks like a drawing of a church or cardboard cutout of a church stuck on the volume of a building. Another thing you see from this oblique view is that there's a kind of schizophrenia going on in terms of how the building expresses itself as a facade and what it delivers as an interior. And by that I mean flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, bumpy, bumpy, bumpy. Two different conditions are going on. And really the dome is so far away. Here's the facade. The dome is so far away that if you're close to the building, this is all you can see. But if you're across the canal, you can begin to understand the dome in relationship to the church. Clever. I wanna say a few more things about close versus far because I think Palladio does this in a way that's really masterful. You get this one reading of a domed temple. Kind of amazing. Hmm, domed temple. Can anybody think of a temple with a big dome in it from classical antiquity? Pantheon, right? It doesn't exactly look like the pantheon, but it's pantheonic. At least there's a precedent that's being used and it's not being rebuilt spatially. It's being conjured up perspectively. It's using the fact that this thing is viewed like a billboard and it can collect its layers together and be understood and read as an orthographic projection. When you're close to it, all that goes away, all you get are the temples. But the way the temple meets the ground becomes really useful. There is this development in plinth land of a kind of low scale that relates to the scale of the human body. The scale of this stuff is so big it really relates to the viewer across the water. The scale of this stuff is so small that it can be looked at but also used by the viewer. It forms a bench and you can actually sit on and occupy the church. Fabulous. Audio loves proportion. And these are some of Cesariano's ideal diagrams like the radical two rectangle. You take a diagonal through a square and you pull it down. Two by three rectangle, three by five rectangle, square, golden rectangle. And Palladio makes use of all of these kinds of proportions in his church. Beautiful. Here's the plan. We had a hint that something a bit odd was going to happen when we looked at the distant view and we saw that there is this kind of juxtaposition between the extreme planarity of the facade and the extreme figureality of the building. And I think extreme is the only word to be used for it because it is a monastic church. And in monastic churches, you really have two different kinds of users. You have the laity, people who are not part of the monastic order and you have the monks. And it's important to separate these two user groups. So here we have the monks choir sticking out over here. Here we have the area for the laity to come. And this is the crossing. And this is kind of the apps, but not quite the apps because there's this constant projection of the space through these screens beyond these screens. It's really quite amazing. Your sense of what the building is changes when you move to the interior and you begin to read this thing like a centralized church with a big crossing and these extensive elements moving in both directions. Look at how Palladio deals with edge or deals with corner. He really runs with the plasticity. Over here we see a technique that looks familiar, let's say from Brunelleschi where he has the gray stone and the white whitish creamer stucco, but much more plasticly developed. And by the time we get to the piers, it's a bundle of plasters and columns that negotiate the turn fabulously. Palladio did another church in Venice, also spectacular called Il Redentore. And the Redentore is over here on an island called the Giudecca. So here's San Giorgio Maggiore, here's the Redentore and here's all of Venice. This is St. Mark's in through here. By not being in the thick tangle of Venice, the Redentore also has the opportunity to be read as pure elevation. And this is what you get when you look at it really from the opposite side, or actually I think this is from a boat, one of the vaporettos, these water buses that they have in Venice. It really looks like a drawing, doesn't it? It really looks like a perfect orthographic projection. This is just a funny moment in Venice where a cruise ship sails down and you see this church of the Redentore at the same scale as the cruise ship, that they're exactly the same size, except one is a major piece of architecture and a large church and the other is a cruise ship. Comparisons between San Giorgio Maggiore as drawn by Palladio and Redentore as drawn by Palladio. And notice that San Giorgio Maggiore comes first, Redentore comes second. When Palladio draws San Giorgio Maggiore, he doesn't draw the dome. You can see the dome if you're over by the San Marco but he doesn't draw the dome. But I'm sure he thought should have drawn the dome. I should have realized that you could see this thing from far away and that I could actually organize that as part of my elevation idea. When Palladio draws Redentore for his publication, he includes the dome. And this is a pretty interesting facade, you gotta say. In many ways, it's similar to the facade of San Giorgio Maggiore and similar in that we have here a temple up on a plinth, a temple down on the ground and here we also have a temple up on a porch or a plinth and a temple down on the ground. But we have a lot more stuff here. We have a lot of stuff. For example, here we have a hip roof. A hip roof slanting backwards. But if you draw a hip roof slanting backwards, what does it look like? Looks just like a pediment, right? And we have this block and then we have the dome. Lots of stuff to think about. I think this drawing is pretty useful in showing you this strange attitude that Palladio has about all the layers. I think when we were discussing the facade of San Giorgio Maggiore, we noticed that he was dealing with layering to begin to create something that is perceived to be a deeper space than it is or perceived to be a shallower space than it is, depending on your vantage point. And here too, the very structure of Redentore has to do with these buttresses that come out really like slices of bread off the loaf of bread. A layer, a layer, a layer, a layer, a layer. And then suddenly bang, the hybrid condition that we noticed in San Giorgio Maggiore happening again and this kind of battle between something that wants to organize itself as a centralized church with a big dome and something that wants to be this pulled apart orthographic projection of a series of layers in space. This is what it looks like on the side. Quite fabulous. Volume, volume, volume, flat. And it could be that Palladio was really thinking about this thing as an orthographic projection because there are vantage points within the church that begin to let the different layers collapse together based on your cone of vision. And there are also vantage points in viewing this that begin to make it look like other buildings we've seen before, particularly something like this. This is Palladio's sketch and Palladio's drawing of a building we're familiar with. Do you know what that building is? Kevin, what is this building? Yes, of course, it's the pantheon. And so look what we have in the pantheon. It's kind of interesting. We have a temple, we have a temple, and we have a dome. And so even this block that seems like a funny thing that's used to negotiate the joining of the temple to the cylinder in the pantheon is something that gets rebuilt in Redentore. In many ways, Palladio is rebuilding the pantheon and think about the problem that the Renaissance had with the centralized church. You love the centralized church. You wanna build the centralized church, but you cannot really organize a worship service inside of a centralized church. There's no place for the procession. There's no place for the altar. There's no hierarchy between the clergy and the congregation. But what if you could make it read like a centralized church? What if you could play with drawing conventions like orthographic projection, the flattening of all these layers together on a drawing and therefore build yourself a virtual pantheon? It sort of seems like that's what Palladio is doing. He's building himself a virtual pantheon. Now in the case of the pantheon, all of these different layers are quite close. And look at this. This is that extra triangle that really you don't notice ever when you're dealing with the pantheon. But Palladio would have crawled around on this thing, sketching it. Palladio would have spent a lot of time not simply having a coffee and reading a newspaper while near the pantheon, but measuring every stone, looking at every little piece of joinery. And so I think he's using a strategy, very akin to pulling apart the space of the pantheon and then slingshotting it back together again. So much so that in plan, when we get this thing, we're actually beginning to experience the space that's promised us in elevation from the idea of the dome. Palladio wasn't the only guy to deal with this issue. Perhaps you remember Vignola from the gardens that we were talking about last time. Vignola is also a kind of crazily inventive mannerist. And there's a little church by Vignola, San André in Via Flaminia on the outskirts of Rome. And it looks like Vignola is dealing with the same situation here. It's an ovalized church and this church has a ovalized drum that extends up. So over here, this is what we see when standing in front of it. We see a square block and a temple and an incredibly flat representation of the orders as pilasters, not fully spatialized as they would be in a real pantheon. But we have a square block and we have a temple. And perspectively, when you look at this drum and you flatten it out, you're at this kind of close framed advantage point, you can't read the ideal proportions but you read it and it begins to look domey. It begins to look like a little dome. So here is a precedent really for rebuilding the pantheon as orthographic projection, trying to give yourself the image of the pantheon while still giving yourself a form that allows pieces to be read differently. Kind of clever, funny looking thing, isn't it? Palladio solution is much more elegant. It's also possible that Palladio is collapsing even other readings in here. For example, this space is really strange and what makes it so strange are these thresholds that you come across where the space is clipped in and you think you have a thing, longitudinal church. Clipped in, you think you have a thing, centralized church. Clipped in and you see beyond that to something that begins to set up the whole argument all over again. And what could Palladio be thinking of? How could somebody who gets credit for being so renaissance-y do something so crazy? And it could be that he's also thinking about other precedents like a forum. Or if this could be simultaneously church-like and forum-like. And you think about what the condition of, say, one of the imperial fora would have been where there's a temple inside of a construct with these different lobes. And what if you pulled those pieces apart and you began to get something that begins to look kind of like a temple with these lobes surrounding it? Who knows what Palladio's thinking, but there's a real density of references that go on in his work. Let's look at some of the other urban buildings. For example, this one. This is quite an early Palladio building. It's called the Basilica, or Palazzo della Ragione, the town hall, more or less. This is how Palladio draws it in his treatise. He draws it in his treatise as a fairly ideal thing with a fairly even set of bays. And this is a big lie because Palladio here is refurbishing a Gothic building that already existed. Vicenza, where this is located, is in Veneto. And Veneto is part of Venice. Instead of having, say, a king or a prince or a duke settle all the matters, there's a real democratic spirit in Venice. And you would have this council chamber where citizens would come and make decisions about policy. So it's an important building. And you find these in lots of the main towns in Veneto. If you look at this fabulous Google version of the world, here it is. It's a big thing. But we saw how Palladio drew it. This is really what it's like. This is the real plan. Palladio is a big liar. Palladio, again and again, will draw the ideal concept of the building in his treatise and not really tell you all of the kind of messy truth. But Palladio gets a building that's kind of like this. You have one of these fabulous domes. And when I say domes, fabulous barrel vaults built by the carpenters from the Arsenaale. People schooled in shipbuilding, build a ship upside down. And that's what you get for the vaulting of the upper chamber, really an amazing space. But now Palladio has to deal with this irregular bay system and all of this kind of oddness of the Gothic arches. And what's he going to do? Because he's a Renaissance guy. He wants to use classical language. He wants round-headed arches. He wants rhythms that are orderly. And you can see from this drawing that he's going to give you that, or he's going to at least give you the image of that. And I think this piece of the drawing begins to give you a tip into what Palladio is doing. And this is the corner condition that Palladio is doing. It's this piece blown up really large. He's using that kind of plastic attitude about the pier that we saw when we looked at the piers at the crossing of San Giorgio Maggiore, where a lot of different elements get plastered together at different scales, calling out different readings. We have little guy, big guy, other guy pulling itself out at the corner. But look what we have on the individual bays. Here we have pier, little guy's space, little guy's pier. But look what happens immediately next to it. He's subtly adjusting the rhythm as you move along. He's changing it so that you think you're getting this ideal condition. But in fact, there's incredible variability going on in it. What I have up here is the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, which is another Veneto town. And this one didn't get decorated up by Palladio. But the one in Vicenza probably would have looked a lot like this had Palladio not intervened. If you look at the wall of this, you think, well, this is pretty much exactly as he drew it, this ideal thing. But if you look carefully at it, you see that there are all of these little adjustments, all of these amazing adjustments. And nobody is better at turning the corner than Palladio. You've got to say. Here's another building. This is exactly across the square from the Palazzo della Ragione. Here's the Palazzo della Ragione. Here's the loggia del Capitagnato. And the Capitagnato are just city council, a group of important citizens. And the loggia is this space here. So the important citizens could hang out and have learned conversations right here off the main square. The version that we have right now is a three-bay version, which I think is pretty great looking. Apparently Palladio had wanted it to be larger, didn't get built. I like it just fine as a three-bay system. And one thing that's nice about the three-bay system is as a triad of arches, it can begin to play with a lot of precedents that a six-bay system or seven-bay system wouldn't be able to play with, such as the triumphal arch. So you read this three-bay system, and you automatically connect it to a tradition of elements. And I think it's hard for me to believe it would have been bigger, because it works so well at this scale. Typical Palladio is deploying multiple scales. And he's realizing the fact that there are two different ways of seeing this thing. There's the big view from across the square, and there's the little view from right next to it. Or even there's the big view from across the square, and there's the really little view from this tiny little street that it sits into. And so how does the building turn the corner when its condition is so different on either side of the corner? And how does the building deal with these different scales? The piazza side, the side toward the town square, has this colossal order of Corinthian columns. Fabulous. But notice what happens as it turns the corner. It begins to shift scale. You have this row of balconies that gets set up above the arches. So already here on the front facade, you have two scales. Scale of pilasters holding up the arches, scale of columns holding up the entablature. And as it shifts, these two levels begin to subdivide. And over here, the balconies set up kind of new ground plane. And you get even a further diminution of the scale. You get this little triumphal arch motif coming on in here. Fabulous. So there's a shrinking from one scale to the other. And the colossal order as we move around the corner shifts into a minor order that only organizes one story. If you happen to be walking down this street, you can see what's going on and the scale of the ornament is geared to the scale of the space from which it's being seen. Fabulous, Palladio. Fabulous. This is the switcheroo as you move around the corner. And this is Palladio's drawing of that side elevation where he moves from the tall to the small to the really small. Looks so good. Looks like it had to be this size. It seems crazy that it was any other size ever. Probably one of the most interesting urban buildings that Palladio did. And this is also in Vicente, very close to Chiaricati on the edge of town. And that is the Teatro Olímpico or the Olympic Theater. Already looking at this plan, you should pause and say, that's a strange plan. But it's a strange plan because it's a theater. And so Palladio is making a building for a theater and we know the type of theater from classical antiquity. That you have this sort of semi-circular seating space. You have a stage. And here, you have all these fake perspectives. Fake perspective, fake perspective so that the actors can walk onto stage, through these different doors and you get this sense that the space is much deeper than it is. You get an image of what these scenes look like in the stage sets drawn by Serlio and in his architectural treatise. This is the Chena Tragica where we get a fake perspective. And these things actually get built into the space of Palladio's Teatro Olímpico. I'm just showing you a Roman precedent here. This is the theater in Orange, France. Palladio has basically given you what we have in Orange, which is the seating, the circular form, and then the wall, which here in Orange is this kind of large proscenium. But Palladio is actually allowing perspective, allowing vision to further amplify the space through these perspectival tunnels that he cuts into it. This is more or less what we have and it's a bizarre looking thing, right? We have the space of the seating. We have the space of the stage right over here. And then we have the fake perspective. So you have the space, triangular cones of space, pulling off in either direction. Really great. And Palladio is using things like the triumphal arch motif also to organize this whole big wall that he has. He used to be a tour guide, this old guy. And he was a prisoner of war in World War II. So he was a really old guy and he didn't speak English, but he was a prisoner of war for such a long period of time. He could do things like say, how are the Dodgers doing? And then he would have no idea what you would answer. But whatever his prison captors would tell you, he would repeat. But the one thing he would say as the tour guide who didn't speak much English, when you asked him about the building, he would say, too many statues, too many statues. And in fact, there are a lot of statues. But this is a technique that Palladio uses again and again and again. And that is the pairing between the body and the column. There's a precedent in Greek architecture. There are these things called acriteria. These things on the top of the temples that reach up. And Palladio here terminates the edge of the line of the columns with little statues moving upward. This is just showing you the schizophrenic nature of the space where there is half a square and part of a circle, let's say, that begin to allow the skewering of these two different spatial experiences to come together. And these are just a few urban buildings by Palladio. This is the Palazzo Val Marana. And he's got the challenge here of how do you meet your neighbor? What is the decorous way to meet your neighbor? Particularly if, like Palladio, you're interested in these big moves. And for Palladio here at the Palazzo Val Marana, the big move is a colossal order that organizes two stories. He's not content to be like the guy next door saying, here's a window, here's a window, but rather bang, I'm making this whole thing read at the scale of Roman architecture. It's not domestic architecture, it's Roman. But his strategy for ending the system is really similar to his strategy for turning the corner at the loge del Capitagnato. And that is, he takes the plaster and he's got this kind of doubling going on here so that there are smaller things happening on the window surrounds. And then instead of putting another plaster down here, he shrinks the scale and terminates it with a human figure. By the time he gets to the neighboring building, there is a kind of decorous response in terms of scale and how he meets his neighbor. So fabulous. Vicenza is full of these strange little Palladios. This is one that was meant to be five bays. But as a two bay system, it's pretty spectacular because it's so muscular in the development of the order and so out of proportion with the delicacy of the geometry of all Palazzo. And these are just a few more of his urban buildings in Vicenza. Here in the Palazzo Tiele, he's dealing with rustication. And there are spaces in this that really remind you of Palazzo del Te in the hyper rustication of the orders themselves. I think that is it for Palladio. See you next time.