page_title: Palladian architecture
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Palladian architecture / Legacy
context_page_description: Palladian architecture is a European architectural style derived from and inspired by the designs of the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio. What is recognised as Palladian architecture today is an evolution of his original concepts. Palladio's work was strongly based on the symmetry, perspective, and values of the formal classical temple architecture of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. From the 17th century Palladio's interpretation of this classical architecture was adapted as the style known as "Palladianism". It continued to develop until the end of the 18th century.
  In Britain, Palladianism was briefly in vogue during the 17th century, but its flowering was cut short by the onset of the English Civil War and the imposition of austerity which followed. In the early 18th century it returned to fashion, not only in England but also, directly influenced from Britain, in Prussia.
context_section_description: By the 1770s in Britain, such architects as Robert Adam and Sir William Chambers were in huge popular demand, but they were now drawing on a great variety of classical sources, including ancient Greece, so much so that their forms of architecture were eventually defined as neoclassical rather than Palladian. In Europe, the Palladian revival ended by the end of the 18th century. In North America, Palladianism lingered a little longer; Thomas Jefferson's floor plans and elevations owe a great deal to Palladio's Quattro libri. The term "Palladian" today is often misused, and tends to describe a building with any classical pretensions. There was, however, a revival of Palladian ideas amongst the colonial revivalists of the early 20th century, and the strain has been unbroken, even through the modernist period.
  In the mid-20th century, the originality of the approach of the architectural historian Colin Rowe had the effect of re-situating the assessment of modern architecture within history and acknowledged the Palladian architecture as an active influence. In the later 20th century, when Rowe's influence had spread worldwide, this approach had become a key element in the process of architectural and urban design. If "the presence of the past" was evident in the work of many architects in the late 20th century, from James Stirling to Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi, Oswald Matthias Ungers, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves and others, this was largely due to the influence of Rowe. Colin Rowe's unorthodox and non-chronological view of history then made it possible for him to develop theoretical formulations such as his famous essay "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa" (1947) in which he theorised that there were compositional "rules" in Palladio's villas that could be demonstrated to correspond to similar "rules" in Le Corbusier's villas at Poissy and Garches. This approach enabled Rowe to elaborate an astonishingly fresh and provocative trans-historical assessment of both Palladio and Le Corbusier, in which the architecture of both was assessed not in chronological time, but side by side in the present moment.
caption: Portrait of Andrea Palladio from the 17th century
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