The average person spends 84% of their life indoors: that is, inside architecture. Much of the rest of the time we are around buildings, even if we’re not paying them a great deal of attention. Despite this massive exposure, overall we’re not – as a culture – very ambitious about what buildings look like. We tend to assume that mostly the buildings we live around won’t be anything special and that there’s nothing to be done about this. We’ve come to imagine that great buildings are the unique and very expensive creations of genius-architects. You might travel to see great architecture on holiday perhaps but it’s hardly to be expected as standard at home. Vicenza, 25 miles inland from Venice, is one of the leading sites of global architectural tourism and for one reason: many of the works of Andrea Palladio are located in and around that town.
Andrea Palladio was born at the end of November in 1508 in Padua. He was an apprentice stone mason and later a stone carver. His real name was Andrea di Pietro della Gondola (i.e. Andrew, son of Peter the Gondolier). And it was only when he was around thirty years of age that he got involved in designing buildings himself – and his first important patron suggested a stylish name change, to Palladio. [It’s not intuitively obvious how to say his name. A safe bet is to start with ‘pa’ (as in dad); then ‘lad’ as in ‘a bit of a lad’; and finish up with a brisk ‘ay-oh’: pa-lad-ayoh.] Over the next forty years of his working life, Palladio designed forty or so villas, a couple of town houses and a handful of churches. Not a huge list, given the amount of building that was going on at the time. For most of his career he had a mix of professional successes and setbacks; though during his sixties he finally emerged as the top architect in Venice – about the richest and most powerful city in the world at that time.
Palladio himself held views on architecture almost entirely opposite to those which are current today. His attitude can be summarised by two central ideas. First, architecture has a clear purpose, which is to help us be better people. And, second, there are rules for good building. Great architecture (he was convinced) is more of a craft than an art: it isn’t necessarily expensive, and it is for everyday life, for farms, barns and offices, not only for the occasional glamorous project.
We tend not to ask ourselves what the purpose of architecture is - it can easily sound naive or pretentious. Either you are supposed to know already, or someone is about to launch into a complicated disquisition. Palladio held that architecture has an important purpose – above and beyond the provision of floors, walls and ceilings. He thought that we should build in order to encourage good states of mind in ourselves and others. In particular, he thought architecture could help us with three psychological virtues: calm, harmony and dignity.
Powerfully coherent buildings are moving because they counter the natural tendency of life for things to get muddled, confused and compromised. They work against our anxiety that many of our concerns won’t line up neatly: that work and home life, sex and love, desire and duty will all be continually fighting one another. The building creates an environment in which we are provided with a limited – but real – sense of everything important coming elegantly together.
The task of architecture is to provide us with the environment that continuously reminds about – and encourages us to become – who we really want to be. We find it difficult to say what it is about one building that makes it attractive and what makes another unappealing. We’re tempted to say that it’s a purely personal matter, that taste in architecture is purely subjective. It’s a well-intended sentiment. But it’s also unfortunate. It plays into the hands of developers who have no concerns whatever for beauty and well-being – who are safe in the knowledge that they will rarely be taken to task for what they do.
Palladio’s ideas have resonated down the ages. But it isn’t when buildings have columns or make nods to ancient temples that they are necessarily at their most authentically ‘Palladian’. Buildings are Palladian when they are devoted to calm, harmony and dignity on the basis of rules which can (and should be) widely re-used. It’s then they display the same underlying ambition of which Palladio is a central exponent and advocate: that it should be normal for buildings to present us with a seductive portrait of our calmest and most dignified selves.
