Earls Court Living
Palladianism
Andrea Palladio (1508 – 1580) was an Italian architect. (Palladio was a nick-name, based on Pallas Athene, the Greek goddess of wisdom. His real name was Andrea dalla Gondola.) He studied the buildings and ruins of ancient Rome and the surviving writings of Vitruvius, a Roman writer of the 1st century BC. He became convinced that the wonders of ancient Rome could be repeated. What he took to be the necessary rules builders and architects would have to observe to achieve these results, he set down in I Quatto libri dell’architettura (The Four Books of Architecture). Palladio emphasised the paramount importance of harmony and the need to specify the proportions between different elements of a building in order to achieve harmony. The book included designs showing how this could be achieved.
This book was immensely influential throughout the western world, although the process took two centuries. Its first impact in England was on Inigo Jones (1573 - 1652) the greatest English architect of the first half of the 17th century, and the creator of the Queen's House in Greenwich and the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall. The Queen's House is the earliest strictly classical building in England. After his death, classicism was submerged in the sickly flood of Baroque for over half a century.
In 1715 Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1694—1753) returned from a Grand Tour of Italy, converted to the Palladian religion, and arranged for the publication of an English translation of I Quatto libri. Where it had had a lukewarm reception in the days of Inigo Jones, now everyone was presumably so heartily sick of the excesses of the Baroque that the "new" style was taken up enthusiastically.
The impact of Palladianism was reinforced by the publication between 1715 and 1725 of Vitruvius Britannicus by Colin Campbell (1676 – 1729). This 10 volume set included detailed designs for houses in the Palladian style which builders were able to copy and use. (Campbell attributed the designs to Inigo Jones.) In 1727 (at Burlington’s expense) William Kent published Designs of Inigo Jones, a book of Inigo Jones’ designs for buildings on Palladian lines.
It was The Age of Reason and Palladio's rules and proportions seemed to provide a rational basis for architecture. The most noticeable impact on English houses was an enthusiasm for columns - columns supporting roofs, columns carrying pediments, free standing columns, columns half-buried in walls. Columns and their paraphernalia of friezes, cornices, architraves and so on were called orders and the permitted types and their precise construction were a major part of Palladio's architectural system. Most London terraced houses, however, fell under the influence of a new form of classicism, Neo-Classicism.
