The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio Read Online Free Page A

from the seventeenth century (although their design is based on Quattro libri ). If, as seems likely, they reproduce the original, then this may be the first application of the simple, full-width stair that Palladio would use so often. In some ways, the loggia is the most dramatic space in the villa, taller even than the sala, with a high, barrel-vaulted ceiling and three arched openings that recall the Villa Godi. The ceilings and walls are likewise frescoed, although clumsily painted compared to Zelotti, and much worn. Still, the patches of vivid color give a festive air. Two 8-foot-long garden benches fit comfortably on each side of the loggia with room to spare. Perhaps it’s because I’m used to modern houses, where everything is “just large enough,” that Palladio’s amplitude is sostriking. Just as the height of the rooms alters my perception of the space, the largeness has unexpected effects. The windows, for example, which are all the same, are 4 1 / 2 feet wide and no less than 8 1 / 2 feet tall. When I open the shutters in the morning, it’s not like raising a blind at home. Through the tall windows I can see more sky than land, which both brings the exterior into the house and heightens the sense of protective shelter when I close the shutters at night. There are lessons here for anyone building a house today: instead of concentrating on increasingly refined details and exotic materials, focus instead on spaciousness. Make things longer, wider, taller, slightly more generous than they have to be. You will be repaid in full.
    The English architect Raymond Erith attributed the generosity of Renaissance architecture to its different units of measure. According to him, the Venetian foot, which like the Vicentine foot is about fourteen modern inches long, “was a better unit for classical architecture because, for instance, if they made a door 3 Venetian feet by 6 Venetian feet, it was big enough to walk through, i.e., it was 3 feet 6 inches by 7 feet by our measurements.” 9 (This is exactly the size of the interior doors of the Villa Saraceno.) Of course, measurements are abstractions, and the doors could easily have been made any size, but architects have always had a tendency to round off dimensions to whole numbers. When sketching the plan of a house, for example, and trying to fit the various bits and pieces together, it is easier to remember that clothes closets and kitchen counters are two feet deep, that stairways and exterior doors are three feet wide, that patio doors are six, eight, or ten feet wide, and so on. Using Venetian feet makes everything slightly larger, slightly more generous.
    As I write this, I have before me photographs of that eight-day idyll spread out on my writing desk. There are several viewsof the front of the villa, taken one late afternoon when the winter sun was low on the horizon. It had been a gray, drizzly day, and the four of us were in the loggia watching the sunset. In the photographs, the bare branches against the southwest horizon are burnished with golden halos. We look tiny next to the massive piers and the vast arches; the architecture appears overwhelmingly huge, the people minute. The photographs are startling because when we were in the villa I did not feel overwhelmed at all. Quite the opposite. Palladio’s architecture was large and powerful, but it was also welcoming and comfortable, not cozy but definitely accommodating.
    This accommodation is a matter of scale, not of size. Although size and scale are often used interchangeably in popular speech, their meanings in architecture are distinct. To say that a door is “big” describes its size; to say that a door has “big scale” says nothing about its actual dimensions, but rather characterizes its impact on us—it looks big. Scale has to do with relative size: how large or small is the door frame compared to the surrounding wall, how heavy or light is the door handle compared to the door. It is easy to