Palladio Virtuel Hardcover – December 15, 2015

what I was expecting

Peter Eisenman knows as little about Palladio as he knows about architecture, which is to say, he doesn’t know very much at all. But that shouldn’t matter much to the target audience for this book, those gullible types that hover around the pseudo-intellectual fringes of the design profession. The pretentious title is all that will be needed to draw them in. Much as flies are drawn to cowpats, they will be attracted to the wholly feeble conceit that informs not only the title but indeed the whole trite and embarrassingly flimsy attempt at scholarship that was somehow mistakenly packaged as a theoretical investigation.Like Eisenman’s architecture, his writing manages to avoid substance … entirely. Smoke and mirrors, and the manhandling of the vocabulary of a third-rate hermeneutics professor are more Peter’s thing. That, and simplistic but mostly meaningless diagrams. So it should come as no surprise that there are oodles and oodles of drawings overlaid with the same red lines that pretended to imply meaning in Eisenman’s 2003 volume on Terragni. He was wrong there. He has learned nothing since. Here he transfers the same simplistic analysis and the same schoolboy logic to a different Italian architect, one operating in a different time, in a different place. But time and place are not part of Eisenman’s thinking. Nor is an understanding of interior space, the movement through it, proportion, the relationship of form and scale to the human body, or indeed any of the actual qualities that informed the work of this most important renaissance architect. Instead, Eisenman offers superficial graphics and quasi-analytical speculations. These are gift-wrapped in thrice-hyphenated words, a surefire way to sell dime-store ideas to the intellectually insecure. For Eisenman’s audience it’s enough that the drawings merely look complicated. Real complexity is for real architects; a study of ‘The Orders’ (inarguably one of the most essential departure points for Palladio’s compositions), is only for the most serious and passionate student of design. And that takes work. It’s so much easier to be pretentious.Bruce Boucher’s ‘Andrea Palladio: The Architect in his Time’ is a better place to develop a deeper understanding of that architect. Princeton Architectural Press’ facsimile edition of Scamozzi’s ‘The Buildings & Designs of Andrea Palladio’ is the place to go for drawings that are informative rather than naïve and disingenuous. You’d learn more about architecture by perusing “Where’s Waldo” than you would reading ‘Palladio Virtuel’. Which leaves Eisenman’s book as just another overpriced door stop.

I initially saw this book in the form of a lecture series while a student at Cooper Union in the Spring of 2000. What is presented here appears to be nothing more than a regurgitation of the ideas and rudimentary analysis perhaps done by his students at the time or over the years.The book itself is comprised of anemic diagrams by the way of unimaginative axonometric drawings with a half baked narrative interweaving the necessity for red diagonals and dashed lines. All this attempts to form a "critical analysis" in the words of Mr. Eisenman on the villas of Palladio. No epiphonic revelations, ala Colin Rowe finding the harmonic composition of Le Corbursier Villa Stein De Monzie with Palladio's Villa Rotunda, are to be found here. If I recall correctly, the eponymous misspelling was a cute inside joke between Mr. Eisenman and his cronies on the virtues of "El-shaped" formations.Considering that these lectures took place a decade and a half ago, I imagine that this late in his career Mr. Eisenman has run out of ideas and has reached the bottom of the barrel on what he can hawk gullible students. Someone should inform him that once the bottom of said barrel has been scraped, there is nothing left.

I have read it and it has a better introduction to a geometrical description of Andrea Palladio's architecture theory. If not the best book, it's a good one to start understanding on-field the 'Four Books of Architecture'. There will be better books like this. But as start learning, i would reccomend it once you read the related Palladio's Book.

Smart & thought provoking. Both art & architecture in one bold work.

Overall a great book by a great architect.If you want to enjoy a particular and original view of Palladio, you will enjoy Eisenman's thesis.Great drawings too, all too good.