“All over the western world, hundreds of thousands of houses, churches and public buildings with symmetrical fronts and applied half-columns topped by a pediment descend from the designs of Andrea Palladio. In many ways it is a return to the beginnings of his extremely long career, as if to prove the truth of Karl Kraus’s motto, “the origin is the goal.”Įxactly half a century ago, in that fateful year of 1966, when the ways of architecture were about to change radically under the blows dealt (unwittingly) in unison by Robert Venturi in the US ( Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture) and Aldo Rossi in Italy ( L’architettura della città), a forty-year-old from San Francisco brought out a slim but precious book, published by Penguin in London, with a title as curt as a pistol shot, Palladio:
After the book on Giuseppe Terragni, announced as far back as 1978 and then miraculously brought out in time for the centenary of the architect from Como, 1 we now have one devoted to Palladio, 2 published last December after almost thirty years of gestation. Now in his eighties, Peter Eisenman has published another of his well-marinated books, in other words writings that have been soused in brine for decades to cleanse them of any impurity.
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