Unexpected Palladio

At regular intervals, we see architecture casting light on its innate false consciousness, almost as if accusing itself of an inability to dialogue with a far broader public than that of only insider although it is perhaps more an awareness of its own insignificance in the public eye. So, campaigns are launched to raise awareness of the importance of the broad spectrum of architectural thought. This is, of course, a natural objective for institutions which act as bridges between this very equivocal entity – architecture – and the collective feeling.

The Royal Institute of British Architects is a leading institution of this kind in the United Kingdom and, on 9 September last, it inaugurated “Palladian Design – The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected”, an opportunity to show the public a selection of approximately 350 Andrea Palladio sketches and drawings conserved by the RIBA, which amount to 85% of all those in existence.

The exhibition is arranged in the same room that had, until a few days previously, hosted one celebrating the role of playgrounds in post-WWII “Brutalist” housing construction (“The Brutalist Playground”, 10 June–16 August 2015).  Soft, 1:1 scale reconstructions (foam rubber in place of reinforced concrete) of playgrounds that were a fulcrum of social experience in the British suburbs were replaced by the restrained and elegant installation designed by Caruso St John to exhibit approximately 50 original drawings by the Veneto architect, and numerous subsequent works by other architects – from Inigo Jones, John Webb and William Kent to OFFICE Kersten Geers, passing via Edwin Lutyens, Aldo Rossi and Oswald Mathias Ungers. In the intentions of the exhibition’s curators, Charles Hind and Vicky Wilson, these manifest the multiple ways in which Palladianism was reincarnated over the years, oscillating between pure iconographic reproduction and attentive interpretation of the iconoclastic action of Palladio’s oeuvre.

The exhibition design by Caruso St John treats Palladio as an object to be handled with care, in a silent space that cancels out the rowdy voices of the children who climbed – tirelessly and destructively – over tilted planes and slides transplanted from the suburbs to the centre of London for two months. However, the obvious clash between the two exhibitions is only on the surface and careful reading of the Palladio exhibition reveals a latent leit motif linked to precisely that attempt to raise common awareness of the importance of architecture mentioned above.

The Brutalist playgrounds may have interpreted the need for a collective spirit in a  rapidly spreading metropolitan residential sea but the ultimate meaning  of returning to Palladio in 2015 lies in the attempt to cross the set boundaries of architectural practice that still make it something for the few. However naive it would be not to agree that the Veneto architect, as too many or nearly all his colleagues of the times and those closer to the present day, worked in response to a clientele far more affluent than was the norm, if there is a lesson to be learnt, it is more likely to be found in a letter handwritten by Palladio than in the countless porticoes, tympanums and pronaoses that fill the eyes of visitors to the RIBA.

Not so much a formal letter, it is a piece of paper on which every available centimetre is filled with pencil sketches; fragments of building layouts and sections of Roman architecture appear alongside the study of a layout for low-cost housing. Although one might see a certain romanticism in its caption, presenting a Palladio concerned with both rich and poor, its juxtaposition on the same surface as a social housing drawing, a theatre, a temple, a noble mansion and a church undoubtedly heralds an urban space, in the 16th century, that was about to become modern, posing the need to include housing for a growing urban population more numerous than the Princes and Lords among the architect’s problems. This population was soon to find itself living in those places from which the RIBA borrowed the playgrounds.

Several captions to the drawings displayed contain the word “democracy”, indicating a desire to channel the message that architecture must operate for social standings other than that it most directly addresses and on a case by case basis. This democratic ideal emerges from the Palladian cowshed, passes via the utilitarian annexes designed by Inigo Jones – presented as the first to bring a healthy Palladianism to the British – and, finally, appears in the RIBA exhibition.

The curators try to hold several threads together, several ways of interpreting Palladio’s significance and of asking why we are still speaking about him. It is  unquestioned that pressing on their shoulders is a specifically British tradition, found expressly in the title of one section of the exhibition “The Rise of Anglo-Palladianism”, echoing that Vitruvius Britannicus with which, in 1717, Colen Campbell celebrated the results of a British architecture that had, among other things, learnt the lesson of the Veneto architect (although he preferred to place his origins in Rome rather than Vicenza). It is a tradition constructed, on the one hand, on formal and mathematical readings of Palladio’s work (the Wittkower-Rowe-Eisenman approach) and, on the other, on the always valid criticism that it is the equivalent of a little black dress, which Palladianism as a style has suffered over time.

The word “style” is certainly the main spectre hanging over the whole exhibition; the Modernist purge has taught us to always regard this term with the utmost mistrust, if not to recoil from it. The word appears several times in the exhibition, bearing testimony to an embarrassment at its mention but an equal desire to exorcise it. Astutely, its eclecticism makes it possible not to take any one stance and, in the end, visitors are asked to endorse the synthesis of a selection of positions on Palladio. Most will, inevitably, take away confirmation of their own preconception: Palladio, like that little black dress, always works even today and especially when it is a status symbol for the newly rich (as a trip though the outskirts of small suburbs will confirm).

The doubts will linger on in the others – those with the time to stay for two hours and see an exhibition all contained in a single room, and perhaps read the catalogue purchased at the exit. Doubt regarding a culture – the  British one – that is still wondering whether and how the architectural principles were really appropriated and transformed into Palladio version of local identity in the era of humanism. Doubt regarding whether – as stated in the catalogue – the 21st century really began with a more “abstract” interpretation of Palladio and whether and how works as different as those by Caruso St John (compared to Palladio, with the method of the dual projection so dear, among others, to one of the leading, albeit imported, British Palladio scholars Rudolf Wittkower) and OFFICE Kersten Geers form part of this.

There is much, perhaps too much, on show and there could be no better support than the minimal exhibition design of wooden planks and blocks of colour on the walls (inspired by the Villa Caldogno frescoes, again as stated in the catalogue) to contain so many contrasting voices – almost as if to remind us of those who occupied the Brutalist foam-rubber playgrounds a few days earlier.   

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until 9 January 2016
Palladian Design: The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected
Royal Institute of British Architects, London