San Antonio College Library

"Before Andrea Palladio began designing his simple, gracious, perfectly proportioned villas, architectural genius was reserved for temples and palaces. Palladio elevated the architecture of the private house into an art form, and he not only designed and built, he wrote. His late-sixteenth-century architectural treatises were read and studied by great thinkers as diverse as Thomas Jefferson and Inigo Jones, profoundly influencing the design of Monticello,...

The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture Pier Vittorio Aureli. In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement with the city. Aureli uses the term absolute not in the conventional sense of "pure," but to denote something that is resolutely itself after being separated from its other. In the pursuit...

(From t.p.) Book I. Containing the five orders and the most necessary observations in building -- Book II. In which the designs of several houses ordered by him ... are comprised, and the designs of the ancient houses of the Greeks and Latins -- Book III. Wherein the ways, bridges, piazzas, basilica's, and xisti are treated of -- Book IV. Describing and figuring the ancient temples that are in Rome and some others that are in Italy and out of Italy....

England emerged from the wars of the early eighteenth century as a world power, her colonies and dominions vastly extended. During this period, a reaction to the excesses of the Baroque led to the adoption of a new style of architecture and interior decoration. Inspired by the proportional classicism of the great Italian architect Andrea Palladio, designers such as Lord Burlington, Colen Campbell and William Kent created a new architectural style:...