Since the book is mostly the story of Rybczynski's trips near Venice to visit Palladio's houses, with historical background and some decductions about what makes good architecture, the minimal illustrations are good enough: you probably won't enjoy the book if you don't know a little about late Renaissance and early Enlightenment architecture, or care much about expensive architecture. If you do know a little of the relevant history, Palladio's career will be a nice colored-in detail; he was of humble stoneworking beginnings, near a city subsidiary to Venice, near the beginning of Venice's political subsidence, and despite that his reinvention of classical architecture was so good that it still identifies seats of power and claims thereto. Rybczynski makes some of an argument that Palladio's architecture was influential because he was late and provincial: as an adult, he saw some ancient buildings and early-Renaissance attempts to build in the ancient style, but it was new and fresh to him. Interesting; a comfort for anyone who feels that all the important stuff has been thumbed through; unprovable. I wonder what being a mason did: there is a contemporaneous description of him being cheerful and attentive and teacherly towards the workers. Surely this made the commissions more likely to be finished; possibly, they were more likely to last.
About the houses themselves, Rybczynski notes that the proportions are not as mathematically exact as some people have assumed, but also are usually not far off simple ratios of size. It does occur to me that since most of his floorplans are tidily rectangular, and symmetrical around at least one axis, it would be hard not to have rectangular rooms come out with simple ratios of sizes.
What modern non-architects notice, I gather, is that the designs put impressiveness well ahead of comfort: scant privacy, weird interconnections that send people out onto the porch or down into the basement to get between adjacent rooms, exteriors that look like two enormously tall stories because the practical rooms have been fitted into short inter-stories (which must, I think, be poorly lit, but were originally servant's quarters, so ha! Who would care then?) With this much effort, with their technology, a house could have been built that provided the owners privacy and reliable warmth in winter. One should remember that pre-modern wealth was quite fond of some immaterial luxuries that democracy forgoes. Display, patronage, service, pomp; I don't think it's just the twenty-foot entrance halls that provide this, or the existence of servants to make up for having all the closets in the attic (or in the garden, if counting water-closets). I think the effect was partly made by having no merely comfortable space, nowhere the owner could be imagined slouching or looking after himself. Snout-houses undo their "gracious estate entrances" by having a family-room at all. (I should say that Rybczynski didn't find the Villa Saraceno uncomfortable, although he did not stay there in pomp.)
Somewhere around the - perfectly interesting - history of Palladian architecture's dominance as the powerful building style in Enlightenment England and colonial America, I started wondering if inexpensive Palladian architecture was possible, if it could be used for distributed, rather than civilized, dignity. Rybczynski lightly touches on the matter in his last chapter, on a stay in the Villa Saraceno. He discusses the difference between size and scale, implying that things can be of big and comforting scale without being of big and expensive size; but, alas, on the previous page he mentions that the wonderful windows are all 4.5 by 8.5 feet. I am sure that it isn't merely standardization that makes windows of that size more expensive than the modern standard of, oh, 36" by 54".
Studio loft apartments might be what moderns have instead, and for
recognizable reasons: open plans and huge windows that make them
stage-sets, displayed not just to guests in them but possibly to everyone
in the street below and the building across the way. Minimalism that
has no extraneous possessions or comfortable chairs demonstrates a
minute devotion to style, which might explain more of its appeal than
photographic charm; most houses only demonstrate what the owner has; it
takes a difficult house to demonstrate anything about what the owner is.
So wrote clew in
History (16th c.).
