The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio (28 page)

A
T THE
V
ILLA
R
OTONDA
, P
ALLADIO DESIGNED FOUR IDENTICAL PORTICOES OVERLOOKING FOUR DIFFERENT VIEWS.

Jones, too, admired La Rotonda, although he had some reservations about the clay-tile roof, which he thought “does not look well, considering the richness of the Statues, and Beauty of the Building.”
¹³
Characteristically, he did not copy the domed house but used it as a springboard. He made drawings of several villas with domed central halls, though they were not built and likely were studies done for his own amusement. The houses are variations on a theme: one is octagonal with an octagonal central hall; another is round with a round hall; a third has a cruciform plan with an octagonal hall.
¹⁴
The resulting triangular and wedge-shaped rooms don’t appear very practical. The most interesting design is an octagonal plan with a round hall that, unlike the others, is not domed but open to the sky like a giant atrium.

The Scottish architect James Smith also produced a design for a domed house. Smith, who had been to Italy, introduced the Palladian style to Scotland in the late 1600s in a series of country houses. His domed house was a close copy of La Rotonda,
with a circular hall, a similar room arrangement, and four porticoes; the main changes are the addition of more fireplaces and the modification of the porticoes from six columns wide to four. There is no evidence that the house was built, and like Jones, Smith probably made the design as a theoretical exercise.

The four drawings of Inigo Jones’s domed houses have survived in William Kent’s
Designs of Inigo Jones,
which was published in 1727. By then there were two famous domed houses in England. The first, Mereworth Castle, was designed by the Scottish architect Colen Campbell, who knew James Smith and owned many of his drawings, including the domed house study.
¹⁵
The exterior of Mereworth, built in 1725 in Kent, is a close approximation of La Rotonda: the same size, with four identical Ionic porticoes, stucco walls, stone trim, and many of Palladio’s details. “I shall not pretend to say, That I have made any Improvements in this Plan from that of
Palladio,
” Campbell wrote somewhat defensively, but he went on to list the advantages of his design, the chief being his ingenious incorporation of twenty-four chimney flues into the double skin of the dome.
¹⁶
Although the circular domed room of Mereworth is the formal reception area, the main public space is the so-called Gallery, a long, comfortably furnished room that occupies one entire side of the house; the main floor also includes a dining room and a drawing room. The shape of the dome distinguishes Mereworth from La Rotonda, for it is modeled on the tall dome that Palladio illustrated in
Quattro libri,
not the flatter version that was actually built by Scamozzi.

A second domed house was built a few years later in the outskirts of London by Campbell’s aristocratic patron, Lord Burlington, for his own use. Chiswick House was an addition to an existing Jacobean house, and its chief function was to accommodate Burlington’s art collection, although the main
floor included a bedchamber with a dressing room for Lady Burlington, and the basement housed his private apartment and library (the kitchens were in the main house; there was no attic). Chiswick is an artful blend of Palladio, Jones, and Scamozzi by a talented neophyte (this was Burlington’s first architectural work). The plan is a square with an octagonal Jonesian hall. The attractive flattened dome is carried on an octagonal drum like Scamozzi’s La Rocca, but instead of an
oculus,
the drum is pierced by four thermal windows like the Villa Molin. The tall Corinthian porch distinctly recalls La Malcontenta, but the sides of the house have
serlianas
like La Rocca, and the rear façade has three
serlianas
that are obviously derived from an unbuilt Palladio project.
¹⁷
Burlington was intimately familiar with Palladio’s drawings since he owned most of them. He had acquired Jones’s entire collection, which he supplemented by additional drawings that he bought on his Italian travels; he is said to have discovered a trove of Palladio drawings in the stables of the Villa Barbaro. Yet Chiswick House, with its delicate ornament, almost dainty scale, and richly encrusted interiors, is not Palladio, it is Burlington; exquisite rather than powerful, elegant rather than sublime.

Two more domed English country houses were built in the 1750s. The first is sometimes attributed to Isaac Ware, who with Burlington’s support had published the definitive translation of
Quattro libri.
¹⁸
Foots Cray Place, in Kent, was built for a wealthy London pewterer. It has an octagonal hall capped by a hemispherical dome that roughly resembles the version in Palladio’s treatise. The house is built on a hilltop, which distinguishes it from Chiswick and Mereworth, which are on flat sites. The front and back of Foots Cray have Ionic porches; the other two sides have flattened temple fronts. The plan is surprisingly unsymmetrical, given Ware’s familiarity with Palladio, convenience
taking precedence over geometrical elegance. The second domed house, known as Nuthall Temple, was in Nottinghamshire and was designed by a relatively unknown architect, Thomas Wright. Although the house no longer exists, it is illustrated in the fourth volume of
Vitruvius Britannicus.
This is La Rotonda as seen through the eyes of Scamozzi and Burlington. The octagonal hall is covered by a flat dome resting on an octagonal drum, pierced not by thermal windows but by
serlianas.
The plan is the most Palladio-like of the four British houses, with a strict axial symmetry and small, medium, and large rooms. Mimicking La Rocca, Wright used only one portico, balancing it with the curved bay window of the salon on the opposite side. Like Ware, he paid attention to creature comforts: the domed room was provided with a fireplace, and the two staircases (one for the owners, the other for servants) were more generous, important since the bedrooms were on the upper floor.

The four English villas are attractive enough, but they only serve to underline Palladio’s achievement: a domed house is a very simple idea that is anything but simple to pull off. None of the four British architects had Palladio’s breadth of experience, and it shows. There are too many compromises, too many fussy details, not enough discipline. Although the pieces are there, they fit together awkwardly; the seams show. And without the magician’s sleight of hand, the trick falls flat.

Builders in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries adapted Palladio’s domed house, but how would it suit a modern family? In 1993, Alvin Holm, a Philadelphia architect, built a domed house inspired by La Rotonda for Richard and Susan Wyatt and their two daughters on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. The first architectural impression is English rather than Italian. The exterior of the house is brick with white-painted
wood trim. The interior of the hemispherical dome, slightly smaller than the original, is painted Wedgwood blue, like the hall at Mereworth. An upper gallery overlooks a room that is hexagonal in plan, like Foots Cray and Nuthall. The domed room functions like the large center hall of a traditional American Colonial house: a combination of foyer, reception room, and circulation space. Since it is lit by an
oculus,
it provides a bright focus for the variety of public and private rooms that surround it: four bedrooms on the upper floor (whose basic layout is not much different from its eighteenth-century English predecessors, although more space is devoted to bathrooms and closets) and a variety of public rooms below. Mereworth Castle had a gallery, and Nuthall a saloon, and while the Wyatt house includes living and dining rooms, pride of place is given to that particularly late-twentieth-century contrivance, the family room. Family rooms have largely replaced living rooms in new houses, so the large paneled room with an elaborate patterned ceiling is directly across the hall from the front door. The kitchen is next to the family room, and it includes an informal eating area that looks out over the garden through a handsome
serliana
window. The architectural décor of the Wyatt house is resolutely classical and distinctly formal, but the absence of corridors and the airy central hall give the interior a modern feeling, not an open plan in the Modernist sense but certainly an open atmosphere.

When Holm first saw the Wyatts’ hilltop site, he was reminded not only of La Rotonda but also of Thomas Jefferson’s hilltop house at Monticello. Monticello has a flat dome on an octagonal drum that resembles Chiswick, although it is compromised since the space under the dome is not a central hall but a menial attic room, invisible and barely accessible from the main floor. Jefferson designed two other houses. One was his
unsuccessful entry in the architectural competition for a new President’s House, a faithful rendition of La Rotonda, copied from Leoni or Ware’s translation of
Quattro libri,
with one novel modification: the ribbed dome consisted of alternating segments of masonry and glass that would have made it an extraordinary presidential beacon at night. The other house was Poplar Forest, Jefferson’s country retreat near Lynchburg, Virginia. The octagonal plan, clearly inspired by Inigo Jones, is neatly subdivided into five rooms surrounding a central hall. The rooms ingeniously share chimneys and include a parlor, two bedroom suites, and two smaller rooms; there are two Doric porticoes.
¹⁹
The central hall is not round but square, and is used as a dining room.

Poplar Forest does not have a domed room. In an uncharacteristic bid to economize, Jefferson opted for a flat roof, making the dining room a twenty-foot cube into whose ceiling he cut a narrow, sixteen-foot-long skylight. The Wyatt house has a domed room but no external dome. Holm’s first sketches featured a flattened Palladian dome on the exterior, but his clients worried that their home might be mistaken for an institutional building, so the dome was concealed behind a large slate roof. In any case, despite its four fronts, the exterior of the Wyatt house does not resemble La Rotonda. There are Palladian motifs such as axial symmetry, pedimented porches, and
serlianas,
but the pragmatic accommodation of form to function is unmistakably American—Jeffersonian rather than Palladian. Each of the four temple fronts is different. The entrance is the familiar double portico of Drayton Hall—Ionic over Doric; an open pedimented porch above a glazed sunroom faces the swimming pool; the main garden façade is a pilastered double portico; and the fourth side has an open pedimented porch above a two-car garage. Of course, this accommodation to
utilitarian requirements undermines the purity of the original concept, yet Palladio’s ingenious idea of a hilltop house looking in four directions, with a domed space at its center, persists, even in this altered form.

 • • • 

The man who commissioned La Rotonda had relatively simple requirements. He was a fifty-two-year-old retired cleric, Monsignor Paolo Almerico. As a young canon of Vicenza’s cathedral, the well-born Vicentine had been accused of murder and imprisoned, and although ultimately exonerated, he had left the Republic with a cloud over his head. Nevertheless, able and ambitious, he persevered in his career and served two successive popes in the influential post of referendary (the person who screened papal petitions). He eventually returned to Vicenza, where, “to enjoy himself he retired to his place on a hill outside the town,” according to Palladio.
²⁰
Almerico owned agricultural land in the vicinity, but his new house was not a
casa di villa;
it had neither outbuildings nor
barchesse,
and there was no
granaro,
which is why Palladio referred to the attic merely as a “place in which to walk around the hall.”
²¹
La Rotonda has sometimes been described as a “pleasure house” or a “belvedere,” which gives the impression that it was not a permanent residence.
²²
In fact, in 1567, a year after commissioning the house, Almerico sold the family residence in Vicenza, and three years later he was described as living in his new home.
²³
Almerico was a bachelor, and that may explain the unconventional layout of La Rotonda: four distinct suites of two rooms were useful for entertaining guests.
^II
The plan, however formal, functioned extremely well,
and one can imagine large numbers of the monsignor’s Roman friends living comfortably in the house without tripping over each other. Each room has direct access to the outside—and to an airy portico—and the
sala
is located out of the traffic flow so that social events can continue undisturbed by comings and goings.

Palladio had met Almerico thirty years earlier, when the canon commissioned the Pedemuro workshop to build a cathedral portal—the design and execution of which are generally credited to the stonemason Andrea di Pietro. The old relationship, as well as the idyllic hilltop site, and the willingness of Almerico to build a domed house, surely persuaded Palladio to undertake the commission. Construction progressed extremely quickly by the standards of the time, and by 1570 the final decorative touch was in place—the eight statues on the stair abutments. However, for unexplained reasons, the construction of the dome lagged and the central room remained unroofed. It has been suggested that Almerico may have run low on funds, but perhaps, like the Wyatts, he was having second thoughts about the propriety of a house with a dome.

Palladio’s great treatise,
I quattro libri dell’architettura,
was published in 1570. It was more than 340 octavo pages, profusely illustrated with simple, uncluttered woodcuts, organized in four books. Palladio described the basics of construction and the five orders in the first book, his own palazzos and villas in the second, bridges and sundry structures (including the Basilica) in the third, followed by a book on Roman temples. He planned as many as six additional volumes, on ancient baths, theaters, amphitheaters, harbors, and fortifications. To reach a wider readership,
Quattro libri
appeared in three editions, one consisting only of Books I and II, another of Books III and IV, as well as an omnibus volume.