Synopses & Reviews
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 tidewater plantation houses of Virginia, and the White House. All across America today, Palladio's influence is evident in ample porches and columned porticoes, in grand ceiling heights and front-door pediments.
In The Perfect House, Witold Rybczysnki, whose books on domestic and landscape architecture have transformed our understanding of parks and buildings, looks at Palladio's famous villas, not with the eye of an art historian but with the eye of an architect. He wanted to know why a handful of houses in an obscure corner of the Venetian Republicshould have made their presence felt hundreds of years later and halfway across the globe.
More than just a study of one of history's seminal architectural figures, The Perfect House reflects Rybczynski's intimacy with and enthusiasm for his subject. He not only reveals why the villas were so architecturally and culturally influential, he also imparts his enormous affection and admiration for the man who designed them. Embracing the elements of Rybczynski's most successful books on domestic architecture, Home and The Most Beautiful House in the World, this charming, revelatory meditation explores the dawn of domestic architecture and provides a new way of looking at every building we inhabit or visit today.
Review
Cheryl Mendelson
Author of Home Comforts
Rybczynski leads us through Palladio's beautiful villas, illuminating each room for its own sake and helping us understand what Palladio thought was ?the perfect house' and where so many of our own ideas on that subject have come from. He puts his great historical and architectural knowledge to work to explain private houses?the small, the intimate, the domestic. The result is a delightful and enlightening book, full of warmth and intelligence.
Review
Ross King,
Author of Brunelleschi's Dome
Witold Rybczynski proves a wonderfully informative and evocative guide to both the elegant rooms of Palladio's villas and the fascinating history of how a humble stonemason from Padua became one of the most influential architects of all time.
About the Author
Witold Rybczynski is the author of ten books, including
Home, City Life, and the national bestseller
A Clearing in the Distance, for which he won a Christopher Award and J. Anthony Lukas Prize. He is a regular contributor to
The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and
The New York Review of Books. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.