Feb 21, 2017
house-city, city-house
Palladio also considered the house to be the model for the city - a notion he borrowed from Alberti : ‘the city is as it were but a great house, and, on the contrary, the country house is a little city’ (Quattro libri, II, 12). Alberti related this house-city, city-house relationship more fully : ‘If (as the philosophers maintain) the city is like some large house, and the house - atria, xysti [open colonnaded spaces for promenading], dinning rooms, porticoes, and so on - be considered miniature buildings?‘ (Ten books, I, 9, p.23). This line of thinking was influential for Palladio’s development of the villa form.
- Palladio and Palladianism, Robert Tavernor, Thames & Hudson, 1991