The Perfect House

First published in 2002, The Perfect House by Witold Rybczynski is pure pleasure.  Rybczynski is now an Emeritus Professor of Urbanism (who knew?) at Penn.  He's a noted author, having written over 300 articles and more than a dozen books, which have received several important awards.

This book is an account of a trip to Italy Rybczynski took to personally visit the many villas in the Veneto designed by Palladio. He describes the history and design of each villa, and some history and thoughts on Palladio's life.  It's all very interesting, but a delightful surprise to me was how wonderful the writing is.  Simple, graceful, effortlessly insightful and witty. For example:

The final step of the makeover involved finding a more impressive name than Andrea di Pietro.  Renaissance architects regularly adopted professional names.  Jacopo Sansovino was born Tatti; Giulio Pippi de' Giannuzzi, a Roman expatriate practicing in the Venetian Republic, called himself Giulio Romano, or simply Giulio.  The mellifluously named Michele Sanmicheli had adopted the name of his birthplace, San Micheli, a village near Verona.  Andrea di Pietro might have become Andrea Padovano, or Andrea Vicentino.  It is generally assumed that Tissino (his mentor) proposed the name since he later used it in an epic poem.  The Latin palladius means pertaining to sagacity, knowledge, or study, and is derived from Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom.  It is a name to live up to.

Here's another example:

Every evening I walk across the Piazza dei Signori from the trattoria where I regularly eat dinner to my hotel.  The ivory white Basilica shimmers in the moonlight.  Goethe characterized architecture as frozen music, which well describes this extraordinary building.  I don't know what kind of music Goethe heard when he looked at the Basilica, but I hear percussion - the great jazz drummer Philly Joe Jones, my boyhood idol. The tall half-columns are the steady rhythm beat of the bass drum, which Palladio accentuates by breaking the extremely deep cornice and projecting it forward over each capital.  At the attic level, a statue above each column provides a high-pitched cymbal clash.......(and further correlations!) 

And another striking description, of Rybczynski's visit to a different Palladio villa, with a powerful conclusion:

The main street of Piombino Dese, a large village east of Vicenza, is Via Roma.  The busy artery is lined with unremarkable apartment buildings and neon-fronted shops.  It's Sunday morning and there's not much traffic.  A parking lot near the church is temporarily occupied by a traveling amusement park whose single attraction resembles a huge lazy Susan.  Children line up to get on, then scream as the ride begins to turn, slowly at first, then faster and faster, finally tilting and turning at the same time.  The more daring boys leave their seats to crawl, crablike, across the angled floor. Strobe lights flash, and noisy calliope music is piped over loudspeakers.

Across the street, rising behind a brick wall, the stately portico of the Villa Cornaro overlooks the raucous spectacle.  The juxtaposition of the fun fair and the villa makes me think of a scene in a Fellini film. The villa more than holds it own.

Rybczynski thoughtfully adds a glossary of architectural terms and a chronology of Palladio's designs, with sensible cautions about the relative certainty of the dates of construction of different buildings.

Maybe not to everyone's taste, but a delightful read.