How Was Vicenza Built

Palladio's buildings here are mostly brick rendered in stucco, tooled and painted to read as stone. That was not deception so much as economy: his clients were provincial gentry, not popes, and the system let a modest budget buy a Roman temple front.

The Basilica Palladiana is the clearest demonstration. A medieval town hall was structurally failing and out of square; Palladio wrapped it in a two-storey classical loggia whose repeating arch-and-column unit -- the serliana, now called the Palladian motif -- could absorb the irregular bay widths of the older building behind. A classical skin fitted to a crooked medieval box, and it works.

The Teatro Olimpico solved a different problem: how to build a Roman theatre indoors, in a small hall, out of wood and plaster. The permanent stage set behind the proscenium uses forced perspective so aggressively that its streets appear to recede for hundreds of metres in a space a few metres deep.

At La Rotonda, the logic goes the other way: a perfectly symmetrical house with four identical porticoes on a hilltop, designed around the view rather than around a road or a courtyard. It is less a farmhouse than an argument about geometry, and it is the single most copied private building in the world.