November 2008

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2008 is the year of Andrea Palladio (above), born 500 years ago. The anniversary is being celebrated with a big exhibition in his home town, Vicenza, which opens at Palazzo Barbaran da Porto on 20 September (until 6 January) and then travels to the Royal Academy in London (31 January-31 April). There are plenty of good arguments for saying that Palladio – thanks to his 1570 book Quattro Libri dell’Architettura rather than his actual buildings – is the most influential architect of all time. Even Le Corbusier cannot quite rival him for the way that his understanding of the classical language of architecture became the standard against which architects measured themselves for over 400 years.

It might be thought that – after two centuries of Victorian stylistic plurality followed by the hegemony of modernism – he is today of only historical interest. But there are plenty of architects who still hold him up as a model for contemporary design. A good cross-section of their work can be seen in an exhibition at the Prince’s Foundation Gallery in London (until 20 September). It has been organised by the Traditional Architecture Group at the Royal Institute of British Architecture and The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment to demonstrate that Palladio is a model for architects seeking a ‘timeless, robust, and sustainable culture of building and design’.

In his speech at the exhibition’s opening, the celebrated classical architect Robert Adam went a bit further. Declaring that ‘change is in the air’, he suggested that the imminent election in America, the anticipated change of government in the UK and the downturn in the global economy after 15 years of sustained growth mean that an opportunity has arrived to break the dominance of modernism in architecture with a return to the traditional values embodied in Palladianism.

This raises the intriguing subject of the links between politics, economics and stylistic choice in architecture. There are plenty of immediate objections to Mr Adam’s argument. Modernism is not self-evidently a style associated with prosperity. Although its fondness for glass walls does evoke a time in which energy was cheap, it established itself in the 1930s, when the world economy was very shaky indeed, and it became the preferred style of the British architectural establishment in the years of austerity in the late 1940s. The collapse of the consensus surrounding modernism, the rise of post-modernism and the classical revival largely date from the 1980s, a period of economic boom. In England at any rate, modern classicism became associated with the revived cult of the country house and of country pursuits, and country houses are still the only building type in which classical design is a popular choice.

Yet Palladio is an appealing model because he provides exemplars for all building types, from barns to town halls and palaces. Too much classical revival architecture in the 1980s and 90s was content to stick columns and pilasters onto poorly proportioned boxes, ignoring the possibilities of Palladio’s more modest stripped, astylar modes. That aspect of the Palladian inheritance might well come into the fore in an age of austerity, if that is indeed what we are moving into. My only real argument about what Mr Adam says is that I think his objection is not to the all-dominance of modernism – abolished a generation ago now – but the dominance for the past 15 years or so of retro-modernism. I cannot believe that can last much longer, simply because people will get bored with it. Indeed, as property prices crash, the sight of endless untenanted blocks of inner-city ‘loft-style’ apartments may well induce feelings of revulsion about the style. Can we expect neo-Palladianism to replace retro-modernism, or – as I suspect – will it be something with much greater and more superficial glamour? Perhaps, like France in the 18th century, the rich will turn to rococo while the political storm-clouds darken.

www.princes-foundation.org

The Traditional Architecture Group at the RIBA: www.taguk.net

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