Andrea Palladio

Andrea Palladio is the most influential architect who ever lived - much more so than those heroes of the Modern Movement - Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. It is significant that buildings we call "Palladian" are still being built today - for example, by the British architect Quinlan Terry.

Palladio’s ideas were disseminated not only by his buildings, but also, even more effectively, by his writings, most notably by his didactic masterpiece, I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), published in 1570. The four books were modeled on contemporary handbooks of grammar and style, and treated architecture as an infinitely flexible visual language, which was nevertheless created from a limited number of components, which could be combined in different ways in order to produce the desired result.