The Building in Bildung: Goethe, Palladio, and the Architectural Media

Summary

Well before photography and electronic networks encircled the planet, there existed a European migratory channel within which architectural images were carried across the Alps by tourists and pilgrims. Moving along well-established pathways, architectural drawings, treatises, and personal recollections operated as a self-replicating network that allowed travelers, once home, to recreate the buildings they so admired abroad. The northern European reception of Andrea Palladio (1508-80), facilitated by the elegant woodcuts and explanations of his Quattro Libri dell'architettura (1570) [Four Books on Architecture] and by the prominence of his buildings in cities and estates between Vicenza and Venice, demonstrates the effectiveness of this pre-modern media circuit. The efforts, first British, then German, to emulate Palladio's villas, palaces and churches constitute one of the most successful examples of pre-modern stylistic proliferation.

Not only did Palladian architecture reproduce itself throughout Europe and North America,it integrated comfortably with other media. For many in the late eighteenth century, Palladian architecture seemed to enhance the production of literary texts, the recollection of foreign adventures and the self-understanding of the modern subject. More than just a backdrop for the idyllic production and reception of literature, Northern European Palladianism was deployed as a technology capable of assisting in the conscious reproduction of experience. Through architectural and imagistic simulation, Palladianism sought both to inspire reminiscences of earlier travels and to encourage their repetition. Stressing the importance of architectural journals, Beatriz Colomina has argued that twentieth-century architecture was constituted within its own photographic representation.