Digital Discoveries: Using New Technologies to Reveal Palladio’s Design Process

Controls

• Use buttons to show Il Redentore compared to other works and adjust viewpoints.
• Use 'w', 'a', 's', 'd' keys to shift camera.
• Use arrow keys to rotate and 'q' or 'e' to elevate the camera in 3D mode.

Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), the Renaissance architect active in the Venetian Republic and considered one of history’s most influential architects, built churches, palaces, and houses throughout Northern Italy. While it is well known that his study of classical architecture helped shaped his work, what is less clear are the design processes that link many of Palladio’s creations.

This project investigates the idea that drawing buildings early in his career, such as the Baths of Caracalla, Diocletian, Constantine and Agrippa, not only helped Palladio shape his skills as a draftsman, but developed his spatial imagination, and these drawings and spaces then made their way, out of scale and context, into his late career churches, especially Il Redentore. Palladio essentially used parts and spaces with near identical proportions from different buildings with different functions at different scales to create his innovative designs.

This project uses orthogonal Renaissance hand drawings to create 3D models able to be experienced by the viewer and “walked through” as perhaps Palladio did in his own mind as he designed. Starting with his reconstruction drawings of the Roman baths (Diocletian, Caracalla, Constantine and Agrippa) and finishing with the late church of Il Redentore, viewers can experience his drawings as 3D spaces and walk through his drawings in virtual reality, as well as to compare them in scale and plan and section and elevation, and therefore experience firsthand the thread of Palladio’s lifelong commitment to playful formal manipulation of scale, plan, section, and elevation.

In the future I hope to 3D scan the churches and bath ruins and compare them as well to the models made from Palladio’s drawings to see how the drawings compare to the realized buildings. Through this project, students and architects can contrast the old and the new, the designed and the actual, in ways that have not previously been possible to truly understand the processes embedded in Palladio’s buildings. From stone unto stone, Palladio’s work, viewed with these tools, may yet have much to teach us about his powerful manipulation of form and structure.

This Test Interface Includes:

1. the 2D Scamozzi drawings of Il Redentore (as there are no Palladio drawings) scaled - plan, section, elevation
2. Palladio's drawings of the great halls (and eventually caldariums) Baths of Caracalla, Diocletian, Agrippa and Constantine, in plan, section, and elevation
3. a 3D model of Il Redentore interior (exterior not complete) derived from the Scamozzi Drawings
4. 3D interior models (exterior not complete) of the great halls (and eventually caldariums) Baths of Caracalla, Diocletian, Agrippa and Constantine derived from Palladio’s hand drawings

The buttons and sliders allow the user to compare the Baths’ great halls proportions (in wireframe and solid) to the nave of Il Redentore- in plan, elevation and perspective.

The sliders allow the viewer to see the bath great hall spaces and their proportions and compare them to Il Redentore- then slide to see them in “real scale” to see how large they are in real life relative to the church.

The idea, again, is to understand how Palladio thought in terms of proportion and to be able to “walk through” the spaces as Palladio may have imagined them using current technology.

Karolina Kawiaka, Senior Lecturer, Dartmouth College