Palladio in the computer: gestalts, grammars, and programs

Building standards, modular components, prefabrication, and corporate architectural firms — these were all part of a systematisation of design that, after the Second World War, promised an efficient and flexible architecture, one that could easily adapt and respond to the diversity of functional and economic demands of the postwar building boom. But this systematisation also intensified the conflict between architecture as a technical activity and its autonomy as a humanist and artistic discipline, a conflict that had become increasingly apparent after the rationalisation of architectural production during the nineteenth century. Linguistics were used in this context to theorise form as the exclusive object of architecture as a discipline, a move that Manfredo Tafuri denounced as leading to ‘a syntax of empty signs’ within ‘a language that speaks only of itself’. At the same time, the computer emerged as a technical concretisation of a modern rationality which, through analytic philosophy, equated thought with language, and posed to represent its underlying logic algebraically. In this dialectic between disciplinary autonomy and technologies of rationality, the villas in Andrea Palladio's Four Books of Architecture came to be seen as a token of both of architecture's humanism and of rational systematisation. They became the historical embodiment of the ideological anxieties of twentieth-century architecture — of the possibility of defining it as an autonomous discipline, or of its subsumption into the sphere of production in which it operated. This paper examines how concepts from semiotics, formulations of architectural disciplinarity, mathematics, and the computer were used to transcribe the plans from the second of The Four Books of Architecture into the diverse and often conflicting discourses.