Fellowship proposal, the Pulitzer maintains anextensive on-line catalog at http://mattaclark.pulitzerarts.org.

Dana Buntrock

Notes

1. Quoted in Jeffery Kastner, Sina Najajfi, and Frances Richard, eds.,

Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates (New York:

Cabinet Books, 2005), p. 38.

2. Quoted in Corinne Discernes, ed., Gordon Matta-Clark (London:

Phaidon, 2003), p. 120.

3. ‘‘Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections: An Interview by Donald

Wall,’’ in Gloria Moure, ed., Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected

Writings (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2006), p. 63.

4. Anthony Vidler, ‘‘Gordon Matta-Clark,’’ Artforum 45 (May 2007): 364.

5. ‘‘Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark: Antwerp, September 1977’’ in

Moure, p. 251.

Palladio, el Arquitecto, 1508–1580Caixa Forum, MadridOctober 6, 2009–January 17, 2010

Palladio and His Legacy: A TransatlanticJourneyMorgan Library & Museum, New YorkApril 2–August 1, 2010

The 500th anniversary of the Renaissance architectAndrea Palladio’s birth in 1508 served as theinspiration for a traveling exhibition that found twoof its manifestations in spanking new architecturalvenues. The principal galleries of Madrid’s CaixaForum, designed by Herzog and de Meuron andinaugurated in 2008, were the setting for ‘‘Palladio,el Arquitecto,’’ an exhibition of Palladio’s drawingsalongside books, paintings, models, period objects,and even an animated film exploring the role ofdrawing in the architect’s theory and practice.Across the Atlantic, a smaller selection of Palladio’sdrawings was displayed more serenely in one of thenew galleries designed by Renzo Piano for theMorgan Library & Museum opened in 2006. Despitethe contrasting venues, Palladio was the star inboth places and his work revealed its lastingmodernity.

Shown first in Vicenza in 2008, the Palladioexhibition, organized by the Royal Academy of Artsin London and the Centro Internazionale Studi diArchitettura Andrea Palladio (CISA), morphed as ittravelled to London and Barcelona before arriving inMadrid. The curators of the original exhibitionincluded the renowned Palladio scholars GuidoBeltramini and Howard Burns, in addition toMaryAnne Stevens of the Royal Academy. For theMadrid exhibition, Fernando Marías and CharlesHind were contributors and, in New York, where theexhibition was pared down to a group of thirty-onedrawings from the Royal Institute of BritishArchitects with supplementary objects, the curatorswere Hind, Irena Murray, and Calder Loth. Theaccompanying catalog has appeared in threevariations and four languages: Italian, English,Spanish, and Catalan. It is richly illustrated with highquality images and provides new scholarship onPalladio from leading scholars in Renaissancearchitectural history. The version accompanying theMorgan exhibition offers a brief version of thisresearch along with additional essays focusingattention on Palladio’s impact in the United States,including a lively introduction to the topic by theeminent architectural historian James Ackerman.

Although Herzog and de Meuron’s Caixa Forumcould never be confused as Palladian, its largegalleries provided an ideal setting for a tightlypacked, yet free-flowing display of objects. Intimacywas achieved in the galleries via the use of darkochre paint on the walls, so that the impact ofrelatively small drawings was not lost in theproximity of large-scale, wood models and imageprojections onto partition walls. Indeed, theoverriding theme of the exhibition was thecentrality of drawing in the architect’s designprocess, and the viewer stood to learn much fromthe artful installation. In a couple of instances, thematerial suffered from spatial constriction, as whenPalladio’s studies of Giulio Romano’s rustication forthe Palazzo Thiene, his early villa designs, and hisproject for the Basilica in Vicenza, each defined as a

separate topic by the wall text, converged in asingle gallery corner. Although imposing, a largemodel of the Basilica, made in 1976, worked togreat effect in offering the public a sense of thethree-dimensional nature of the architecturerendered on paper. These drawings remained theheart of the show. For any viewer coming face toface with them for the first time, they were arevelation.

The ephemeral quality of Palladio’s sketchesfully captures the excitement of an idea in themaking. His pen and ink studies of the Baths ofAgrippa, for instance, record a repetition of circlesand lines on paper, defining solid forms anddenying them at the same time. By 1570, thearchitect produced fully formed plans and elevationsof the same baths detailing his meticulousreconstruction of their ruins. The resulting imagesare comparable to those of the Baths of Diocletianfrom the 1540s shown in New York and illustratedhere (Figure 1). In addition to rapidly producedstudies, the Madrid exhibition also included manyfinished drawings ready for presentation to apatron. Palladio’s alternative designs for the RialtoBridge in Venice—displayed in drawings by thearchitect and a digital reconstruction prepared by ateam at the University of Venice led byBeltramini—reveal his savvy in trying to win over apowerful patron as well as the wide range ofpossibilities the classical language offered thisarchitect who was fully steeped in its principles andcreative potential.

The Madrid exhibition succeeded in its goal toprovide a complete picture of Palladio’s designtheory and practice, including even a scale drawingby the architect made for a stonemason to shape acornice for the church of San Giorgio Maggiore.Another stand-out inclusion was a magnificentthough little seen painting by El Greco, TheImmaculate Conception (ca. 1585, Museo de SantaCruz, Toledo). The painting includes a Palladianbuilding in the background, but more importantly itsituates both architect and painter within a broad

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milieu of artistic exchange across media andgeography. El Greco’s painting appeared in a sectionof the exhibition devoted to the impact of Palladio’sarchitecture through print, and most importantly viahis 1570 publication, I Quattro Libridell’Architettura. In Vicenza and London, theexhibition ended with works by Inigo Jones andLord Burlington in England, projects by GiacomoQuarenghi for Russian patrons, and Le Corbusiersketches after Palladio from the Album La Roche(1921–1922, CISA, Vicenza) to flesh out the themeof Palladio’s influence. For the Madrid exhibition,the neoclassical architect Juan de Villanuevarounded out the display in a not-so-successfulgrouping of images derived from Madrid collections.It should be noted that the true stars of localcollections, including masterworks by Villanueva,were on display concurrently at the BibliotecaNacional in an exhibition devoted to Spanisharchitectural drawings of the eighteenth century.Villanueva’s presence, however, small, was justifiedin the Palladio show, given the location of the CaixaForum immediately adjacent to two of thearchitect’s signature projects, the Royal BotanicalGarden and the Prado Museum.

At the Morgan Library & Museum, theexhibition ‘‘Palladio and His Legacy: ATransatlantic Journey’’ highlighted a select groupof drawings by the architect along with a briefconsideration of American Palladianism that,unfortunately, came across as a something of anafterthought. Divided into four principal themes,with eight sub-themes, the exhibition wasdisplayed in a single gallery. A section devoted toAntiquity included early studies of ruins, primarilyin Rome, and Palladio’s drawings after Vitruvius.Floor to ceiling height cut-outs of columns in thefive principle orders according to Palladio wereused to mark transitions between themes and sub-themes, suggesting a vastly different budget atwork than what was available for the Madridinstallation. And so, the Ionic order introduced thesecond principal theme of Palladio’s projects, someof which were only envisioned and others built.Sketches and finished drawings were displayedalongside a few well-selected small-scale models.A third section titled ‘‘Spreading the Word’’explored the impact of the Quattro Libri and otherunpublished works by Palladio, albeit only brieflyand in a small amount of space.

One got a sense of English Palladianism fromthis latter section, but the phenomenon’sexplanation lacked the detail necessary before thetransition to the exhibition’s final theme, Palladio’slegacy in the United States. Examples of Americanarchitecture were primarily represented inphotographs and by handsome plaster modelsmade by Timothy Richards, along with severaldrawings by Thomas Jefferson. The story ofAmerican Palladianism is an interesting one, but itsbrief presentation at the Morgan left the viewerwith a superficial introduction to the subject,focused more on Beaux-Arts examples ofgovernment buildings than on Palladian buildingsper se.

For the first month of ‘‘Palladio and HisLegacy,’’ the Morgan visitor could contemplate thework of Palladio’s compatriots and manycontemporaries in another exhibition of drawingsdedicated to ‘‘Rome after Raphael’’ held justdownstairs in the Annex Building galleriesinaugurated in 1928. Designed by Benjamin WistarMorris, these earlier galleries are among the finestspaces for viewing drawings in New York. Yet, theywork best for large shows and thus the display of a

1. Andrea Palladio, Conjectural Reconstruction of the Baths of Diocletian, 1540s. Pen and ink with brown wash on paper. (Courtesy of Royal Institute of British Architects Trust, British Architectural Library).

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small number of Palladio drawings was well servedby Piano’s small and slightly understated gallery.This reviewer’s only complaint concerns circulationin the gallery, as one could enter the exhibitionfrom a side door and wholly miss the introductorywall text, thereby unnecessarily complicating theexperience of the small exhibition. Once on track,however, the intimate setting encouraged the quietcontemplation seemingly demanded by Piano’sarchitecture.

Herzog and de Meuron’s loud Caixa Forumcould not be more different. It is the most excitingnew cultural space in a city filled with great culturalinstitutions. Inaugural exhibitions have includedcontemporary work by artists such as Anselm Kieferand Cindy Sherman, highlights of the Aga Khancollection of Islamic art, and a retrospective ofRichard Rogers + Architects. Palladio, it turns out,fits right in with this company. ‘‘Palladio, elArquitecto’’ revealed for visitors the workingmethod of an architect who learned from drawingand from the past. With this knowledge, Palladiocharted a course of architectural experimentationthat has produced the very Madrid building inwhich his work was on display. And yet, in hispolished reworking of ruins on paper and radicaltransformation of them in print, Palladio can alsobe seen as a model for Piano’s subdued elegance atthe Morgan. Indeed, after five hundred years,Palladio is revealed to be as modern as he everwas.

Jesús Escobar

What We Learned: The Las Vegas Studio andThe Work of Venturi Scott Brown & AssociatesThe Las Vegas Studio, curated by Hilar Stadler andMartino Stierli, Museum im Bellpark Kriens,SwitzerlandThe Work of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates,curated by Dean Sakamoto, Yale School ofArchitecture Gallery, New Haven, CTOctober 29, 2009–February 5, 2010

By the time Robert Venturi returned to Yale in1966 as Davenport Visiting Professor, he wasalready an anti-establishment figure.1 His VannaVenturi House (Philadelphia, 1962) was an earlyexample of emerging post-modernism, its collidingfragments of traditional and twentieth-centuryforms—such the gabled roof and the ribbonwindow—was a case study in the ‘‘both ⁄ and’’equivocation that he would eventually formulate inComplexity and Contradiction in Architecture(Museum of Modern Art, 1966). Returning again in1968 as an advanced studio instructor at Yale,where modernism had flourished under the tutelageof Louis Kahn and the leadership of Paul Rudolphbefore the latter was succeeded by Charles Moore,Venturi and partner Denise Scott Brown foundthemselves in particularly supportive environmentto attack the modernist academy from within, whilemaking use of that very studio culture to advance

new sensibilities about how architecture andurbanism might be researched and ultimatelyproduced after modernism.

Meanwhile, 2600 miles away from thearchitectural academy, Las Vegas had alsodeveloped a reputation for the unorthodox: anurban anomaly that was nevertheless an exemplarof America’s love affair with the automobile andthe sprawl that had come to characterize thecities of the American West. Perhaps identifyingwith the misfit nature of the city, Venturi andScott Brown embraced Las Vegas as an alternativeto a post-war modernism they consideredexhausted and out of touch. In its brazencommercialism and architectural pragmatism, thebuilt environment of Las Vegas found expressionin billboards rather than building facades, its openspaces defined as parking lots rather thanpiazzas.2 What’s more, the commercial architecture

1. View of gallery showing installation of What We Learned. (Photo courtesy of Yale Media Services.)

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