Reading Uncensored Palladio in Light of Australian Vernacular Architecture

In this book, Clarkeson reads Palladio’s drawings as being carefully crafted, having integrity in their own right, with their own story to tell, and meant to be measured. Claiming Palladio’s rightful place in the history of metrology, Clarkeson represents Palladio’s work as part of the Italian contribution to the debate about the desired features of a universal metric measure. Clarkeson turns architecture on its head, to focus on feet as units of vibrant metre, capturing insights from the architectural interests of Isaac Newton and Francis Howard Greenway to architectural practice in the antipodes, and taking movement of and within 3-dimensional ‘bulk’ spaces as the fundamental stuff of an architecture that is assertively local in its unique co-ordinate cosmetic. The book offers a fresh interpretation of Palladio’s ‘orders’ and of such classic designs as villa Cornaro, palazzo/villa Almerico (la Rotonda), and villa Antonini, teatro olimpico that dispels myths and explains ‘the bits that don’t fit’ in the usual interpretations of Palladio’s work.