Organization of the book
This oeuvre consists of four separate books, each one dealing with a different topic regarding the architecture of that time.
- The first book deals with the choice of which materials to use in a specific type of building, their respective building techniques and introduces a new, simplified order of columns with the help of detailed illustrations and descriptive texts.
- The second book shows several architectural projects of Palladio, including elegant villas and public buildings.
- The third book dives into the different ways of constructing roads properly, in regards to stability, form, and materiality. It shows ancient greek squares and some designed by himself and VItruv.
- The fourth book depicts reliefs of several ancient Roman buildings, which are either temples or basilicas.
Subject and importance of the book
This book is said to be the most important piece of architectural literature of its time. The reason for this is how Palladio manages to set up clear and easy to implement rules for the different orders so that one could design columns, etc. specific to the required height, which had been very complicated up until this point. He divides every component of a column and describes its specific height in a ration, respective to the height, rather than in numbers. Like this one simply has to replace the variables rather than having to do complicated calculations.
Size
250 x 190 x 25 mm
Number of pages and illustrations
the book consists of 152 illustrations and 372 pages.