Parametric Experiments on Palladio’s villas

Several scholars from the mid-twentieth century have highlighted traces of parametric thinking in Palladio’s designs, mainly of villas. The availability of digital parametric tools today encouraged the authors of this paper to set up an instrument to interpret the compositional logic of the villas in Palladio’s treatise I Quattro libri dell’architettura (1570) and rebuild them virtually. Two lines of research about Palladio’s designs have been summarized by Tikhonova (2019: 362–363): the first focuses on his theory of proportions, while the second on formulas and rules for parametric generation of the villa’s plans. Both lines inspired the analysis phase of this research, which aims to overcome the two-dimensional survey by creating three-dimensional parametric models through the combination of Visual Programming Language (VPL) and Building Information Modelling (BIM) tools. The fully developed case study (Villa Poiana) has achieved the first few objectives of the research allowing an elementary representation of the villa’s parametric model through a related system of signs and texts. The expected results of the ongoing phase of the research are as follows: the recognition of typological and morphological variants and invariants; setting planimetric tartan grids which are dynamically transformable; creating families of architectural elements defined parametrically; and the scalability of the process on other Palladian villas.