Palladio Museum Vicenza

Palladio Museum are two words that don’t require translating on the Internet, but whose identity is underpinned by ancient Greek and Latin. Indeed the museum logo still has a memory of the diphthong from the ancient spelling musaeum.

Through the Palladio Museum the experts in the Palladio Centre illustrate their research and studies to a wider public as their work progresses, usually but not always focused on Andrea Palladio. Groups of experts work on research projects that become the themes in the museum rooms; each will usually last a year, according to a three-year programme.

This is no mausoleum for a dead hero. It is a place in which thinking about architecture is fostered, far from the more cynical commercial logic of the profession, which consumes rather than produces knowledge. The Palladio Museum works on Palladio, without “modernising” him and even less without suggesting him as a formal model for today. It explores the past using the tools of accurate historical reconstruction with special care being taken over context, which is indispensable in trying to understand a world that is distant and faded but also close and very practical, every time that we walk among palaces, pillars and churches built centuries ago. The Palladio Museum’s mission is to explore the origins of themes and concepts also found in the architecture of today by describing and discussing them with a view to creating a cultural platform for the architecture of tomorrow.

So far the research projects have concerned communication, technology, the relationship between economy and landscape, and the design of complex organisms. These are key topics for Palladio and they inform his vision in the Quattro Libri (Four Books) and in his urban projects, country villas and Venetian churches; these themes also feature, however, on the contemporary agenda.