Peter Eisenman’s Palladio Virtuel, the most recent of his exquisitely crafted books, promises a new take on Palladio as a designer of villas. The book reprises material presented in an exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture in 2012, which received high praise. Among other enthusiasts, Anthony Vidler felt the show was of crucial importance primarily because Eisenman’s method of analysis successfully overturns accepted interpretations that had long held sway.

Acknowledging the superabundance of volumes on Palladio and his legacy, Eisenman asserts that as a practicing architect, he can discern “unseen” aspects in the buildings, and promises to rescue previously undetected yet significant qualities from oblivion. While respectfully citing Colin Rowe’s brilliant essay “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,” Eisenman challenges the ideas espoused by Rowe and inherited from Rudolph Wittkower. Implicit throughout his discussion is the affinity between Palladio’s method of generating architecture and his own. By uncovering the hidden evolution in Palladio’s production of country home, it seems that Eisenman hopes to reveal aspects of his own creative process as well as others of his persuasion.

One might ask: Why Palladio now? He claims that he intends to “awaken” similarities with a historical period that he believes shares much with the present. He has uncovered a shift within Palladio’s oeuvre from the “ideal” toward the “virtual”—a term that describes states of “disarticulation disjunction, or disaggregation.” Eisenman notes how the villas refuse to be read as a single homogenous space and writes: “Such a structure inscribes its own internal strategies with references that are no longer to the body, to Christ, or to God but to the decomposition of what were then thought to be traditional typological structures.”

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