Andrea Palladio's Villa Rotonda is a manifesto of how a building can reach a mathematical purity by invoking the language of an ancient temple. What matters here is not an individual material or structural invention but the plan itself becoming an idea: absolute symmetry.

The villa sits on a hilltop and each of its four faces is identical — each carries a temple portico (a row of columns) with a triangular pediment and a flight of steps. The building thus recognises no 'front'; from whatever direction it is seen it presents the same noble face, opening equally onto the four quadrants of the surrounding landscape. At the centre is the circular (rotonda), domed hall that gives the building its name; the whole plan distributes symmetrically from this centre into four arms. The rooms are proportioned in simple whole-number ratios (1:1, 2:3, square, circle) — for Palladio beauty lies, as in music, in the ratio of the parts to one another and to the whole.

The villa is not a working farmhouse but an object of thought, a villa-temple. Its real influence comes precisely from this abstraction: architects who studied Palladio's buildings and his book (I Quattro Libri) carried this symmetrical, porticoed, proportioned scheme — under the name 'Palladianism' — from England to America, from the White House to countless government buildings. Villa Rotonda is the purest example of a single building becoming a grammar and being copied for centuries.