Andrea Palladio was an architect of stonemason origin who built villas and churches in the Veneto. I quattro libri dell'architettura, published in 1570, departs from its predecessors on one point: the book contains not only rules and antique examples but plans, sections and elevations of the architect's own designs, with their dimensions. The buildings are not described; they are documented so that they can be reproduced.

The result was a diffusion with few parallels in architectural history. Inigo Jones carried the book to England in the seventeenth century; in the eighteenth, around Lord Burlington and Colen Campbell, Palladianism became not a fashion but an official language. The same drawings crossed the Atlantic: Thomas Jefferson designed Monticello and the University of Virginia with this book open, and the columned portico of American public buildings descends from it. The proportions of a Venetian villa settled the façade of a courthouse in Washington three centuries later.

Palladio's own contribution was to bring the antique temple front to domestic building and to establish a symmetrical, centrally planned villa type — with wings tying the farm buildings to the main block, at once representational and working. The criticism follows from the same trait: the more portable a language, the more indifferent it is to the climate and life of the place where it lands. The twentieth century's argument about the International Style is another form of the same tension.