The Perfect House A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio

"Palladio is the Bible," Thomas Jefferson once said. "You should get it and stick to it." With his simple, gracious, perfectly proportioned villas, Andrea Palladio elevated the architecture of the private house into an art form during the late sixteenth century -- and his influence is still evident in the ample porches, columned porticoes, grand ceilings, and front-door pediments of America today.InThe Perfect House,bestselling author Witold Rybczynski, whose previous books have transformed our understanding of domestic architecture, reveals how a handful of Palladio's houses in an obscure corner of the Venetian Republic should have made their presence felt hundreds of years later and halfway across the globe. More than just a study of one of history's seminal architectural figures,The Perfect Housereflects Rybczynski's enormous admiration for his subject and provides a new way of looking at the special landscapes we call "home" in the modern world.

Witold Rybczynski is the bestselling author of ten books, including Home, City Life, and A Clearing in the Distance, for which he won a Christopher Award and J. Anthony Lukas Prize. A regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Review of Books, he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.