Palladian architecture

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This article is about an architectural style. See palladian window for that particular architectural detail.

File:Woburn Abbey.JPG
Woburn Abbey, a Palladian house in Bedfordshire

The so-called Palladian was an extremely popular style of architecture in 17th- and 18th-century England (as well as thereafter); indeed, for many years it was the ever-dignified gold standard.

Palladian is, properly, an English style, but in its name and inspiration it pays tribute to Palladio, the 16th-century Italian architect and writer on architecture. For years, even as more outrageously Baroque and more severely Neoclassical architecture enjoyed popularity, many architects continued to hark back to the work of Inigo Jones, who in the early 17th-century had first brought Palladio's influences coherently to England. Two surviving examples of Inigo Jones' style are the Queen's House, Greenwich and the Banqueting House, Whitehall, London. Some houses in neo-Palladian taste were built by Jones' pupil John Webb, (Wilton House for example) but the English Baroque architecture of Sir Christopher Wren and his followers set style on a different path for more than a generation.

Chiswick House in London is one of the most famous surviving examples of Palladian architecture.

Colen Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus

Burlington and Kent

Some designs of Mr. Inigo Jones and Mr. Wm. Kent, London, 1744

Matthew Brettingham and the second-generation Palladians

A villa with a superimposed portico, from Book IV of Palladio's Quattro Libri, in a modestly-priced English translation published in London, 1736

Irish Palladian architecture

Palladian elements in Neoclassicism