The film emphasizes two main points about Palladio and his works. Firstly, in his lifetime, Palladio’s designs were specific to each owner and site, and the interaction between a building and its space was considered throughout each element. For Ackerman and Terry, Palladio is the most imitated architect of all time because of his strong interpretation of the classical order in a modern and applicable way. Palladio skillfully accommodates his buildings to their sites, considering their urban and natural context, while maintaining traditional proportions. Secondly, while Palladio was well-known within his own region, the books that he wrote later in his life, The Four Books, are what really carried his influence through Europe and into the United States. The film brings the audience through Palladio’s life chronologically, showing his major pieces of work and how later buildings in the United States directly correspond with his original …show more content…
Through film, the viewer can understand the proportional relationship between the homes and the lands that they dominated as well as, on a more individual level, the views from the porticos that the wealthy owners would have experienced themselves. For example, the spanning of the camera up a hillside only reinforces the argument that Palladio’s rotundas act as a man-made hilltop for their environments. Viewers, moreover, can hear the waters in Venice or the birds on the plantations while grasping the environment, and therefore have increased understanding into the decisions that Palladio and those influenced by him were making regarding their structures. The background music takes away from the viewer experience, and rather, the strongest parts of the documentary are the scenes when there is an aerial landscape and silence. This pairing forces the viewer to take a breath and grasp the magnificence being