Abstract:

Since his breakthrough into architecture in the mid 16th Century, and particularly after the publication of I quattro libri dell'Architettura (1570), Andrea Palladio has been an architect whose work presents an eminently educational value. Long before the intellectuals of the Enlightenment, such as Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, produced manuals that guided students and architects both in architecture schools and in their professional practice, Palladio's Four Books became a true Thesaurus appropriated by architects outside the borders of Italy, with a most notable example in English Palladianism and Neo-Palladianism, which shaped British and Anglo-Saxon architecture for several centuries. Unsurprisingly, this also makes Palladio a powerful pedagogical tool for architecture students. In the last years, Palladio's oeuvre has been a recurrent case study in the course Composición Arquitectónica 2 (Theory and History of Architecture 2: Renaissance & Baroque), where the students have to analyze both his buildings and those influenced by him, searching for proportional systems and compositional recurrences using Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Technology, subsequently presenting the results with graphical means and virtual environments.

In our experience, these works help second-year students in the development of their design skills on many levels, by making them unveil the deep structure behind the design while also trace the lineage of the elements of the architectural lexicon and their evolution. Therefore, the use of CAD technology engages the students -mainly already born in the XXI century-, who feel really comfortable using computers. Also, CAD technology pushes their graphics abilities, both at a conceptual and technical level, when facing the representation of spatial, geometric, and/ or argumentative relations and correspondences on a flat surface.

Through the years, we have witnessed an increase in the complexity both of the graphic representations and the analyses produced by the students, which in the case of Palladio's architecture has expanded beyond the scope of the course, with students making complex CAD analyses involving mathematical and harmonic proportions. This paper presents two related student works as case studies: One, developed by second-year students, analyzes Palladio's Villa Foscari 'La Malcontenta' through several CAD proportional systems. The other, developed as a Degree Thesis (Trabajo de Fin de Grado) explores the relations between the proportions in architecture and musical harmonies in the Renaissance, focusing on the work of Palladio (all the analysis are done in CAD). Both of them are presented as examples of the way in which CAD Technology can help students gather a deeper understanding of design strategies which results in their development as architectural designers. But also, they exemplify the way in which digital technologies, which give students access to formerly unavailable information (books, articles, research papers, academic exercises), and provide them with representation tools of extreme precision, are growingly blurring the limits between student work and scholarly research.

Keywords:

CAD Technology, Architecture, History of Architecture, Enhanced Learning, Design.