FABIO NOVEMBRE

Palladio and I have never really gotten along. I always thought he was too provincial, moralistic, conservative, though he does have one point in his favor: he never set foot on an airplane. I’d like to take him with me and show him, nearly 5 centuries later, the great influence he has had on a big young country like America. He could definitely get a green card for artistic merit, seeing how often he’s been used as a stylistic reference across the entire US territory, including the White House. I would especially like to take him to New York, that dialectic of opposites, the most classical of modern places. I’d take him to the neoclassical buildings uptown, then show him the grand lofts of Soho with their classical cast-iron columns. I would dare him to find his symmetry in a world where the laws of chaos have triumphed over Euclidean geometry. I’d ask him to explain the difference between the floor and the ceiling in a world without gravity. I would question him about how an ornamental motif can come from the projection of a sofa, and how that sofa can seem like a three-dimensional decoration.I bet his answers wouldn’t be that different from mine, in the end. After all, we’re both Italian, provincial, moralistic and conservative.