Andrea Palladio · The First Book
Chapter XXI. Of the loggia’s, entries, halls, rooms, and of their form
THE loggia’s, for the most part, are made in the fore and back front of the house, and are placed in the middle, when only one is made, and on each side when there are two.
These loggia's serve for many uses, as to walk, eat in, and other recreations; and are either made larger or smaller, according as the bigness and conveniency of the fabrick requires; but, for the most part, they are not to be made less than ten foot wide, nor more than twenty.
Besides, all the well-contrived houses have in the middle, and in their more beautiful part, some places, by which all the others have a communication: these in the under part are called entries, and in the upper halls. These places are publick.
The entries are the first parts, except the loggia’s, which offer to those that enter the house, and are the most convenient for those to stay in who wait the matter’s coming out, to salute or do business with him,
Tug halls serve for feasts, entertainments and decorations, for comedies, weddings, and such like recreations; and therefore these places ought to be much larger than the others, and to have the most capacious form, to the end that many persons may be therein commodiously placed, and see whatever is done there.
In the length of halls I use not to exceed two squares, made from the breadth; but the nearer they come to a square, the more convenient and commendable they will be.
The rooms ought to be distributed on each side of the entry and hall; and it is to be observed, that those on lie right cancspond swith thos on the left, that (0 the fabrick may be the same in one place as in the other, and that the walls may equally bear the burden of the roof; because if the rooms are made large in one part, and smal! in the other, the Latter will be more fit to resist the weight, by reason of the nearness of the walls, and the former more weak, which will produce in time very great inconveniences, and ruin the whole work.
The most beautiful and proportionable manners of rooms, and which succeed best, are seven, because they are either made round (tho hut seldom) or square, or their length will be the diagonal line of the square, or of a square and a third, or of one square and 2 half, or of one square and two thirds, or of two squares.
Public-domain text (London, published by Isaac Ware, 1738). Read from the Internet Archive’s scan (gri_33125011569684) of the copy in the Getty Research Institute, by way of Wikimedia Commons, where it is marked public domain. That scan’s text layer had lost the ends of the lines on every left-hand page, so the pages were read again from the scan’s images, the two readings compared word by word, and the text cleaned: the long s (ſ) is printed s and the ct and st ligatures as plain letters, words broken at the ends of lines are joined, and running heads, page numbers, signatures and catchwords are removed. Ware’s spelling, capitals and punctuation are otherwise kept (shew, publick, antient, compleat). Chapter titles and words the OCR misread were corrected against the page images. Some misreadings will remain, most of them in the italic prefaces and the Latin of Book III. Ware’s dedication, the list of subscribers, his table of terms, the errata and the bookseller’s advertisement are not reproduced. Nor are the 212 engraved plates, their inscriptions, or the keys to the letters on them that Ware prints in the text: where Palladio writes “as in the design” the figure is in the printed book.