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A new exhibition celebrates Palladio’s architecture 500 years on
Vicenza is a pleasant, prosperous city in the Veneto, 60 km west of Venice. Its principal claim to fame is Andrea Palladio, who is such an influential architect that a neoclassical style is known as Palladian. The city is a permanent exhibition of some of his finest buildings, and as he was born — in Padua, to be precise — 500 years ago, the International Centre for the Study of Palladio's Architecture has an excellent excuse for mounting la grande mostra, the big show.
The exhibition has the special advantage of being held in one of Palladio's buildings, Palazzo Barbaran da Porto. Its bold facade is a mixture of rustication and decoration set between two rows of elegant columns. On the second floor the pediments are alternately curved or pointed, a Palladian trademark. The harmonious proportions of the atrium at the entrance lead through to a dramatic interior of fine fireplaces and painted ceilings. Palladio's design is simple, clear and not overcrowded. The show has been organised on the same principles, according to Howard Burns, the architectural historian who co-curated it.
Palladio's father was a miller who settled in Vicenza, where the young Andrea was apprenticed to a skilled stonemason. How did a humble miller's son become a world-renowned architect? The answer in the exhibition is that, as a young man, Palladio excelled at carving decorative stonework on columns, doorways and fireplaces. He was plainly intelligent, and lucky enough to come across a rich patron, Gian Giorgio Trissino, a landowner and scholar, who organised his education, taking him to Rome in the 1540s, where he studied the masterpieces of classical Roman and Greek architecture and the work of other influential architects of the time, such as Donato Bramante and Raphael.
Burns argues that social mobility was also important. Entrepreneurs, prosperous from agriculture in the Veneto, commissioned the promising local architect to design their country villas and their urban mansions. In Venice the aristocracy were anxious to co-opt talented artists, and Palladio was given the chance to design the buildings that have made him famous — the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore, both easy to admire because they can be seen from the city's historical centre across a stretch of water.
He tried his hand at bridges — his unbuilt version of the Rialto Bridge was decorated with the large pediment and columns of a temple — and, after a fire at the Ducal Palace, he offered an alternative design which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Banqueting House in Whitehall in London. Since it was designed by Inigo Jones, Palladio's first foreign disciple, this is not as surprising as it sounds.
Jones, who visited Italy in 1614, bought a trunk full of the master's architectural drawings; they passed through the hands of the Dukes of Burlington and Devonshire before settling at the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1894. Many are now on display at Palazzo Barbaran. What they show is how Palladio drew on the buildings of ancient Rome as models. The major theme of both his rural and urban building was temple architecture, with a strong pointed pediment supported by columns and approached by wide steps.
Palladio's work for rich landowners alienates unreconstructed critics on the Italian left, but among the papers in the show are designs for cheap housing in Venice. In the wider world, Palladio's reputation has been nurtured by a text he wrote and illustrated, "Quattro Libri dell'Architettura". His influence spread to St Petersburg and to Charlottesville in Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson commissioned a Palladian villa he called Monticello.
Vicenza's show contains detailed models of the major buildings and is leavened by portraits of Palladio's teachers and clients by Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto; the paintings of his Venetian buildings are all by Canaletto, no less. This is an uncompromising exhibition; many of the drawings are small and faint, and there are no sideshows for children, but the impact of harmonious lines and satisfying proportions is to impart in a viewer a feeling of benevolent calm. Palladio is history's most therapeutic architect.
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A. The chain of stores known as Farmers began one hundred years ago as a mail order company. Today the Farmers chain employs 3,500 staff across 58 branches making it the most venerable institution of its type in New Zealand. 'Coming to Farmers once a week has become woven into the fabric of New Zealand culture,' says business historian Ian Hunter. By 1960, one in every ten people had an account with the company. It was not only a shop but also hosted the largest annual parade in the country, the Santa parade each Christmas time. Gary Blumenthal, whose family have been customers for three generations, understands well the role Farmers have played in New Zealand culture. 'We were on holiday in Auckland,' he explains, 'and I decided that the lookout tower on top of the Farmers building would be a unique place to fit the ring on my new fiancee's finger.' The couple has been married for 50 years.
B. Farmers' longevity can be attributed to the philosophy fostered by Robert Laidlaw, the Scottish immigrant who established the business. Right from the outset, Laidlaw guaranteed customer satisfaction, and those who were not entirely happy with a purchase would receive a full refund with no questions asked. This was certainly the first time such a guarantee had been made by a New Zealand retailer and was probably one of the first worldwide. Laidlaw believed that the scheme could work if he ensured that every product sold was of the highest quality relative to its price.
C. Another important aspect of the Farmers' philosophy was to internationalize the New Zealand market. By the time the Hobson Street store opened in 1920 in order to sell directly to customers for the first time, Laidlaw had established buying officers in New York and London so as to offer his customers the latest designs. This was a bold move in those days and won Farmers a devoted following. It's also true that whoever you speak to regarding Farmers in the early years, whether managers or workers, they all emphasize how the company represented a large family. Everyone employed by Laidlaw felt they were building something that would ultimately be to the benefit of the whole country. For example, to mark the centenary celebrations, 58 Farmers' stores around the country announced the neighborhood charities they would raise funds for everything from guide dog services to volunteer fire brigades will benefit.
D. Farmers has always had a heart, according to former board chairman Rawdon Busfield. 'One day I was in the Hobson Street store and a woman came in with two small children- they didn't have a lot of money, you could tell. That week we had a special on, a big bar of chocolate for a shilling… But the boy only had a penny. I took the penny and gave him the chocolate.' However, not everything has stayed the same. Farmers was once home to genteel tea rooms, children's playgrounds, and an annual sale to celebrate the birthday of Hector the Parrot- who came to embody the store in the eyes of many shoppers and who died, aged 131, in the 1970s. You could buy houses from Farmers, and its saddle factory supplied the armed forces. In fact, although the company has grown considerably over the years, today it sells a narrower assortment of products than in the past.
E. Walk through a Farmers store today and you'll see big changes. Its most recent branch in the suburb of Albany is filled with bright lights and big brands. The branch sells cosmetics from 16 different international companies and buys from approximately 500 suppliers, of which about 30 percent are locally owned. 'Eight or ten years ago,' says current chief executive Rod McDermott, 'lots of brands wouldn't partner with us. We weren't in trouble as such, but we could have been doing much better because we were focused too much on price and not on fashion. The reorientation of the last decade has seen a great improvement.'
F. Farmers almost didn't pull through one economic crisis. In the mid 1980s, business was booming and the company had stores throughout the country. Then, with sales topping $375 million, it was taken over by Chase Corporation. Lincoln Laidlaw, the son of the company's founder, remembers the dark days following the stock market crash of 1987 and the collapse of the Chase Corporation. 'The business was being divided up,' he says, 'and I believe that the original culture of the store was dispelled and it hasn't been recovered. That's a shame, but the business is still strong. 'For a few turbulent years the stores were controlled first by a consortium of Australian banks, and later a local corporation. In 2003, it went back into 'family' ownership with the purchase by the James Pascoe Group owned by an established New Zealand retail family. Brand power has made Farmers profitable again, according to McDermott. 'And now we're becoming the brand we used to be… It's like the rebirth of an icon.'
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As new 'wonder products' are getting harder and harder to find, what should companies do to survive in today's ever more competitive markets?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines innovation as 'making changes to something established'. Invention, by contrast, is the act of 'coming upon or finding; discovery'. Revolutionary 'inventions' of 20th-century US firms include, for example, the safety razor, the hydraulic brake, and DNA fingerprinting. However, as Adrian Slywotsky of Mercer Management Consulting says, 'In most industries, truly differentiating new-product breakthroughs are becoming increasingly rare'. And as 'blockbuster' novel products become steadily more elusive, big companies would do well to focus instead on making lots of small things better.
Unfortunately, big companies often have big problems with innovation. 'Innovators try to change the status quo', says Bhaskar Chakravorti of the Monitor Group, 'which is why markets tend to resist them'. Innovations frequently disrupt the way companies do things (and may have been doing them for years). And it is not just markets that are nervous of innovation. Michael Hammer, co-author of 'Re-engineering the Corporation', cites the case of a PC-maker that set out to imitate Dell's famous 'Build to Order' system of computer assembly. The company found its attempts were frustrated by both its head of manufacturing, who feared for his job, and its head of marketing, who did not want to upset his existing retail outlets. So the proposal got nowhere, and Dell continued to dominate the business.
Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School Professor, describes how disruptive innovations - simpler, cheaper and more convenient products that seriously upset the status quo - often herald the rapid downfall of thriving, long-standing businesses. This, it is widely recognised, is because most such organisations are designed to grow through a series of sustaining innovations - the sort which simply improve on existing products for existing markets.
William Baumol, professor at New York University, argues that large companies have been learning important lessons from the history of innovation. Most have both cut back and redirected their Research and Development spending in recent years. Innovation by big companies is now based less on the discoveries of white-coated scientists, and more on incremental improvements in the processes that constitute daily operations.
According to marketing specialist Vijay Vishwanath, companies also need to adjust to the ongoing fragmentation of markets. Once-uniform mass markets are breaking up into countless 'niches', in which everything has to be customised for a small group of consumers. Looking for blockbusters in such a world is a daunting task. Another problem, according to Chakravorti, lies in the marketing of innovations. Too many executives are still stuck with the strategies used to sell Kodak's first camera 120 years ago, when the product was so revolutionary that the company could forget about competition for at least a decade. Today, rival products can be rushed onto the market at speeds which would have been unimaginable in those days.
Companies that fail to come up with headline-hitting new products should not despair. 'There are plenty of other, albeit less glamorous, areas where innovation can take place', says Erik Brynjolfsson of the MIT Sloan School of Management. He claims that the roots of the USA's productivity surge originate in 'a genuine revolution in how American companies are using information technology to reinvent their business processes from top to bottom'.
Hammer highlights several instances where firms have added considerably to their shareholder value through what he calls operational innovations - creativity in their business processes. Notable among these is the American retail giant Wal-Mart. While superficially mundane, their pioneering idea of 'cross-docking' - shifting merchandise off trucks from suppliers and straight onto trucks heading for stores - has been fundamental to the company's ability to offer low prices, the platform for its outstanding success.
Companies are also being encouraged to embrace strategic innovations, following the example of such firms as Southwest Airlines, a low-cost American regional carrier, whose creative strategies and shrewd timing won it a victory over its ailing competitor US Airways. The Swedish packaging company Tetra Pak also used this style of innovation, by moving away from delivering ready-made containers for customers into providing machinery and supplying dedicated materials for them to make their own packaging. This strips out many costs from the process, and also makes it very difficult for the customer to switch suppliers. Like Southwest Airlines, they achieved success through strategic innovations alone, with little innovation in either the underlying technology or the product sold.
In his book 'How to Grow When Markets Don't', Slywotsky and his co-author Richard Wise recommend what they call demand innovations. A few far-sighted organisations such as the French industrial gas company Air Liquide have found success not - as in the case of strategic innovations - by meeting existing demand in a new way, but by discovering new forms of demand and adapting to supply the products or services required. Air Liquide had been a leading supplier of industrial gases until the early 1990s, when gas became a commodity and their operational income plunged. Realising the value of the skills they had gained over the decades, the company became a supplier not only of gas, but also of the management services to accompany it. Within a short time their profits rose again.
There are certain things that managers can do to make innovations like these happen within their organisations. For example, projects with potential should be rapidly hived off into independent business units, away from the smothering influence of the status quo. The ultimate outcome of any one innovation may still be unpredictable, but the process from which it emerges is not.
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the reading passage?
The building where the exhibition is staged has been newly renovated.
Palazzo Barbaran da Porto typically represents Palladio’s design.
Palladio’s father worked as an architect.
Palladio’s family refused to pay for his architectural studies.
Palladio’s alternative design for the Ducal Palace in Venice was based on an English building.
Palladio designed for both wealthy and poor people.
The exhibition includes paintings of people by famous artists.
Select the correct letter, A–F.
Match each person with the correct idea, A–F.
In order to stay in the market, companies today need to concentrate their efforts on finding genuinely original products.
Disruptive innovations often pose serious threats to even successful, well-established companies.
A key stage in the development of sustaining innovations involves research into the strengths and weaknesses of competitors' products.
Manufacturers today are able to compete with innovations over shorter time periods than in the past.
It is hard to tell what the long-term result of any innovation might be.
Match each point with the correct person, A-E.