A whole lot of talk about nothing. Self-consciously erudite ("The corpus of plans we will be studying...") attempt to find additional mathematical rules governing room dimensions, etc. (Palladio himself gives the main ones in his famous Four Books.) I'm happy to give the author credit for the large amount of research involved, and I suppose some people might want it for its bibliography.

An initial enthusiastic interest in classicism in architecture led to my attending architecture school. This is a book I read during my first term, and I really enjoyed it tremendously. Very instructive as an introduction to the ideas of classical/renaissance architectural theory, as well as fun and "hands-on" with the included software. A previous reviewer seems to feel that the writing unfortunately pretentious. For better or for worse, however, almost all serious art and architectural writing has this kind of quality--or at least appears this way to those who aren't used to seriously thinking about ideas of aesthetics. It shouldn't put one off. The book is substantial, and fun at the same time. I enthusiastically recommend it.