Theorizing the Re-Emergence of Style through Space and Time: The Renaissance of Palladianism from Vicenza to Virginia

This paper theorizes the process and mechanisms through which aesthetic styles can re-emerge across time and space. Through a microhistorical analysis of the global diffusion of Palladianism—from sixteenth-century Vicenza to eighteenth-century Britain and Jeffersonian America—we reveal four mechanisms explaining how a style first codified in a provincial context became one of the most enduring architectural grammars in history. Prospective codification captures how codification means—such as Palladio’s Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (1570)—can translate design principles into modular, user-centric grammars that anticipate future adaptation. Twisted transmission refers to the creative reinterpretations introduced by intermediaries—translators, editors, and publishers—whose translations transform dissemination into acts of reinvention. Adapted adoption describes how specialized adopters and patrons recontextualize the codified grammar, integrating it into new functional, material, and political environments while retaining recognizable formal coherence. Finally, contextual meaning infusion explains how successive adopters endow the style with shifting symbolic meanings ensuring its continued legitimacy. Together, these mechanisms illuminate the process through which styles, unlike technologies or practices, achieve transhistorical endurance and re-emergence by coupling codified formal systems with open-ended interpretive flexibility.