A new, quantitative architecture simulation approach to software design that circumvents costly testing cycles by modeling quality of service in early design states. Too often, software designers lack an understanding of the effect of design decisions on such quality attributes as performance and reliability. This necessitates costly trial-and-error testing cycles, delaying or complicating rollout. This book presents a new, quantitative architecture simulation approach to software design, which allows software engineers to model quality of service in early design stages. It presents the first simulator for software architectures, Palladio, and shows students and professionals how to model reusable, parametrized components and configured, deployed systems in order to analyze service attributes. The text details the key concepts of Palladio's domain-specific modeling language for software architecture quality and presents the corresponding development stage. It describes how quality information can be used to calibrate architecture models from which detailed simulation models are automatically derived for quality predictions. Readers will learn how to approach systematically questions about scalability, hardware resources, and efficiency. The text features a running example to illustrate tasks and methods as well as three case studies from industry. Each chapter ends with exercises, suggestions for further reading, and “takeaways” that summarize the key points of the chapter. The simulator can be downloaded from a companion website, which offers additional material. The book can be used in graduate courses on software architecture, quality engineering, or performance engineering. It will also be an essential resource for software architects and software engineers and for practitioners who want to apply Palladio in industrial settings.

The architect Andrea Palladio was a draughtsman and a designer, a mason and an engineer, an innovator and an image maker. His growing importance from the 16th century onwards was based on his profound expertise in architectural issues that went beyond singular tasks and situations, and beyond his particular moment in history. His way of thinking and solving architectural problems proved invaluable for centuries to come. The contributions to this volume reflect on Palladio's method(s) beyond historism and style, and thus provide insights into design and building in our time.

Drawing on Palladio's original published legacy of approximately 40 designs, the authors attempt to reveal the rigorous geometric rules by which Palladio conceived these structures. Using a computer, they test each rule in every possible application.

Featuring more than 300 new analytic drawings and models, this study explores the evolution of Palladio's villas from those that exhibit classical symmetrical volumetric bodies to others that exhibit no bodies at all, just fragments in a landscape.

Sir Kenneth Clark wrote in the Architectural Review, that the first result of this book was "to dispose, once and for all, of the hedonist, or purely aesthetic, theory of Renaissance architecture, ' and this defines Wittkower's intention in a nutshell.

This book shows through historical data, diagrams and drawings, the design system of an Italian historic center, that of Vicenza, Italy. Vicenza is the result of an urban construction process that has as its model the invention of the Palladian design system. The main argument is how the architectural vision of Andrea Palladio shaped Vincenza to the city it is today. Vicenza is an example of a collective dream, an expression of the best Renaissance artistic culture, a classic example that a city can reform itself through intellectual activity.

From "one of our most original, accessible, and stimulating writers on architecture" ("Library Journal") comes a captivating account of the life and work of Andrea Palladio, the father of domestic architecture.