Uranienborg

Not everyone who would build in the “Palladian” style would pay mind to Pythagorean of Palladian proportions, but Tycho Brahe did. When his “Uraniborg” was finished, although it looked at first glance anything but Palladian, the Pythogorean musical ratios were all there and the symmetry extended into the landscape, just as Palladio advised. The portal towers on the east and west sides of the house were each fifteen Danish feet wide and fifteen feet long; the height of the façade was thirty feet, the peak of the roof forty-five feet, the side of the central block sixty feet, giving the ratio 1:2:3:4. The same ratios underlay the dimensions of Tycho’s rooms and other elements of the structure. The perimeter wall around Tycho’s garden enclosed square divided by avenues on the diagonal, just as Socrates had divided the swuares in Plato’s Meno. Someone unaware of Tycho’s intentions, and not steeped in the architecture of Palladio or on the lookout for Pythagorean ratios would not have noticed these mathematical and musical subtleties, but Tycho was sure this harmony would make his home and gardens satisfying to the eye and soul, encouraging peaceful, intelligent work and inspiring any sensitive person. Tycho designed and built Uraniborg to be both a palace home and an observatory, all for the purpose of better scrutinizing the heavens where the Pythagorean harmony of spheres - the musical ratios, or perhaps even some deeper harmony - might be discovered. Nowhere else was the Pythagorean and Palladian ideal of proportion so literally and idiosyncratically, realized, as in Ransburg ~ page 248 (The Music of Pythagoras)