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Five hundred years after the birth of German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in 2386, I wonder if there'll be anything comparable to Palladio in Print, an exhibit and publication by Queen's University that celebrate Italian architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580).

There ought to be. In the last century and right now in our own, one would be hard-pressed to find a more influential figure, architecturally, than the Bauhaus master. Today's garden-variety, curtain-walled condo or corporate office block owes much to Mies and practically nothing to Palladio.

Mies spent a lifetime refining a singular architectural idea, but I doubt that future generations of architects and architecture aficionados will feel the need to continue his quest, as was the case with Palladio, by meticulously remeasuring and redrawing every building he ever designed and then publishing tome after tome containing updates and instructions for builders.

And that's not because the modernist motifs of Mies are any less important because they're rendered in steel and glass rather than stone, since the medium an artist chooses has no bearing on the quality of the art. Is Mondrian not equal to Michelangelo? And it's not because their eras were wildly different, either: The Internet of Palladio's time — the printing press — had been liberating literature for almost a century by the time Gian Giorgio Trissino "discovered" him working as a stonemason. By the time of Mies's death in 1969, the University of Toronto's Marshall McLuhan was predicting a new kind of liberation for the printed word via computers.

What's missing, of course, is the quasi-religious fervour in handing down Palladio's The Four Books of Architecture as if its volumes were the 10 commandments.

While many of today's architects, such as our own Peter Clewes, will continue to build Miesian modern, just as many will choose to slap Palladian windows on faux-historic McMansions or do something else entirely different. Anything goes.

In other words, there will be no centuries-old volumes on display during Mies's 500th birthday like those under glass at Queen's W.D. Jordan library (until Oct. 31), so, if you're in the neighbourhood, you really should take a peek.

All pre-1800, these are volumes that have been lovingly passed from generation to generation, and then into the hands of rare booksellers. As the exhibit catalogue suggests, the "crown jewel" of the Queen's collection is also the oldest — a first edition of the 1570 edition of I Quattro Libri dell'Architecttura (The Four Books of Architecture), once owned by "the architect Earl" responsible for reviving Palladian architecture in England in the 1700s, Lord Burlington.

Palladio Londinensis (The London Art of Building), a 1748 builder's manual by William Salmon, lies open at an interesting page containing an image of what catalogue author Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey writes is the only architectural motif "persistently connected with Palladio's name," which is, of course, the Palladian window.

This is ironic because "Andrea Palladio actually never wrote about this type of opening, although he illustrated it on the woodcut elevations of his basilica in downtown Vicenza" and in other places, yet, Mr. du Prey continues, it's a detail that has "spread like wildfire throughout North America's suburbs."

I decided to wander around a few suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area to see if our builders were incongruously grafting Mr. Palladio's windows onto their stucco boxes. I tried areas in northeast Scarborough, near Canada's Wonderland, and in Burlington, but I came up empty.

I found an army of arched windows and even a few with tiny pediments, but nothing that conformed to the strict, three-window design that, as octogenarian architect and heritage specialist William Greer reminded me in an e-mail, is a "true Palladian" by having a central, large-arched window flanked by lower and "much narrower openings with a flat head."

Mr. Greer did point me to what he considers the city's "one genuinely accurate" window, the large and beautiful Palladian that graces the University Club at 380 University Ave. At the very top of the former headquarters of the Dominion Bank (now attached to the condo/hotel 1 King West), however, is a row of Palladian-like windows, and some "good examples" can be found running across the second floor of the Toronto Club at 107-109 Wellington St.

One dormer poking from the mansard roof of George Brown House at 186 Beverly St. comes "fairly close," he writes. Interestingly, one building to the north of Mr. Brown's 1876 mansion is the Beverly School, where I found some abstracted and modernized Palladians.

In a way, I'm glad those were the only "modern" Palladians I found, since not only is it jarring to see the oxymoronic term in print, it's jarring to see an actual example of it — a classic form slapped on a building, clashing with its predominant architectural style.

Which raises the question: If Miesian architecture does become the classic architecture of the 24th century, will tiny curtain-walled windows be Frankensteined on to whatever architectural style is popular at the time?