Colin Rowe
Although this idea was not supported by any hard evidence and could not ever be proven, encouraged by Wittkower it established Rowe's way of speculating and imagining what might have happened: an approach to the history of architecture that was largely imaginary and factually questionable, but which he gradually built into a vastly erudite, coherently argued way of thinking and seeing that exasperated conventional historians, but became the inspiration for a generation of practising architects to consider history imaginatively, as an active component in their design process.
Many years later when Rowe's influence had spread worldwide, this approach had become a key element in the process of architectural and urban design: if "the presence of the past" was evident in the work of many architects in the late 20th century, from James Stirling to Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi, Oswald Matthias Ungers, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves and others, this was largely due to the influence of Rowe.
Between the 1950s and his death, Rowe published a number of widely influential papers that influenced architecture by further developing the theory that there is a conceptual relationship between modernity and tradition, specifically Classicism in its various manifestations, and Modern Movement "white architecture" of the 1920s - a viewpoint first put forward by Emil Kaufmann in his classic book "Von Ledoux bis Le Courbusier" (1933).
Although he remained an admirer of the achievements of the 1920s modernists, chiefly in the work of Le Corbusier, Rowe also subjected the modern movement, which he considered a failure, to subversive modes of criticism and interpretation.
In the course of his brilliant and very influential academic career he focused on developing an alternative method of urban design derived in part from the earlier work of Camillo Sitte but largely original, and based on the making of cities through a process of collaged, superimposed pieces; the ideal model for this pragmatic, anti-doctrinaire approach was the ruined villa of the Roman Emperor Hadrian at Tivoli, outside Rome.
His book Collage City (with Fred Koetter) is his theoretical treatise that sets out various analyses of urban form in a number of existing cities known to be aesthetically successful, examining their actually existing urban structure as found, revealing it to be the end product of a ceaseless process of fragmentation, the collision/superimposition/contamination of many diverse ideas imposed on it by successive generations, each with its own idea.
Rowe's argument began by asserting that both Garches and the Malcontenta are conceived of as single blocks of roughly identical volumes measuring "8 units in length, by 5 1/2 in breadth, by 5 in height.
As Rowe summarizes: "Palladio is concerned with a logical disposition of motifs dogmatically accepted ... while Le Corbusier ... contrasts the new system with the old and is a little more comprehensive."
Rowe continues on in the essay to conclude that, "If Le Corbusier's facades are for him the primary demonstrations of the virtues of a mathematical discipline, with Palladio it would seem that the ultimate proof of his theory lies in his plan ... (At Malcontenta) [t]he facades become complicated, their strict Platonic rationale may be ultimately vitiated by the traditional presence ... of the Ionic order which possesses its own rationale and which inevitable introduces an alternative system of measurement.
In his famous closing quote, Rowe gives his highest compliment to both Palladio and Le Corbusier together stating that Palladio and Le Corbusier had "become the source of innumerable pastiches and of tediously amusing exhibition techniques; but it is the magnificently realized quality of the originals which one rarely finds in the works of neo-Palladians and exponents of 'le style Corbu'".
