ARTS
Architecture
Laying down foundations
Man Powers looks at the work of Colin Rowe, this year's RIBA gold medalist
Architectural critics and historians gain some satisfaction on the rare occasions one of their number is honoured by architects, who prefer their critics tame. The RIBA Royal Gold Medal is being awarded this year to Colin Rowe, who joins Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and Sir John Summerson as the only writers to receive this award since the war.
Compared to his predecessors, Rowe's name is probably not widely known outside architectural circles. His written output has been small, filling three slim volumes (The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, Collage City and The Architecture of Good Intentions) mostly of densely written essays, yet his importance in the development of architec- tural thought has been evident for nearly 50 years. Rowe is now in his seventies. He was born in England, but most of his work- ing life has been spent in the United States of America as a teacher in various schools of architecture.
Rowe's laconic written utterance is attractive at a time when academics are required to produce 'research' by the yard. A few of his essays have had an influence out of proportion to their length, starting with The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, first published in 1947. Rowe was then a pupil of Rudolf Wittkower at the Warburg Insti- tute. Wittkower was discovering the geo- metric and Platonic structure behind Renaissance classicism. Rowe pre-empted Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism with his essay comparing Palladio's Villa Malcontenta with Le Cor- busier's Villa Stein at Garches. One has to go back to 1947 to realise how revolution- ary this comparison was. Modern architec- ture was still in a campaigning state, and connection with the past was suspect. In England, supporters of modernism like Pevsner and Summerson preferred to see it as a naïve architecture divested of cultural baggage, even though Le Corbusier in par- ticular was more complex in his relation to the past. By establishing objective criteria of comparisoii based on plan and propor- tion, Rowe introduced a new analytical method into architectural history and by making Palladio an honorary modernist, opened the way for recognition that Mod- ernism was never the tabula rasa it claimed to be. As he wrote in a review of one of the blander modernist books of the Fifties, the author was 'unwilling to assert what so many suspect — that modern architecture is a style, as disciplined, as legitimate, and as limited as any of the great styles of the past'.
Shortly afterwards, Rowe was teaching at Liverpool School of Architecture. James Stirling was a student and, like Rowe, in revolt against the thin architecture of the austerity years. On endless walks around Liverpool, Rowe and his students devoured neo-classicism and served it up again look- ing like Le Corbusier. At Rice University, Texas, a few years later, Rowe brought a depth of knowledge and European sophis- tication. The prevailing doctrine was the modernism of Gropius implanted on the already smoothed and streamlined Ameri- can Beaux Arts training, systems in which all the answers had already been found. In The Texas Rangers, a study of Rice School of Architecture during the Fifties, a former student Alexander Caragonne remembers Rowe as being 'blessed and cursed in equal measure with that presumably British qual- ity of mind that, upon having just conclud- ed the argument, finds itself obliged to admit not just one but a multitude of dif- ferent alternatives.'
If one takes James Stirling's architectural development as an illustration of Colin Rowe's theories in practice (they remained close friends), then the exploration of pos- sible alternatives led him to a richer and more profound design method. Stirling's increasing interest in the configuration of plan, seen as solid and void space, is a working out of Rowe's urban theory.
The RIBA claims still to believe in some- thing called Modern Architecture. Do they realise that Colin Rowe has been more responsible than anyone for undermining its theoretical claims? The Architecture of Good Intentions (published last year by Academy Editions) removes its underpin- nings one by one with the affection one shows for a good sand-castle when the tide comes in. His remarks on architecture's dubious claims to millennarian renewal are particularly relevant to the present climate in which new buildings are so widely and uncritically accepted as a proper way to
make ourselves better people after the year 2000. Rowe's pessimistic and sceptical out- look prevent him from claiming any great liberation as a result of his demolition but even so, his book has been received with the amused embarrassment still accorded to those who rock the modernist boat.
Like Stirling in his later buildings, Rowe takes fragments and animates them with brilliance. The approach is conceptual so that as in Stirling's buildings, there is no return of the smaller scale of detail that modernism abolished; but Rowe has given back to architecture a serious place in the history of ideas for which critics and histo- rians as well as architects should thank him.
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