As I Was Saying - Collin Rowe

Title: As I Was Saying


Author: Collin Rowe





They've been twisting his arm again. Since 1947, when his elegant, shocking essay 'The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa' appeared in AR,a new book by Colin Rowe has been published on average once every 16 years - most prefaced with weary acknowledgement that only extreme pressure from friends has overcome his reluctance to appearbetween hard covers. One imagines blood in the study. If so, it was worth his pain and our patience. For here at last are no less than three volumes of Kowe's papers, written since 1953.Decades before Robert Venturi and Leon Krier exposed to public ridicule the pretensions of unexamined Modernism, Rowe began its systematic debagging. He was well qualified to do so. Trained as an architect- Liverpool University - he has understood Modernism's austere allure from within; indeed, he has never concealed his respect for its 'good intentions' and the thrall in which its formal language,its romance even, still holds him. But trained as a scholar - Warburg under Wittkower, Yale under Hitchcock - he acquired the historical perspective in which to locate, and by which to judge, itsachievements and failures. To this binocular vision add a tart mischievousness, and how deliciously must his two-slide comparisons between Mies and Michelangelo, Palladio and Le Corbusier, have outragedboth anti-historical Modernists and anti-everything-since-1830 art historians.



Han sido torcer el brazo de nuevo. Desde 1947, cuando su elegante, sorprendente ensayo El Ideal Matemáticas dela Villa 'apareció en AR, un nuevo libro de Colin Rowe ha sido publicada en promedio una vez cada 16 años - más cansado prefacio con el reconocimiento de que sólo la extrema presión de los amigos hasuperado Su reticencia a aparecer entre abarca duro. Uno se imagina la sangre en el estudio. Si es así, valía la pena su dolor y nuestra paciencia. Por último están aquí, en no menos de tres...