The Methodological Approaches of Colin Rowe: the Multifaceted, Intellectual Connoisseur at La Tourette Raúl Martínez Martínez
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arq (2018), 22.3, 205–213. © Cambridge University Press [2018]. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.1017/S1359135518000489 history An analysis of Colin Rowe’s methodological approaches – with particular reference to his 1961 essay on La Tourette – acknowledging dialectic as a creative methodology. The methodological approaches of Colin Rowe: the multifaceted, intellectual connoisseur at La Tourette Raúl Martínez Martínez In England, the establishment of art history as a professional discipline was consolidated by the ‘[…] approaches [to] architectural analysis foundation of the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1932, beyond Wittkower’s analytic formalism and the Warburg Library’s move from Hamburg to London the following year due to the rise of the that Rowe developed after his departure to Nazi régime; a political situation that caused the the United States’ emigration of German-speaking scholars such as Fritz Saxl, Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Wittkower. Colin Rowe, an influential member of the second generation of historians of modern architecture, This article will focus on methodological was educated as part of this cultural milieu in the approaches for architectural analysis beyond postwar period, studying at the Warburg Institute Wittkower’s analytic formalism that Rowe in London. In the ‘Addendum 1973’ to his first developed after his departure to the United States published article ‘The Mathematics of the Ideal in 1951. In particular, it will pay special attention Villa’ (1947),1 Rowe acknowledged the Wölfflinian to his critical article, conceived during a three- origins of his analysis – Saxl and Wittkower had day visit to the recently completed monastery of studied under Heinrich Wölfflin – and the validity La Tourette in December 1960, the result of which of his inherited German formal methods. This was published as ‘Dominican Monastery of La assumption, in the opinion of one of Rowe’s Tourette, Eveux-sur-Arbresle, Lyons’ in the June 1961 7 students, the architectural historian and critic issue of The Architectural Review. The monographic Anthony Vidler,2 indicated the ‘still pervasive force nature of Rowe’s essay, coupled with the in situ of the late nineteenth century German school of analysis of the monastery, can be characterised architectural history in England in the years after as a singular work within his theoretical corpus. the Second World War’.3 Vidler, who has already written on Rowe’s analysis The impact that the German scholar of of La Tourette, considered the by-product of Renaissance and Baroque architecture Rudolf Rowe’s essay to be ‘one of the most difficult he Wittkower had on Rowe is well known and [Rowe] had attempted’, which resulted in ‘a long widely acknowledged in the academic work of reflection, or meditation, on the potentials of a architectural historians.4 Vidler is one of the visual analytic that he had developed since 1947 for 8 contributors who has emphasised Wittkower’s a practical, experiential criticism’. The ambiguity influence on Rowe’s historical approach to modern and complexity of ‘La Tourette’ leaves room for architecture, analysing the origin and development interpretation, as evidenced in Vidler’s open of Rowe’s thought in his written work from 1945 to conclusion, which established parallels between 1950. In his chronological study, Vidler established Erwin Panosfky’s ‘understanding of Scholastic the numerous intellectual debts Rowe owed to his architecture’ and Rowe’s analogous ‘understanding 9 former mentor – including thematic correlations, of mannerist architecture’. This article argues that methodological approaches, modes of historical in ‘La Tourette’, Rowe proposed a methodological interpretation and formal analysis – present in union between two previously mutually exclusive Rowe’s thesis, The Theoretical Drawings of Inigo Jones: concepts, thought and sensation, opening a new Their Sources and Scope, completed in 1947,5 and two door to understanding the work of Le Corbusier articles published in The Architectural Review: ‘The and, more importantly, allowing theorists and Mathematics of the Ideal Villa’ and ‘Mannerism historians to delve deeper towards the idea of a core and Modern Architecture’, in 1947 and 1950, of modern architecture. respectively.6 history arq . vol 22 . no 3 . 2018 205 206 arq . vol 22 . no 3 . 2018 history Colin Rowe and the American art historical tradition a different art historical language.14 These two Within this framework of methodological unexpected meetings broadened Rowe’s mind and analysis, another of Rowe’s students, first at the directly exposed him to an art and architectural University of Texas at Austin and later at Cornell approach that was completely different from the University, Alexander Caragonne, examined German academic tradition he had learned from closely the brief but crucial episode in the history Wittkower; a transformative occurrence that made of architectural education developed at the him feel the need for his own experience in the University of Texas while Rowe was a member United States.15 of the faculty.10 In his book, The Texas Rangers: Rowe’s analytical method was expanded in Notes from an Architectural Underground, Caragonne the United States. His first steps were directed evaluated Rowe’s contribution to the programme by Hitchcock,16 who initiated the American at the university from 1953 to 1956, establishing historical tradition of modern architecture with chronological distinctions within Rowe’s writing. his book Modern Architecture: Romanticism and The first group of essays, the pre-Texas essays, Reintegration, published in 1929. Rowe considered illustrated the influence of the Warburg Institute, this to be Hitchcock’s best book and the motive and particularly Wittkower, on Rowe’s education that persuaded him to study under Hitchcock at during his academic training in England in the Yale. A year after Hitchcock’s death in 1987, Rowe late 1940s. This circumstance prompted Rowe to wrote an homage to his American adviser, an essay choose a theme that closely followed Warburgian simply entitled ‘Henry-Russell Hitchcock’. This text interests as a thesis subject and to use Wittkower’s began with an encounter between Hitchcock and analytic methodology in his written work. The Bernard Berenson, the American art historian who second group of essays, the Texas essays, reflected specialised in the Renaissance, at Vallombrosa in new interests that Rowe developed in the United 1955, recorded by the latter in his diaries.17 Rowe States, which Caragonne categorised as the imagined the possible conversation that the two ‘Superstructure’ and ‘Transparency’ articles. Harvard graduates had that day, establishing a The former category included Rowe’s essays methodological confluence between them. The ‘Chicago Frame’ (1956) and ‘Neo-‘‘Classicism’’ and point of connection, he speculated, was Berenson’s Modern Architecture, I and II’ (1956–7); the latter friend and Hitchcock’s professor, the American was characterised by ‘Transparency: Literal and art historian and medievalist, Arthur Kingsley Phenomenal’ (1955–6). Caragonne’s distinction was Porter. Rowe characterised Porter’s methodological significant because it exposed the development approach by ‘his excessive attention to facts at the of Rowe’s architectural discourse during his time expense of generalisations’; an opposition to the in Texas. Rowe’s departure to the United States German idealism, which was already beginning to in 1951 was a voluntary emigration motivated fade when Hitchcock was studying at Harvard in the by his enthusiasm to learn from the American early 1920s. This differentiation between empiricism architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and idealism caused Rowe to say, ‘it must have been who, at the time, was teaching at Yale University. Kingsley Porter who had been responsible for the Rowe justified the move in 1988 saying, ‘I felt way ultimate mental formation of the Russell Hitchcock back and I still feel today that I came to Yale, as whom I knew at Yale’.18 they used to say, to sit at his feet.’11 Rowe’s interest in the American art historical tradition was not new. It emerged after two Italian ‘[…] different ways of relating the history encounters, first in Florence in 1947 and later in of architecture […] represented by […] Rome in 1950. The former chance encounter was an Wölfflin’s pupil Sigfried Giedion and [Henry art historical confrontation between his Canadian travelling companion, Sydney Key, and an employee Russell] Hitchcock, teaching at Harvard of a New York art magazine, Libby Tannenbaum and Yale, respectively, when Rowe moved – an event that, in Rowe’s own words, ‘was to the States’ amusing for me because between Syd and Libby there developed a conversation from which I was completely excluded. […] I felt myself reduced to These different ways of relating the history of utter insignificance’.12 Even though Rowe described architecture were represented by two of the leading North America as ‘odd’ following the conversation, historians of the modern movement, Wölfflin’s this initial encounter planted the seed for his pupil Sigfried Giedion and Hitchcock, teaching at eventual migration. The second chance encounter Harvard and Yale, respectively, when Rowe moved was with Arthur Brown,