Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T08:13:53.996Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The methodological approaches of Colin Rowe: the multifaceted, intellectual connoisseur at La Tourette

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2018

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

In England, the establishment of art history as a professional discipline was consolidated by the foundation of the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1932, and the Warburg Library's move from Hamburg to London the following year due to the rise of the Nazi régime; a political situation that caused the 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, was educated as part of this cultural milieu in the postwar period, studying at the Warburg Institute in London. In the ‘Addendum 1973’ to his first published article ‘The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa’ (1947), Rowe acknowledged the Wölfflinian origins of his analysis – Saxl and Wittkower had studied under Heinrich Wölfflin – and the validity of his inherited German formal methods. This assumption, in the opinion of one of Rowe's students, the architectural historian and critic Anthony Vidler, indicated the ‘still pervasive force of the late nineteenth century German school of architectural history in England in the years after the Second World War’.

Type
History
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
© 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.
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 © 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.