The Consequences of Dialogue and the Virgilian Nostalgia of Colin Rowe

Abstract

At the time Colin Rowe published the now-famous essay “The Mathematics of the Idea Villa” (1947) he was close to completing his M.A. in the History of Art as Rudolf Wittkower’s only student at the Warburg Institute in London. Rowe’s unpublished master’s thesis, titled “The Theoretical Drawings of Inigo Jones: Their Sources and Scope,” demonstrates how Rowe began to explore the method of comparative dialogical technique through the use of literary texts, images, and diagrams in the construction of the history of architecture as myth. While it has been widely acknowledged that Rowe is an important source on the work of Jones, Rowe’s development and application of the technique of dialogical construction – often relying less on true factual evidence than on imagination – has rarely been examined. This Rowe-ian myth will be viewed as an act of dialogical construction: a theoretical positioning of the role of history within the discipline of architecture.