4
How useful?
The past has long offered the architect a series of models,
provocations and inspirations, which have to a varying
extent helped to shape his or her artistic and professional
practice. The introduction of Roman antiquity as a source of
formal and typological models in fi fteenth-century Florence
and Rome witnesses the emergence of a new awareness of
the past and its importance for the present. We can now call
this new conceptual relationship an emergent historical con-
sciousness. As such, this sense of historicity makes up part
of the foundations of modern architectural culture; even
when an architectural movement, like the Bauhaus, has taken
a rhetorical stance against historical models and precedents,
it has been aware of the historicity of its choices.^1 Architects
not only quote from the past, they also assess their work and
the concept of contemporary architecture against historical
measures. For several centuries architecture maintained this
relationship with antiquity, but it extends well beyond this
particular point of reference. Focillon, for example, explains
the cyclical recurrence of historical forms in La vie des formes
(1934); Colin Rowe explores the relationship of modernism
to the Renaissance on ‘rational’ grounds in ‘The Mathematics
of the Ideal Villa’ (1947); Zevi insists on the importance
of a mannerist archetype for the post-war modernist in
Michelangiolo architetto (1964); and Tafuri argues the
dangers of architectural historians seeing too many lessons