ABSTRACT
Shortly after Le Corbusier published The Modulor, the architectural histo-
rian Rudolf Wittkower published a short book, Architectural Principles in
the Age of Humanism. Considering himself chiefly a scholar of the Baroque,
Wittkower presented this text on Renaissance architecture as a diversion
from his main body of work; the volume reworked three essays already pub-
lished in the The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes during
the previous decade.1 For architects, on the other hand, this thin book-often
concerning projects that were never built-continues to eclipse Wittkower’s
thousands of pages on the Italian Baroque.2 Moreover, in this text, Wittkower
constructed the image of Renaissance architecture and its use of the Vitruvian
Figure that continues to inform contemporary architecture. This understand-
ing also helped to construct the Modulor as heir to this tradition. In this
chapter, I examine Wittkower’s arguments and their role within the larger
discourses on proportion of which his book was an important catalyst. We
also encounter Wittkower’s student, Colin Rowe and how his work allowed
his teacher’s historical arguments to be transferred into post-war design
processes that emphasize the “diagram” as the locus of innovation.
