ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author recollects the memories of his early life. Colin Rowe's article on The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa had startled the author when he first read it in the Architectural Review. The author talks about someone who saw the rationality of proportion as being the constant factor common to a great historic architect and his contemporary, the much-admired Le Corbusier. Having studied architecture at Liverpool, Colin was then working on an MA thesis on Inigo Jones at the Warburg Institute, supervised by the very same Rudolf Wittkower whose lectures had so entranced the author at Charterhouse. The author soon became embroiled in its mechanics. Colin had some difficulty completing any extended piece of writing, and his great authority among his contemporaries and pupils was based on his brilliant conversation as much as on his publications. Although author and Colin remained friends until his death in Washington, their paths separated when Colin first emigrated to the US.
