Note 520 — CHAPTER 24 ARCHITECTURE CALLED TRADITIONAL IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

‘Compositionalism’ has been suggested by Colin Rowe as a name for the style-phase with which this section deals. Composition was then conceived by many architects and theorists as an absolute to which the re-use of any sort of stylistic forms could be accommodated. It is at least open to suspicion, for example, that Rogers’s Pierson College at Yale was designed originally with Gothic forms and then re-cast as Neo-Georgian. Later eyes than our own will doubtless find it possible to identify the period characteristics of traditional work of the twenties in the way many critics already feel able to do with the nineteenth-century revivals. The period-designation ‘President Harding’ may some day perhaps be as meaningful as ‘General Grant’, if hardly comparable to ‘Victorian’!