The former took the art-historical concept of Mannerism, newly imported into Britain by Wittkower and Pevsner, and applied its imputed formal distortions and inversions to Modernism, especially in the reading of the layers implied or stated in facades; the latter ranged from the Modernist notion of ‘transparency’ opposing the literal transparency of a Gropius at Dessau, to the implied, phenomenal, transparency of Le Corbusier’s project for the League of Nations building. Referring to the complex layering of the picture-plane in Cubist painting, the authors identified a series of striations passing through the volumes of Le Corbusier’s project, illustrated in axonometric.
This model of Modernism’s Mannerism was disturbed, however, with Eisenman’s discovery of Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio, Como. Here, and perhaps despite the presence of Rowe, he was confounded by a paradigm that did not seem to fit the Palladian/Corbusian model. A solid cubic block layered and cut as if made of compliant cheese − Mannerist in its depth of surface, but not at all Palladian in plan, and certainly not susceptible to analysis according to the principles of le plan libre. The shift that Eisenman worked was one that still remained within the Corbusian paradigm but that took off from an interesting and deliberate ‘misinterpretation’ of the formal principles set out in Vers une architecture: ‘volume’, ‘surface’, ‘plan’.