For all intents and purposes, it was, indeed, just that: a brilliant play of places, persons and events. Since our design and history for sector 8 were not singled out by Huxtable for acknowledgement, as were others in her critique, I often wondered if she merely accessed the formal manipulations and ignored, or even read, our text of substantiation.

With all this in mind, and realizing that the other invited speakers would, most certainly dwell on formal maneuvering, I delved, once again, into the text. I realized that my interest was not with the formal and often gratuitous manipulations, so seductive to those of us concerned with design and form.

My fascination was, and still is, centered on the fictitious history Colin wrote to accompany our design proposal. I wonder who remembers it, who has read it, and has anyone actually considered its significance as the counterpart to the design process and proposal? Colin, always the alchemist at heart, conjures Rome, The Lost and Unknown City, “a Rome that could have been, but never was; an invented history that might have been, but never was.”10 It is certainly true that our history, more specifically Colin’s, was “an alibi for topographical and contextual concerns”11 which positioned us for design, in both the spirit of Nolli’s aesthetic and Colin’s interest in figure to ground. But these were the two-dimensional aspirations, and it strikes me that what has been overlooked is the true raison d’etre; the fictive history, itself. Even though the exhibition posed itself as an “argument” about Rome’s urban tissue and implied that something had been “interrupted or lost since 1748,” for Rowe, the text, was not so much about the design parse, but an excuse for him to indulge in his favorite game: the “what ifs” of history. Many of us who were in Colin’s orbit, know the game well: “what if” Queen Victoria had been born Prince Victor, a male heir to the throne? What then!? “What if” Napoleon had been born in Corsica two days earlier? That would have meant he would have been born Italian, not French. What then? What about Waterloo and all the rest?

These games of speculation were molto suggestivo (a Colinism) and, yes, he could spin the narrative to satisfy any proposed scenario, since his grasp of historical events and the lineages of buildings and personalities that populated the history of any particular time was so deep as to be almost unimaginable. Colin, in the words of Barbara Littenberg, also a panelist and co-chair at the 2014 symposium said, in essence, “his style of conversation informed both his lectures and writings,” and his method “revolved around the play of unlikely things — juxtapositions...”12

Thus after many re-reads of our, or, of Rowe’s speculative history, I wondered why has no one translated Colin’s imagination and brilliance of memory and visual recall into a pictorial exposition of sector 8?