There was much debate in Britain after the war as to the correct formulation of modern architecture, still in the shadow of the ‘masters’ − Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Aalto − and especially, given the pressure for post-war productivism and standardisation, to the correct mathematical ordering of the elements of architecture. This debate was divided between those who took the Gropius view of mass-production standards and those who espoused (mainly for aesthetic and cultural reasons) the new humanist mathematics propounded by Le Corbusier in the first volume of his Modulor, published in 1953.
A further note was added by the translation of Matila Ghyka’s Nombre d’Or as The Geometry of Art and Life 1946, a diagram from which Rowe published the next year in his Palladio/Le Corbusier article. The debates were intense, and no more so than at Cambridge in the period 1950-60, when the literal mathematisation of architecture and its future adaption to computer design was being strongly advocated first by Christopher Alexander, then by Lionel March, and supported from 1956 in order for architecture to gain a reputation as a scientific discipline, by the new Professor, Sir Leslie Martin.