Next to the original “Bingham, Robert” you find “as alcoholic” and when it comes to “Bingham, Worth”, the name is followed by a suggestive litany – “death of, drinking of, drugs taken by, gambling by, girlfriends of”.Growing up in such a family had its own ritual atmosphere. Consulting their indexes, you might think young Robbie hardly stood a fighting chance. His great-grandfather, Judge Robert Worth Bingham, had been ambassador to Britain from 1933 to 1937, his grandfather, Barry Bingham Snr, was reigning power of the clan. Robert Bingham Jnr’s father, Worth, was accidentally killed in July 1966, at the age of 34, when “Robbie” was three months old.There are three hefty books on the Bingham family, by Bingham’s aunt, Sallie Bingham (Passion and Prejudice, 1989), by Marie Brenner (House of Dreams, 1988) and the Pulitzer prizewinning Patriarch (1991) by Alex S Jones and Susan Tiffet.

Much of this was in his blood, both the interests and the attraction to certain recreations.He was from a well-known, extremely wealthy Southern family, who had created a newspaper empire in Louisville, Kentucky. The reality is more subtle and more rewarding.
If it must be admitted that Bingham was a lover of women, alcohol and drugs, it must be added that he was equally a lover of literature, music, political policy, modern first editions, hockey and economics both micro and macro. The circumstances of his death – he was found on the bathroom floor of his TriBeCa loft after what was probably a drugs overdose – have provided cheap copy for the media and are easily misrepresented as either the tale of a rich junkie or of an American dynastic curse. That is to say, though he would equally happily have lived to 80, Bingham’s sensibility was sufficiently bold, caustic and audacious that it could easily encompass early death as just yet another maudlin ploy. ROBERT BINGHAM had an overtly enviable existence and, though his accidental death at 33 is self-evidently tragic, his own sophisticated, subversive view of the world might not have seen it so.

In this way he established a crucial continuity in architectural culture.Colin Frederick Rowe, architectural educator and critic: born Rotherham, Yorkshire 27 March 1920; Lecturer, University of Texas, Austin 1953-56; Lecturer, Cambridge University, 1958-62; Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design, Cornell University 1962-85, Andrew Dickson White Professor in Architecture 1985-90 (Emeritus); died Washington DC 5 November 1999.. His first essay, “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa” (first published in the Architectural Review, 1947), was in some ways his best, but all his essays were tremendous in showing how modern architecture can be understood through the subtleties of form that it employs. His life was bent on the discoveries that come only through close reading; he did not pursue a career.A master of hermeneutics, he thought nothing of cultural studies and preferred to ignore “the whole semiology thing”. In his half-basement room at Cornell, hemmed in by seemingly eternal snows, he confirmed his opinions through the books that surrounded him, and his erudition was based on an unerring sense of character, and hence of provenance.Rowe will be remembered for his conversations as much as for his writings, which nevertheless, through the good offices of his editor, Alex Caragonne, form in the end a considerable corpus, committed to paper only in his final years. The current movement in new urban design is a direct result of the enthusiasm he inspired. At Cornell his influence was directed at city planning, not in the direction of management, but of exploring that margin where city form and architectural form act together to create a sense of place and occasion. In 1962 he returned to America, and from then on taught at Cornell University, except for prolonged visits to Italy which, by his own admission, made him more or less italianizzato.