In 1953 Rudolf Wittkower referred to proportion as ‘a problem that to-day is perhaps more on artists’ and architects’ minds than at any time during the last 150 years’. Indeed, from the end of the Second World War until the late fifties, proportion aroused exceptional interest among artists and architects. Why, we might ask, at a time of prevailing modernist ideology, was the historically rooted and rather esoteric subject of proportion of absorbing interest to many architects, and why should that interest have vanished towards the end of the fifties?