“John Tuomey applied for the Rome scholarship the same year I did. However, James Stirling had just won the commission for the Neue Staatsgalerie, and wanted John to work on it, so he withdrew his application. Just as well really,” Bob Allies muses, “John probably would’ve got it if we were competing”.

It’s with this rather characteristic modesty that Allies, co-founder of Allies and Morrison, describes the application that led him to spending nine months in Rome between 1981 and 1982 as the Rome Scholar in Architecture. Allies had applied four years after finishing his Part 2, while working for Michael Brawne.

His time in Rome was spent considering the parallels between Renaissance architecture and Mannerism. Allies found himself fascinated by the evolution of architecture in this time from a stylistic rule that considered the building as a perfect object, to one prepared to adapt or adjust to something more complex. This shift was one he saw mirrored in the changes in modernism in the 1980s.

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