Aldo Rossi regarded the work of Le Corbusier and Mies with ambivalence. He was brilliant enough to realise that conditions during his time foreclosed any profound developments within a modernist framework. In other words, these conditions are really impersonal constraints that manifest themselves within a given period. For Rossi, a conservative proto-modern approach seemed a more productive direction at that point. Today, we can consider modernism from the point of view of persistence and that of novelty and this necessarily involves inverting certain assumptions built into modernism.