Colin Rowe

684 pages

The Urban Design Legacy of Colin Rowe is a must read for anyone who cares about the quality and meaning of the diverse environments we inhabit from modest neighborhood communities to grand social and civic institutions.

Colin Rowe (1920–1999) profoundly influenced the discipline of urban design across the domains of theory, teaching, and the practice of architecture and planning as we know them today.

In his 1978 Collage City, co-authored with Fred Koetter, Rowe rebuked the hegemony of doctrinaire Modernist proposals and projects that had already proved devastating to the city in their zeal to sweep away ‘slums’. He exposed their rationales as a stew of Zeitgeist rationales, utopian, and millennialist fantasies.

Thirty-one essays by Rowe’s former students, colleagues, and fellow urbanists, describe Rowe’s life experiences and intellectual grounding in architecture, art criticism, psychology, and liberal philosophy, and how these informed his “urbanistics”. One sees Rowe’s graduate Urban Design Studio at Cornell (1962–1990) exploring historic models, techniques, and developing the related theories of Contextualism, Collision City, and Collage City.

In this book’s closely related text-image format, the reader sees how the fundamental principles of perception psychology informed figure-ground studies of urban form such that the process of analysis and synthesis became nearly simultaneous. The introduction of an eclectic range of historic exemplars further invigorated that process. Exemplars also could serve to test and validate, by direct comparison, the size and scale of developing design propositions. One sees Rowe employing these design processes in preliminary sketches for what became his team’s highly influential submittal to the 1978 Roma interrotta exhibition.