page_title: Colin Rowe
section_title: Teaching and writings
hierarchical_section_title: Colin Rowe / Teaching and writings
caption_attribution_description: English: Villa near Venezia. Front toward the canal.
context_page_description: Colin Rowe, was a British-born, American-naturalised architectural historian, critic, theoretician, and teacher; acknowledged as a major intellectual influence on world architecture and urbanism in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, particularly in the fields of city planning, regeneration, and urban design. During his life he taught briefly at the University of Texas at Austin and, for one year, at the University of Cambridge in England. For the majority of his life he taught as a Professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Many of Rowe’s students extended his influence throughout the architecture and planning professions having become internationally prominent architects. In 1995 he was awarded the Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects, its highest honour.
context_section_description: Between 1950-52, as a tutor at the Liverpool School of Architecture, he inculcated this original approach to modern architecture into the malleable 24-year-old architecture student James Stirling, only six years his junior. In Rowe's view, by that time modernism in architecture was already finished;  what was intended to be a revolution had failed, but in Stirling he had found the means to create a new type of "modernist neo-classicist" architect; the two became lifelong friends, and all of Stirling's work in architectural practice was deeply indebted to Rowe's more or less continuous critical input. It has often been said that Stirling was "Rowe's draughtsman".
  Between the 1950s and his death, Rowe published a number of widely influential papers that influenced architecture by further developing the theory that there is a conceptual relationship between modernity and tradition, specifically Classicism in its various manifestations, and Modern Movement "white architecture" of the 1920s - a viewpoint first put forward by Emil Kaufmann in his classic book "Von Ledoux bis Le Courbusier" (1933). Although he remained an admirer of the achievements of the 1920s modernists, chiefly in the work of Le Corbusier, Rowe also subjected the modern movement, which he considered a failure, to subversive modes of criticism and interpretation.
  Rowe was among the first to openly denounce the failures of modernist urban planning and its destructive effects on the historic city; many of his most important books and essays are in fact more concerned with urban form than with architectural language. This early work, led to the contextualism school of thought which was likewise critical of modern urban design and architectural theory of design wherein modern building types are harmonized with urban forms usual to a traditional city.
  Rowe was the Andrew Dickson White Professor of Architecture at Cornell University, where he taught from 1962 until his retirement in 1990. In the course of his brilliant and very influential academic career he focused on developing an alternative method of urban design derived in part from the earlier work of Camillo Sitte but largely original, and based on the making of cities through a process of collaged, superimposed pieces; the ideal model for this pragmatic, anti-doctrinaire approach was the ruined villa of the Roman Emperor Hadrian at Tivoli, outside Rome.
  1n 1981 he started the Cornell Journal of Architecture and contributed to issue 1 with "The Present Urban Predicament" and to issue 2 with "Program vs. Paradigm."
  His chief significance was as a teacher and writer on these subjects, which greatly influenced architectural thinking. His book Collage City (with Fred Koetter) is his theoretical treatise that sets out various analyses of urban form in a number of existing cities known to be aesthetically successful, examining their actually existing urban structure as found, revealing it to be the end product of a ceaseless process of fragmentation, the collision/superimposition/contamination of many diverse ideas imposed on it by successive generations, each with its own idea. In architecture his thinking paralleled his ideas about the city: he was nostalgic for nineteenth-century eclecticism, advocating that architecture in the modern age should abandon its purist abstraction and allow itself to be influenced by influxes of historical references.
  Philosophically, Rowe's conviction that pragmatic, discrete, and episodic ideas are more meaningful and useful than totalising, overarching, all-inclusive concepts led him towards the political right, and to such philosophers as Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper; but paradoxically this also situated his thinking in the same general zone as left-leaning philosophers like Gianni Vattimo.
  As he continued to publish ground-breaking, intellectually rich, unconventional essays on the history and theory of architecture, and became a permanent resident of the United States (becoming a US citizen towards the end of his life) he went on to influence many other architects, students,
caption: Villa Foscari by Palladio was studied by Colin Rowe in his essay on "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa".
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