Colin Rowe
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Colin Rowe (27 March 1920 – 5 November 1999), was a British-born, American-naturalised architectural historian, critic, theoretician, and teacher; he is acknowledged to have been a major theoretical and critical influence, in the second half of the twentieth century, on world architecture and
urbanism Urbanism is the study of how inhabitants of urban areas, such as towns and cities, interact with the built environment. It is a direct component of disciplines such as urban planning, which is the profession focusing on the physical design and m ...
. During his life he taught briefly at the
University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...
and, for one year, at the
University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
in England. For most of his life he was a professor at
Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
in Ithaca, New York. Many of Rowe’s students became important architects and extended his influence throughout the architecture and planning professions. In 1995 he was awarded the Gold Medal by the
Royal Institute of British Architects The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is a professional body for architects primarily in the United Kingdom, but also internationally, founded for the advancement of architecture under its royal charter granted in 1837, three suppl ...
, its highest honour. He was also awarded the Athena Medal from the
Congress for the New Urbanism New Urbanism is an urban design movement which promotes environmentally friendly habits by creating walkable neighbourhoods containing a wide range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually inf ...
posthumously in 2011.


Early life

Colin Frederick Rowe was born in
Rotherham Rotherham () is a large minster and market town in South Yorkshire, England. The town takes its name from the River Rother which then merges with the River Don. The River Don then flows through the town centre. It is the main settlement of ...
, England in 1920 to Frederick W. and Helena (née Beaumount) Rowe. Rowe's father was a schoolteacher . Their only other child, David, was born in October 1928. Colin won a scholarship to the local Grammar School and, later attended the University of Liverpool to study architecture. He was called up for military service in December 1942 and was enlisted in the Royal Air Force. He badly injured his spine in a practice parachute jump and was hospitalised for more than six months. One of the first letters from Rowe published in
The Letters of Colin Rowe: Five Decades of Correspondence
' was written from his hospital bed to his friend and colleague at the University Ursula Mercer.


Theoretical approach

His 1945 MA thesis for
Rudolf Wittkower Rudolf Wittkower (22 June 1901 – 11 October 1971) was a British art historian specializing in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture, who spent much of his career in London, but was educated in Germany, and later moved to the Unite ...
at the
Warburg Institute The Warburg Institute is a research institution associated with the University of London in central London, England. A member of the School of Advanced Study, its focus is the study of cultural history and the role of images in culture – cros ...
, London, was a theoretical speculation that
Inigo Jones Inigo Jones (; 15 July 1573 – 21 June 1652) was the first significant architect in England and Wales in the early modern period, and the first to employ Vitruvian rules of proportion and symmetry in his buildings. As the most notable archit ...
may have intended to publish a theoretical treatise on architecture, analogous to
Palladio Andrea Palladio ( ; ; 30 November 1508 – 19 August 1580) was an Italian Renaissance architect active in the Venetian Republic. Palladio, influenced by Roman and Greek architecture, primarily Vitruvius, is widely considered to be one of th ...
's ''Four Books of Architecture''. Although this idea was not supported by any hard evidence and could not ever be proven, encouraged by Wittkower it established Rowe's way of speculating and imagining what ''might'' have happened: an approach to the history of architecture that was largely imaginary and factually questionable, but which he gradually built into a vastly erudite, coherently argued way of thinking and seeing that exasperated conventional historians, but became the inspiration for a generation of practising architects to consider history imaginatively, as an active component in their design process. Rowe's original approach was based on making comparisons between cultural events that conventional history kept widely separated and categorised, but which he unearthed from his vast personal erudition (in constant development) and placed together for comparison. His unorthodox and non-chronological view of history then made it possible for him to develop theoretical speculations such as his famous essay "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa" (1947) in which he theorised that there were compositional "rules" in Palladio's villas that could be demonstrated to correspond to similar "rules" in Le Corbusier's villas at Poissy and Garches. Although like his MA thesis, this proposal was impossible to support with any evidence, as a speculation it enabled Rowe to elaborate an astonishingly fresh and provocative trans-historical critique of both Palladio and Le Corbusier, in which the architecture of both was assessed not in chronological time, but side by side in the present moment. The originality of this approach had the effect of re-situating the assessment of modern architecture within history and acknowledged history as an active influence. Many years later when Rowe's influence had spread worldwide, this approach had become a key element in the process of architectural and urban design: if "the presence of the past" was evident in the work of many architects in the late 20th. century, from James Stirling to
Aldo Rossi Aldo Rossi (3 May 1931 – 4 September 1997) was an Italian architect and designer who achieved international recognition in four distinct areas: architectural theory, drawing and design and also product design. He was one of the leading exponen ...
,
Robert Venturi Robert Charles Venturi Jr. (June 25, 1925 – September 18, 2018) was an American architect, founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and one of the major architectural figures of the twentieth century. Together with h ...
, Oswald Matthias Ungers,
Peter Eisenman Peter Eisenman (born August 11, 1932) is an American architect. Considered one of the New York Five, Eisenman is known for his writing and speaking about architecture as well as his designs, which have been called high modernist or deconstructiv ...
,
Michael Graves Michael Graves (July 9, 1934 – March 12, 2015) was an American architect, designer, and educator, as well as principal of Michael Graves and Associates and Michael Graves Design Group. He was a member of The New York Five and the Memphis Grou ...
and others, this was largely due to the influence of Rowe. More recently, theorists and critics of the digital turn in architecture stressed the need to update Rowe's method for the present.


Teaching and writings

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 Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for a classical period, classical antiquity in the Western tradition, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. In its purest form, classicism is an aestheti ...
in its various manifestations, and
Modern Movement Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...
"white architecture" of the 1920s - a viewpoint first put forward by
Emil Kaufmann Emil Kaufmann (1891 in Vienna – 1953 in Cheyenne, Wyoming) was an Austrian art and architecture historian. He was the son of Max Kaufmann (died 1902), a businessman, and Friederike Baumwald (Kaufmann) (born 1862). Kaufmann is best known for h ...
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 Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , , ), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was ...
, 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 Contextualism, also known as epistemic contextualism, is a family of views in philosophy which emphasize the ''context'' in which an action, utterance, or expression occurs. Proponents of contextualism argue that, in some important respect, the a ...
school of thought which was likewise critical of modern
urban design Urban design is an approach to the design of buildings and the spaces between them that focuses on specific design processes and outcomes. In addition to designing and shaping the physical features of towns, cities, and regional spaces, urban de ...
and
architectural theory Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings ...
of
design A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product, or process. The verb ''to 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 Camillo Sitte (17 April 1843 – 16 November 1903) was an Austrian architect, painter and urban theorist whose work influenced urban planning and land use regulation. Today, Sitte is best remembered for his 1889 book, ''City Planning According to ...
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. In 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 Sir Isaiah Berlin (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas. Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks ...
and
Karl Popper Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the cl ...
; but paradoxically this also situated his thinking in the same general zone as left-leaning philosophers like
Gianni Vattimo Gianteresio Vattimo (born 4 January 1936) is an Italian people, Italian philosopher and politician. Biography Gianteresio Vattimo was born in Turin, Piedmont. He studied philosophy under the existentialism, existentialist Luigi Pareyson at the Un ...
. 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, and architectural educators during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (in 1966 he served as a fellow at the Graham Foundation in Chicago) at a time when there was a move towards
Postmodern architecture Postmodern architecture is a style or movement which emerged in the 1960s as a reaction against the austerity, formality, and lack of variety of modern architecture, particularly in the international style advocated by Philip Johnson and Henry- ...
with which he may be partly associated - though only to a very limited extent, and only in a philosophical sense, since his intellectual range, and his all-inclusive interest in every movement and style of architecture, placed him far outside any particular stylistic category. Rowe died at the age of 79 on 5 November 1999 in
Arlington County, Virginia Arlington County is a County (United States), county in the Virginia, Commonwealth of Virginia. The county is situated in Northern Virginia on the southwestern bank of the Potomac River directly across from the Washington, D.C., District of Co ...
. A memorial program was held in his honor on 6 February 2000 at The Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC.


"The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa"

Colin Rowe's seminal essay went through five printings in four years and was titled "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa." The text was printed both in essay form and in book form under the same title along with eight other comparably supportive essays. In this essay, Rowe presented his original view of the direct comparative reading of modern architecture alongside neo-Classical architecture. This approach was not generally done or accepted in the architectural literature of the time when the essay was first published in 1947. Rowe asserted the basis of a direct comparison of a villa by
Le Corbusier Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , , ), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was ...
and a villa by
Andrea Palladio Andrea Palladio ( ; ; 30 November 1508 – 19 August 1580) was an Italian Renaissance architect active in the Venetian Republic. Palladio, influenced by Roman and Greek architecture, primarily Vitruvius, is widely considered to be one of th ...
from the 16th century. Rowe's choice was to place Palladio's masterpiece from the 1550s called the Malcontenta (
Villa Foscari Villa Foscari is a patrician villa in Mira, near Venice, northern Italy, designed by the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. It is also known as ''La Malcontenta'' ("The Discontented"), a nickname which—according to a legend—it ...
) into direct comparison with Le Corbusier's villa at
Garches Garches () is a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the centre of Paris. Garches has remained largely residential, but is also the location of Raymond Poincaré University Hospital, which specialises in traumatol ...
for Mr. and Mrs. Michael Stein. Rowe's argument began by asserting that both Garches and the Malcontenta are conceived of as single blocks of roughly identical volumes measuring "8 units in length, by 5 1/2 in breadth, by 5 in height." Rowe then observes that "Each house exhibits an alternative rhythm of double and single intervals; and each house ... displays a comparable tripartite distribution of line of support." As Rowe summarizes: "Palladio is concerned with a logical disposition of motifs dogmatically accepted ... while Le Corbusier ... contrasts the new system with the old and is a little more comprehensive." Rowe continues on in the essay to conclude that, "If Le Corbusier's facades are for him the primary demonstrations of the virtues of a mathematical discipline, with Palladio it would seem that the ultimate proof of his theory lies in his plan ... (At Malcontenta) e facades become complicated, their strict Platonic rationale may be ultimately vitiated by the traditional presence ... of the Ionic order which possesses its own rationale and which inevitable introduces an alternative system of measurement."Rowe (1976), ''The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,'' p. 9. In the end of his essay, Rowe transfers his approach to the shared sympathy of Le Corbusier and Palladio for the mathematical description of the ideal villa by discussing the
Villa Savoye Villa Savoye () is a modernist villa and gatelodge in Poissy, on the outskirts of Paris. It was designed by the Swiss- French architect Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, and built between 1928 and 1931 using reinforced concrete.Courla ...
in comparison to Palladio's
Villa Rotonda Villa La Rotonda is a Renaissance villa just outside Vicenza in northern Italy designed by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. The villa's correct name is Villa Almerico Capra Valmarana, but it is also known as "La Rotonda", "Villa Rot ...
, which he sees as analogous. In his famous closing quote, Rowe gives his highest compliment to both Palladio and Le Corbusier together stating that Palladio and Le Corbusier had "become the source of innumerable pastiches and of tediously amusing exhibition techniques; but it is the magnificently realized quality of the originals which one rarely finds in the works of neo-Palladians and exponents of 'le style Corbu'". For Rowe, in the end these two master architects would have the more enduring word on the mathematics of the ideal villa than the majority of their followers.


Selected works

*''The Architecture of Good Intentions'' (1994) *''As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays'', Collected essays, letters, and papers collected in 3 volumes by MIT Press from his lifetime, Paperback: 216 pages, The MIT Press (July 23, 1999), *''I Almost Forgot: Unpublished Colin Rowe'', edited by Daniel Naegele. The MIT Press (January 10, 2023), *"The Present Urban Predicament" in ''The Cornell Journal of Architecture'', no.1, 1981 *"Roma Interrotta" in ''Architectural Design Profile'', Vol. 49, No. 3-4 (1979) *''Collage City'' (1978) with Fred Koetter *''The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays'' (1976) *"Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal" Part II, ''Perspecta'' 13/14, 1971 *''Italian Architecture of the 16th Century'', with Leon Satkowski, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002, , hard cover: 331 pages.


See also

* The Texas Rangers


References

* * Sherer, Daniel, ''Architecture in the Labyrinth. Theory and Criticism in the United States, Oppositions, Assemblage, ANY, (1973–1999)'', Zodiac 20 (1999), pp. 36–63.
Cornell faculty memorial obituary.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rowe, Colin 1920 births 1999 deaths British architecture writers Urban theorists Cornell University faculty Recipients of the Royal Gold Medal People from Rotherham Architecture educators Academics of the University of Liverpool 20th-century English architects Architects from Yorkshire British emigrants to the United States