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Colin Rowe
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Colin Rowe (born 1920 - died November 5, 1999, Arlington County, Virginia, USA) was a British architect, architectural critic and teacher. He wrote a number of papers in the 1940s that explored a proportional relationship between Classical architecture and Modernism. Later in life he came to somewhat regret his earlier championing of the modern movement, chiefly because of the destructive effects of that movement on the historic city.[1]
His chief importance as a teacher and writer on these subjects, which greatly influenced architectural thinking. His book Collage City (with Fred Koetter) proposed a new way of analysing urban form as the fragmented, incomplete result of every attempt ever made to organise it logically. In architecture he was nostalgic for nineteenth-century eclecticism and advocated that architecture in the modern age should abandon its purist abstration and allow itself to be influenced by influxes of historical references.
This attitude was profoundly influential on his acolyte and friend, James Stirling whom he taught at the University of Liverpool in the late 1940s. 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 at a time when there was a move towards Postmodern architecture, a cultural fashion now defunct with which he may be partly associated - though only to a very limited extent, since his erudition and the range of ideas that interested him placed him far beyond the narrow constraints of any passing cultural fashion or "ism".
- The architecture of Good Intentions (1994)
- As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essay (1996)
- The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (1976)
- Collage City (1978) - Collaboration with Alfred Koetter
- ^ Curl, James Stevens [2006]. A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (Paperback), Second (in English), Oxford University Press, 880. ISBN 0-19-860678-8.
