Collage City

By Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter

Book Overview

This book is a critical reappraisal of contemporary theories of urban planning and design and of the role of the architect-planner in an urban context. The authors, rejecting the grand utopian visions of "total planning" and "total design," propose instead a "collage city" which can accommodate a whole range of utopias in miniature.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262680424
• ISBN13: 9780262680424
• Release Date: March 1984
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 1.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 8.3" x 11.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Difficult, opaque, frustrating, but important

I am a second-generation Rowe disciple, I guess. I studied with a Rowe acolyte in graduate school and worked with co-author Fred Koetter in an urban design studio. Without the efforts these teachers have made to bring Rowe's ideas to urban design students, they may well have been neglected, because Collage City is a mess. It is badly marred by dense thickets of poorly-edited, idiosyncratic prose. It was one of the more frustrating books I had to read in school, but I'm glad it was required, because the close readings uncovered real gems of theory. Rowe reintroduced the complexities and possibilities of art into urban design right at the peak of Modernism's influence. Architecture was still in the thrall of La Ville Radieuse and socialist-utopian projects that aimed to simplify and disinfect cities. Jane Jacobs saw the social perils of these projects, Colin Rowe saw the architectural perils. His critique of the Modern project was among the most powerful, and among the least cogent. Still, though it requires some serious digging in prose-mud, the gems are there and worth the search. I recommend this book for graduate-level urban theorists or serious urban design students. But there are more accessible urban design primers: Aldo Rossi, et al, The Architecture of the City, for example, covers much of the same ground Rowe so spottily tilled [except where Eisenman is involved in the book: he is a worse prose-stylist than Rowe]. For non-specialists I also recommend Witold Rybczynski's City Life as a thoughtful and LUCID introduction to American urbanism, along with a critique of the last few decades of urban "development".

Most Important Book on Urban Design Theory Today

Colin Rowe proposes a form of inclusive urbanism that meshes the modern city with the traditional city.

The Theoretical Underpinings of Rowe's Urban Design Studio.

Rowe and Koetter's brilliant excursus of urban design theory via the texts and contexts of intellectual history.