Steven W. Hurtt and James Tice, eds. THE URBAN DESIGN LEGACY OF COLIN ROWE. San Francisco, Applied Research and Design, 2025. Pp. 684. ISBN 978-1-940743-51-6. $70.00

After receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from Princeton, Steve Hurtt spent his career practicing architecture and teaching at Notre Dame and the University of Maryland, where he also served as Dean of the School of Architecture. Now he and his co-editor, James Tice, have presented us with a truly magisterial review of the career and work of Colin Rowe (1920-1999), probably the most influential and important urban planner and architect of whom you have never heard. His legacy is all around us, but since he never devoted himself to ego-gratifying or flamboyant buildings or cityscapes, one suspects that few outside his field are familiar with him. Your reviewer was not, but, in the same way that he realized at the age of 14 that he had always been speaking prose, this book has made him realize that he, like perhaps most of us, has been living amid Rowe’s influences for most of his life.

Colin Rowe spent many years running the Urban Design Studio at Cornell University, and training dozens of students who have gone on to careers in architecture, design, city planning, and policymaking. As noted, his legacy lies not in “statement” buildings, but rather in three areas: his ideas, his pedagogical method, and his intellectual progeny.

THINKER. Rowe began in a rather conventional Modernist architectural vein, in the mold of Le Corbusier, but gradually became disillusioned with what he came to see as the stark, utopian, technophilic—even bordering on messianic and totalitarian—idea of cities as endless ranks of high-rise buildings set in a park, with a place for cars but only questionably for people. A city, he felt, should have a place for its history and encapsulating culture and the lives and psyches of its people, and the buildings therein should be planned with a particular eye to their context, as in the traditional city, growing organically rather than ex nihilo. A humane city was one of streets, blocks, and spaces and squares. A city should be a collage of different elements; not uniformly preserved in amber like Williamsburg, but with new buildings or ensembles added with an eye to history, the physical context, and even, yes, nostalgia. The ideal city should be built not according to a rigorous master plan but through a process of bricolage or tinkering, cobbling parts together so that they cohere with one another and what was already there. Indeed, he described his ideal city once as a well-done American suburb (yes, we have room for lawns and garages) alongside a compact, walkable Italian town.

As this last suggests, he was vigorously opposed to the “physics envy” and “object fixation” of Modernism, but not a Luddite. In opposition to the Modernist Jacobins, he seems to have been more of a Burkean conservative. In design, freedom from regimentation, but at the same time, neither laissez- faire nor anarchy. And he did not even reject Modernism completely; throughout his later career his outlook was open, dialectic, and synthesizing, always seeking rapprochement between views rather than doctrinaire pursuit of a particular model. (Well, you know, Modernism may have antihuman and antiurban implications, but let’s see if it might still have something to offer….)

TEACHER. One suspects that such a flexible, open-ended, and eclectic frame of mind must have been occasionally difficult for Rowe’s students to grasp. And indeed, education at the UDS seems to have been a very free-form, imaginative process: Here’s an idea—how about we redesign the entire center of Rome? Not feasible? OK, then about the waterfront of Buffalo, New York? There was a lot of “Try this. How about that?” And a lot of “maybe this other approach has something to say.” In other words, Rowe was disinclined toward dichotomies and binary approaches; as long as a building or ensemble was treated as part of a greater whole, and history was taken into account, an admixture of Modernist ideas was not to be rejected. He seems to have taken an inductive approach to project planning: first look at the context and derive therefrom hypotheses about what might fit, rather than deducing plans from a rigid “form follows function” absolutism. And he seems to have observed few restrictions on the number and variety of potential intellectual influences on his teaching: his syllabi included works in sociology, literature, psychology, anthropology, millenarian religion, and art history, inter al.

Education at the UDS thus seems to have consisted of imbuing students with more of a world view than a set of concrete tools. Rowe’s approach could be ‘’ambiguous and contradictory,” a “both-and” inclusive pluralism rather than an exclusionary “either-or” Modernism. Or Traditionalism. Even with this book as evidence, this reviewer finds Rowe enigmatic and difficult to pin down, and is not sure he would have thrived in such a program. But clearly many, many students did just that.

ACOLYTES AND FELLOW TRAVELERS.  The 25 authors of the chapters in this book are mostly among them, although not all are graduates of the Urban Design program at Cornell. As this suggests, Colin Rowe’s ideas were not disseminated narrowly to his own students. Once his ideas were out there, they obviously were adopted, mediated, and interpreted by others, even resulting in projects which were inspired--but not fully approved of!—by him. As noted, Rowe was not himself associated with many specific projects, much less any Gehry-esque greatest-hits buildings. But if you have been to Cambridge, Barnard College, Chattanooga, Syracuse University, Carleton College, Battery Park City, South Street Seaport, Sea Ranch, the London Docklands and Canary Wharf, Mexico City, or Tokyo Midtown you have seen his ideas realized. Or Seaside, Florida, the creation of Princeton’s own Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.

But his legacy does not reside only in specific projects by architects subject to his influence. As noted, his intellectual fellow travelers include planners, designers, and policymakers as well. Does your community have form-based zoning? Do its new architectural forms sit comfortably in their surroundings? Does it have historic districts? Walkable neighborhoods? Mixed-use instead of segregated development? Then Colin Rowe’s ideas are to be found there. This is not to say that they are hegemonic, or even necessarily mainstream—America is sufficiently full of cringeworthy architecture which foregrounds authorial egos, not history or community or human scale, for one to realize this. But they have in many ways become a healthy breath in the air about us, and Steve and his co-authors have given us a comprehensive understanding of how and why this is so.

Reviewed by James W. White Princeton ‘63