The Colin Rowe Model of Urban Form: “Just How to Make a City” 37
Steven K. Peterson
Colin Rowe: The Rediscovery of the City 61
Michael Dennis
From “Mathematics” to “Urbanistics” 77
Antonio Pietro Latini
The Legacy of Colin Rowe and the Figure/Ground Drawing 99
Charles Graves
Type and Transformation 119
James T. Tice
Inland Architect and Contextualism: a Commentary 141
Stuart Cohen
The Influence of Colin Rowe on My Urbanism and Architecture 149
Dhir u A. Thadani
Three Stage Sets in Search of a City: An American Perspective 161
James T. Tice
II. Pedagogy 190
Colin Rowe: My Personal Recollections 193
Jerry A. Wells
The 1967 Cohen-Hurtt Master’s Thesis (abridged) 201
Steven W. Hurtt
Contextualizing Contextualism 227
Brian Kelly
I. Colin Rowe & Urban Design
... the tradition of Modern architecture has tended to produce objects rather than spaces, has been highly involved with the problems of the built solid and very little with the problems of the unbuilt void ... just how to make a city if all buildings proclaim themselves as objects? … [and] any idea of facade, and any idea of necessary interface between the res publica and the res privata is a final and terrible dissimulation.
... attack upon facade and permeation of building as object can only become attack on the street.
The Present Urban Predicament, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, 1, 1981.
“Colin Rowe & Urban Design” provides an analysis of the contemporary city and articulates principles that could guide the design of cities toward a more humane, livable future. It provides a basic lexicon that expands Rowe’s multi-layered critique, connecting the perfunctory to the profound. The visual world of the architecture of the city—urban design—is explained in terms: figure/ground; parti, precedent, and paradigm; ideal type, the circumstantial and resulting deformations; contextualism, type, transformation; and collision and collage. One moves rapidly from the abstractions of Gestalt psychology to concrete architectural examples, and from these to the city described metaphorically, whether as museum or theater emblematic of human nature and culture and, therefore, as an instrument of education. As Rowe’s own ideas and understandings of the city developed along these lines, his early enthusiasm for Modern architecture, and even the notion of a reconciliation of the Modernist City with the Traditional City, began to wane. Described dialectically as the Mod/‘trad’ problem, exploring that speculative possibility was the leitmotif of Studio investigations and Rowe’s writing for much of his later career. Could rapprochement between the Modernist city and the Traditional city be achieved? Could the Modernist freestanding towers and slabs in park-like settings and the Traditional City of streets, blocks, and squares complement each other, reducing the liabilities of each? Over time, as successive Studio attempts at reconciliation proved less than satisfactory, he edged closer and closer to a complete rejection of Modernist ideology and urban forms. By 1970 Rowe saw, as clearly as any of the critics of the Modernist City, the problem of the Machine metaphor coupled with Natural Man (‘noble savage’) that resulted in the skewed idea of towers in a park linked by the automobile. Rowe understood that the resulting impoverishment of cities posed a threat to civilization and to democratic freedoms. The unremediated Modernist city not only eliminated a sense of place but also erased the real and existential space of the polis and the possibility of civic identity.
From “Mathematics” to “Urbanistics”
Antonio Pietro Latini
The disciplinary development of Colin Rowe and the various but remarkably consistent production of the “creative group”1 that consolidated around him, starting in the 1960s, were among the main factors of a broadly shared and largely successful disciplinary attempt. A recognizable structure was restored to the urban design praxis; values and methodological tools were provided and effectively deployable for use in a wide range of applications.
Principles and design rationales, both products of this development, are elements of a system that starts emerging in the late 1940s and is transformed by addition during the next twenty-five years. Like the neck of an hourglass, Rowe and his circle seem to have been able to accumulate, select, and use for reference a generous and yet complex and contradictory tangle of ideas, concepts, methods, and models, variously available in a world of cultural dynamics. Cleverly compared, combined, and conflated, and despite their resistance to a linear reading, these ideas were subsequently spread through the multiple forms and geographies of physical, academic, and professional venues.
Thus, Rowe’s extraordinary stand seems to rest, not on the originality of his inventions, but on his exceptional ability to contribute to the needs of design—and especially urban design—by making a system out of different pieces of knowledge, of combinations and of rationales found in the disciplinary and broader cultural debate. He was not a counter-current intellectual, then. Rather, he was unique in funnelling the vigor of the theoretical turbulence of the time to the use of design.
“Mathematics”
Colin Rowe published his first essay, “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa”, in the March 1947 issue of The Architectural Review2 (Fig. 1). It was destined to have multiple impacts: on a new way of looking at Modern Architecture, on
AR+D
frontispiece:
Superimposition of diagrams from the “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa” and figure/ ground reversal drawing of Wiesbaden by Wayne Copper. Graphic design by J. Tice.
1 Here I adopt the expression “creative group” in the sense described in De Masi, Domenico, ed., L’emozione e la regola. I gruppi creativi in Europa dal 1850 al 1950, Editori Laterza, Roma –Bari, 1989, because it seems to me particularly apt to indicate the collective activity and the dynamics of Rowe’s group before, during, and after his tenure at Cornell University.
2 Rowe, Colin, “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa. Palladio and Le Corbusier compared”, The Architectural Review CI (603), Mar 1947: 101-04, also in Rowe, Colin, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, 1976: 1-27.
alla memoria di Paolo Avarello
The Legacy of Colin Rowe and the Figure/Ground Drawing
Charles Graves
Colin Rowe introduced and continued to advocate the use of the figure/ground drawing as a design tool during his tenure at Cornell University as head of the Urban Design Studio from 1963 to 1990. Even though these characteristic black and white drawings and related versions are well known today, and even though it is a basic tool in the arsenal of urban designers and planners, there remain many unanswered questions surrounding the origins and evolution of this seemingly simple drawing instrument.
Overview
By 1964 Rowe’s students were implementing the figure/ground as a standard tool for presenting their work. In his 1967 Cornell thesis, “The Figure/Grounds”, Wayne Copper described its importance for designing at the urban scale. Over the next decade the figure/ground drawing became the standard format in the studio for imparting a particularly cogent understanding of urban settings and site conditions. Meanwhile, research by Rowe and his students revealed new sources to produce meaningful figure/ground analyses. In Rowe’s 1971 publication of “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal Part II,”1 he first discussed the gestalt theory of figure/ground in relation to architectural (facade) analysis. In 1978 Rowe and Fred Koetter published their seminal Collage City in which they detailed the use of the figure/ground drawing in urban analysis and design. In the same year, Rowe and his design team published “Roma interrotta”. There they further demonstrated how figure/ground could be linked to the conception of public/private space implicit in Giambattista Nolli’s famous 1748 plan of Rome. Rowe’s later years at Cornell expanded the repertoire to include a broad range of city plans as well as landscape examples, especially those derived from Italian Renaissance gardens. All of these were rendered through the use of black or hatched poché for buildings and landscape volumes and white for open space.
By the 1980s and 1990s the figure/ground became an accepted method for both urban analysis and design by many in the profession and the academy. Perhaps the very acceptance of this technique set the stage for a contrarian position
frontispiece: Roma interrotta, detail by Colin Rowe with Steven Peterson, Judith DiMaio and Peter Carl, 1979 (digital image by Charles Graves).
1 Rowe, Colin; Slutzky, Robert, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, Part II ”, Perspecta, 13/14, 1971: 287-301.
Inland Architect and Contextualism: a Commentary
Stuart Cohen
Contextualism was a term that Steve Hurtt, Tom Schumacher, and I began using while students at Cornell University to describe the design strategies of Colin Rowe’s graduate Urban Design Studio in the late 1960s. Tom would subsequently write a description of these urban strategies in a 1971 article in Casabella. Steve would, in his 1983 article for The Cornell Journal, provide a useful developmental history of these design strategies. I was interested in extending the ideas of the Studio’s urban design strategies to the design of individual buildings, with respect to the idea of making additions and interventions based on existing conditions. For me, Contextualism seemed to have relevance with respect to the question of how we determine the starting point for the design of buildings (beyond program). In 1974, the second issue of Oppositions, a publication of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, carried my article, “Physical Context, Cultural Context: Including it All”. The subtitle was a play on the idea of “inclusivism” being put forward by Charles Moore and Robert Venturi, among others. I wished to point out that their, and Rowe’s, positions were not that far apart, although it was clear that the Venturi-Moore group were primarily interested in the inclusion of popular culture and what they celebrated as mundane imagery. Thus my inclusion of cultural context along with physical context in the title of my article.
My article on Contextualism for Inland Architect appeared about a decade later and was not intended to add anything new to the argument. At the time, I was teaching at the University of Illinois, Chicago. I taught a design studio and typically gave, depending on the year I was teaching, problems where both unusual site configurations, and adjacent (often party-wall) buildings, were intended to be strong design determinants. I also frequently gave building addition problems, where the existing building to be modified was a significant work of architecture, demanding consideration. In short, I believed that I was teaching the application of Rowe and his design Studio’s ideas.
The Inland Architect magazine, a storied Chicago publication of the 1890s and first part of the 20th century, had been resurrected in the late 1970s as a publication of the Chicago Chapter of the AIA . Nory Miller, who would later go on to
frontispiece: Map showing John Nash’s Regent Street, London over existing context, Waterloo Place to the Great Quadrant. From John White, Some Accounts of the Proposed Improvements of the Western Part of London, 1814. Color emphasis by Bacon.
Author’s note: As Regent Street is mentioned in the text, the author chose it as an example of a contexual reconfiguring of a city street that both removes and retains existing buildings while constructing new ones to suggest the street as an idealized condition. All illustrations appeared in Edmund Bacon’s, Design of Cities.
II. Pedagogy
I presume architectural education to be a very simple matter; and the task of the educator I am convinced can be quite simply specific as follows: 1) to encourage the student to believe in architecture and Modern architecture; 2) to encourage the student to be skeptical about architecture and Modern architecture; and 3) then to cause the student to manipulate, with passion and intelligence, the subjects or objects of his conviction and doubt.
Architectural Education: USA, Lotus international, 27, 1980.
Is not precedent, and are not its connotations, the primary cement of society? Is not their recognition the ultimate guarantee of legitimate government, legal freedom, decent prosperity, and polite intercourse?
Precedent and Invention, The Harvard Architecture Review, 5, 1986.
Colin Rowe regarded the teaching of studio design and its concomitant learning to be a highly effective, rare, and unique form of education. He argued its potential for other disciplines, as did the 1996 Carnegie Foundation study Building Community by Ernest Boyer and Lee Mitgang.
The common theme for these essays is a ‘contextual’ or ‘site specific’ design approach. Rowe cast doubt on tabula rasa and utopian alternatives, for where to begin? How to generate possibilities, evaluate, and proceed? The existing city as precedent was the primary instrument for studio learning par excellence. It was the medium used as a source of ideas and the medium in which design performance was tested. The ideal, the abstract city, the city of the utopian philosophers, the city as idea with or without definite form, could little instruct. Even Le Corbusier’s utopian proposal for Paris shows it to have been responsive to the city’s deep structure. Contextualism can be seen as an ethical and practical mandate and means for re-examining cities. Any city with a ‘loaded’ context, like Buffalo, NY, was the operative paradigm for investigations into topographies and histories at once unique and commonplace allowing the student to invent designs both general and particular, moving backward and forward in history.
Dissemination of this Studio ‘method’ was given voice by the student work shown, described, and accompanied by essays in The Cornell Journal of Architecture from 1981 to 1991. It is illustrated in projects for 19th and early 20th century towns with canal systems and railway infrastructures in Illinois and Tennessee. This method has also been taught in seminars and in the domains of community service.
Rowe’s teaching was not limited to the Studio or lecture hall and could be highly personalized and impromptu. Questions asked by students prompted suggestions by Rowe: books to read, architectural or urban exemplars to study. His apartment, his ‘salon’, displayed prints, books, and furnishings that opened doors to worlds of ideas, material culture, and matters of taste, both temporal and timeless. Traveling with Rowe, the landscape became a font of historical incidents, related biographies, and a critique of regional character.
The Studio was central. It could appear vague, ill-defined, and ad hoc to outsiders but it radiated a mystique and the students always had a sense that they were on to something ‘big’. The exceptional work effort was undeniable. The University set the meeting time. Otherwise, standard course accoutrement was absent: no syllabus, goal statement, grading standards typical of formal architectural studios. What was evident were maps, aerial photographs, tracing paper, and flurries of intense activity. An esprit de corps was palpable, the productivity remarkable.
Circumstantially, a minimum three-semester program over two regular academic years assured overlapping classes, advanced students acted as mentors and guides to all things Rowe. Each new class was partly accidental. But Rowe’s colleagues directed students to him, and Rowe recruited others, many from the undergraduate program at Cornell. Most intentional was project site selection and absence of ‘program’ specifics. Rowe was skeptical of city planning, social science ‘facts’, and bureaucratic zoning standards. By contrast, the Studio operated in the thick of things, in the messy crucible of an evolving culture, specific to place, bringing history and identity to the fore.
Buffalo and Beyond: The Cornell Urban Design Studio, Theory and Practice 1962–1988
Steven W. Hurtt
Introduction
This essay examines the ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ that is the urban design legacy of Colin Rowe, as developed and illustrated by the Cornell Urban Design Studio during Rowe’s leadership of that Studio for a quarter century, 1962–1988. In 1965, Rowe remarked that the Studio was “totally devoid of theory”, but within a year some Studio students were suggesting otherwise. By 1973, Rowe and former student Fred Koetter had written a propositional urban design ‘theory’ known to us from their book Collage City. It was published in 1978. The work of the Studio is the closest thing we have to a representation of Rowe’s continuous related ‘practice’. In 1996, for the third and final volume of his As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays, subtitled Urbanistics, 1 much of the Studio work was published or republished with commentary either by Rowe himself or with descriptive commentary he endorsed. These two publications offer an opportunity to examine something of the back and forth between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ over twenty-five years of activity. Following a few introductory remarks consisting of cautions about theory/practice, notes about Rowe’s teaching mode, and Rowe’s surprising 1965 “devoid of theory” take on the Studio, the body of my essay has two distinct parts. The first part focuses on the import of the 1966 Buffalo Waterfront project to the development of ‘theory’ through early Studio ‘practice’. The second part is structured by Rowe’s 1996 characterization of the “Cornell Studio Projects and Theses” in his “Introduction” to them. I expand on Rowe’s brief remarks, point-by-point, for purposes of further explanation, clarification, and occasional correction.
Theory / Practice, and Cautionary Notes: The fundamental proposition here is that Rowe’s urban design legacy exists in both verbal and visual forms, and that these can be roughly equated to theory and practice as categorical conveniences for discussion. The first caution is that if the same meaning could be conveyed by words as by images, there would be no need for both. The one may help us understand the other, but they are neither equivalent nor do they necessarily occur simultaneously.2 Practice may lead to, explore, or demonstrate theory. Theory might prompt, promote, or explain practice, at least partially. Second, for our
frontispiece: The Buffalo Waterfront project, shadow plan, Studio project, 1966.
1 Rowe, Colin, As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays 3, Urbanistics, Caragonne, Alex, ed., MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, and London, 1996. See footnote 16.
2 I cannot recall the art critic I am paraphrasing who said as much about writing and painting.
Teaching Urban Design and the ‘Reconquest of Time’
Kevin Hinders
Numerous opportunities have arisen for me to teach urban design based on the teaching of Colin Rowe and his followers. Working from the general to the specific, I will describe my approach to the teaching of urban design at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC ) in four different venues. While each of the venues is distinctly different in multiple ways, all are informed by Rowe’s legacy. One of the venues is offered university wide, the other three are part of the architecture program. The courses are: 1) Design of the Built Environment offered to non-architecture students; 2) an architecture design studio that is part of the regular undergraduate studio sequence based in Urbana-Champaign; 3) a seminar titled Urban Morphology and Design; and 4) The Chicago Studio, a graduate level studio taught in Chicago, now paired with the Urban Morphology and Design seminar. Each of these courses has given me the opportunity to engage and teach the relationships between landscape, urbanism, architecture, and culture to students at a variety of levels within the university and the school, and all have been informed by Rowe’s thinking and writing.
Design of the Built Environment
The Design of the Built Environment course is an elective offering for students enrolled in the UIUC Campus Honors Program. Created specifically for students in other majors who are interested in architecture, the course uses the university and its surrounding context, that is, its various urban environments, as a vehicle to explore architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and urban design. The class incorporates eighteen to twenty walks and site visits over the course of a fifteen-week semester. The walks are somewhat determined by the weather or scheduling and necessarily have only a loose correspondence to the four conceptual themes that otherwise order the course’s four parts. Each part is described below.
PART 1- Approaches to the Design of the Built Environment
Design of the built environment is presented as a complex combination of both art and aesthetics on one hand, and technical aspects on the other. The designer must evaluate the needs of the owners, the occupants, and the needs of the general
frontispiece: Example of Phenomenal Transparency at the Architecture Building.
The Micro-Urbanism of Rome
James T. Tice
Introduction
Although never using the term ‘micro-urbanism,’ 1 Colin Rowe’s teaching in the Cornell Urban Design Studio recognized and engaged this scale of urban design with passion. And it was the Pianta Grande di Roma of 1748, by Giambattista Nolli, that served as a wellspring for these ideas. As an antidote to the limits of Modernist architectural practice and theory that favors large scale interventions, micro-urbanism describes a set of ideas, especially manifest in Rome, that treats the small-scale interface and interaction between architecture and city. Fred Koetter referred to this as “the art of the in-between”.2 Micro-urbanism examines the relationship between a building, or group of buildings, and their immediate setting, including the constructed space of streets, squares, courtyards, and curated landscapes. As an urban design strategy, it favors a dialectical approach that addresses the inevitable contradictions and complex relationships of the city and its architecture. It attempts to address the competing forces of an existing empirical reality and the notion of ideal type. It posits how a resolution between the two could be achieved through a process of accommodation and transformation. Beyond being a useful design tool and frame of reference for historical studies, it has proven to be an effective instrument for articulating contemporary urban design principles—all revealed in hundreds of small-scale urban interventions in Rome—micro-utopias—each one a perfect fragment within an imperfect whole.
Rowe’s interest in Rome and the Nolli map sparked my own interest, particularly at the “in-between” scale of city and building, for nowhere does this twin phenomenon appear with such regularity and stunning brilliance as it does in the city of Rome.3 This interest has led to an extended study of the graphic and cartographic means by which Rome has been recorded over the millennia and how these techniques contribute to our understanding of Roman urbanism. These methods include a) cartography, which has a rich 2,000-year tradition in Rome; b) vedutismo, the art of perspectival rendering of urban landscapes, which reached its peak in the 18th century during the age of the Grand Tour; and c) accurate orthographic drawings first developed in the 15th century by Renaissance architects, climaxing in the early 19th century under the influence of pensioners at the French Academy in Rome. The author focuses on the great documentarians
frontispiece: Detail, Rione IX Pigna, Pianta Grande di Roma, by Giambattista Nolli, 1748. Red inserts from Édifices de Rome Moderne by Paul Marie Letarouilly, ca. 1850. All graphics and photographs by the author unless otherwise noted.
1 The term “micro-urbanism” was suggested to the author by Leon Satkowski.
2 Koetter, Fred. “Notes on the In-Between” in The Harvard Architecture Review 1, “Beyond the Modern Movement”, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, Spr 1980: 62–73.
3 This paper adapts an earlier essay, “Revealing the Micro Urbanism of Rome: A Posthumous Collaboration between G.B. Nolli and P.M. Letarouilly”, Giambattista Nolli and Rome, Mapping the City before and After the Pianta Grande, Verstegen, Ian and Ceen, Allan, eds., Studium Urbis, Rome, 2013. These themes continued in various venues for the author, including the Rowe Rome Conferences from 2014 to 2018 and related online publications and interactive websites described below.
Tice, James, “”Tutte Insieme” Giovanni Battista Falda’s Nuova Pianta di Rome of 1676”. After Falda’s death, his maps were published by De Rossi. The complete editions are: 1676, 1697, 1705, 1730 and 1756. See also Latini, Antonio Pietro, “Urbanistica a Rome nelle piante del Falda”, for a discussion of the changes recorded for each edition. Both essays are in Bevilacqua, Mario and Fagiolo, Marcello, eds., Piante di Roma, dal Rinascimento ai Catasti, Editoriale Artemide, s.r.l., Roma, 2012: 244–271.
The Koetter Kim Practice, a Paragon of Contextualism?
Steven W. Hurtt
Introduction: Context, Collision and Collage
The Koetter Kim urban design and architectural practice is inevitably and logically linked with Colin Rowe’s impact on the field of urban design for multiple reasons. Fred Koetter was a student of note in the formative years of Rowe’s urban design Studio at Cornell (1965–66). He shared the development and authorship with Rowe of Collage City (1970–73), and, with Susie Kim launched their professional practice the same year that Collage City was published (1978). Their practice achieved world renown specifically for its combined urban design and architecture.
Because the associated theories of Collision City, Collage City, and Contextualism would seem to have been fundamental to the Koetter Kim practice, several questions beg for attention. Summarily, how do the associated theories manifest in the work? And how might this have come about? To attempt answers, I note the development and emergence of the theories from the Studio, their entry into the literature, Fred Koetter’s promotion of collision and collage and rumored reservations about contextualism. Then I examine nine Koetter Kim architectural urban projects from among the many in the Koetter Kim monograph (1979–95), with particular attention to the theoretical grounding provided to their practice primarily by Collage City and, surprisingly, more illustrative of Contextualism than either Collision or Collage.
It was at Cornell in the Rowe Urban Design Studio of 1966–67 that ‘contextualism’, ‘collision city’, and ‘collage city’ were incubated.1 Our understanding of urban design was primitive. Reference material was scarce. Mainly, we were predisposed to think that an in situ or context-based understanding of buildings and spaces represented a superior form of architecture – urban design. That view was common among a handful of Cornell faculty and students who shared their knowledge of examples as a corrective critique of the building isolated from its physical context that was typical of architecture history classes. For the Urban Design Studio, Rowe gave no formal seminar or lecture class. He did suggest we look at “this or that”. Otherwise, the Department of Planning offered numerous
frontispiece top to bottom: Galerie d’Orleans, Paris. Imperial Fora, plan, Rome.
Unter den Linden, Berlin. Palazzo Chiericati, Vicenza.
Place des Vosges, Paris. Plaza España, Vittoria Gasteiz, Spain. Louvre Colonnade, Rue de Rivoli, Paris. Imperial Fora, model, Rome.
1 Discussions about naming the evolving ideas as ‘theory’ took place between January 1966 and June 1967, primarily among Stuart Cohen, Fred Koetter, Tom Schumacher and me. Others, then in the Studio, might have contributed also. I remained in Ithaca and the Cornell orbit until June 1970 when subsequent discussions might have included at least Roger Sherwood, Michael Dennis, Jerry Wells, Don Duncan, Alex Caragonne, David Grahame Shane, and Larry Witzling, among others. Jim Tice prompted this essay with remarks on Koetter’s reservations about Contextualism, see footnote 43.
Urbanism at Ground Zero: The Attempted Colin-ization of Lower Manhattan
Barbara Littenberg
Colin Rowe often expressed ambivalence about the physical form of New York City—the urbanism was simplistic and fundamentally monotonous, the blocks were too long and repetitive (at least there was Broadway), there were few public spaces of any quality (Rockefeller Center being the notable exception), and residential squares were few and far between. It was not the place he chose to settle after his retirement from Cornell University, although it had been considered briefly. London, Boston, or Washington, D.C., were far more intriguing options, partly because of their perceived superior urbanism, or perhaps, for the conversation of friends and acquaintances. He had lived on the Upper East Side during his work with the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in the 1960s, and he had visited the city on countless occasions. Lower Manhattan, which, during his lifetime, was a predominately commercial district, probably did inspire in him the same awe of its extraordinary physical being that was experienced by other Europeans from Le Corbusier in the 1930s to Prince Charles today.
I really can’t say with certainty what Colin Rowe’s reaction to the design efforts to rebuild the World Trade Center site, after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, might have been, although I have often pondered the question. Given the myriad stakeholders involved with the rebuilding—governors, mayors, interstate agencies, community boards, real estate developers, business associations, the AIA , and most prominently, committees formed on behalf of survivors, family members of victims, and rescue workers—Colin would have been highly skeptical that urban design, as he taught it and loved it, would have had a voice in such a process. It would have seemed to him an impossible, hopeless undertaking—he would have been right.
However, it proved not to be the complex makeup of constituent groups that undermined urban design in Lower Manhattan in the wake of 9/11. Instead it was the fundamental struggle that played out between two conflicting viewpoints: one put forward by advocates for finding a solution based on the idea of appropriate city form and the other by proponents of the redemptive power of iconic architecture that derived its justification from Modernism. The site would be entangled in what Colin Rowe in his article “The Present Urban Predicament”
Fig. 1. Aerial photograph of iconic Lower Manhattan.
frontispiece: Model view of the Peterson Littenberg final design showing the relationship between the Public Garden and West Street Boulevard. Model photo: Jock Pottle.
