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. During his life he taught briefly at the University of Texas at Austin and, for one year, at the University of Cambridge in England. For most of his life he was a professor at Cornell University 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, its highest honor. He was also awarded the Athena Medal from the Congress for the New Urbanism posthumously in 2011.
Early life
Colin Frederick Rowe was born in Rotherham, England in 1920 to Frederick W. Rowe and Helena Beaumount. 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 hospitalized 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 at the Warburg Institute, London, was a theoretical speculation that Inigo Jones may have intended to publish a theoretical treatise on architecture, analogous to Palladio'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, Robert Venturi, Oswald Matthias Ungers, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves 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.