The “Definitive Book on Colin Rowe’s Urban Design”, The Urban Design Legacy of Colin Rowe, published by ORO Editions, just came out. The book presents a comprehensive study and collection of Rowe’s work through a number of essays that trace his influence and legacy, focusing on urban design.

Colin Rowe (1920–1999) was one of the central figures in post-war architectural theory, not because he created a single doctrine, but because he supplied precise analytical tools that shifted how architects read buildings and cities. Rowe taught Architecture and Urban Design at Liverpool University and the University of Texas at Austin. Here, between 1951 and 1957, the fresh programme was formed by a group of influential teachers, later dubbed the “Texas Rangers”, who established grounds for postmodern revolution in architecture. Rowe continued to teach at Cambridge University and for another 30 years at Cornell. Rowe was awarded the Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education in 1985 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1995. His unique perspective on architecture and urban studies remains seminal for the discipline today.

Key ideas he put forth are the concept of ‘collage’, notably presented in Collage City (1979), coauthored by Fred Koetter, ‘adopted city’, and the idea of ‘transparency’ (in Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, 1963, with Robert Slutzky), proponing the layerings, simultaneity, and continuity of time, rejecting the seeming rupture modernist architecture and its total planning strived for. As Ed Cutler writes, a Collage City proposed “a city of fragments from the past, present and future, taking inspiration from working examples in existing cities; some scientific, others picturesque; some antique, others contemporary; some may be rational, whilst others disordered”, offering a non-total, a never-finished Utopia, and contextuality, using fragments and excursors, such as “Memorable streets, Stabilizers, Potentially Interminable Set Pieces, Splendid Public Terraces, Ambiguous and Composite Buildings, Nostalgia Producing Instruments, Gardens”, that users can appropriate, acustom, allowing the city evolve beyond immediate subscription. Collage City gives designers actionable tools—figure/ground relationship studies, typological reading, incrementalism—rather than ideology. Mixed-use development, rather than nostalgic ecclecticism, conviviality, analytical and incremental rather than total approach, all continue to permeate the urban studies discourse.

The Urban Design Legacy of Colin Rowe is a collection of works by Rowe’s students and fellows, who gathered at a conference first held in Rome in 2014, with subsequent events across the globe. The conferences gathered material and showed unceasing interest in Rowe’s work in pedagogy, and through practice, following the ideas of the production of space with architecture as a participant in the city-making, rather than an object. Rowe critiqued the alienation of the machinic city and capricious man, and, concerned about the climate future, declared himself an ecological partisan.