without Utopia:
Form
Colin Rowe
Contextualizing
JOAN OCKMAN,ColumbiaUniversity
At a symposium held at Cornell Universi-
ty's College of Architecture two years ago,
marking Colin Rowe's retirement after five
decades of teaching (the latter three in
Ithaca), the architectural critic and histo-
rian admitted to feeling some discomfiture
at the "mini-apotheosis" he was being ac-
corded at this stage in his career.Comment-
ing on a slide of a ceiling painting by
Giovanni BattistaTiepolo with angels tum-
bling out of the picture frame, he acknowl-
edged that "great heights tend to induce
in me a fear of falling." Musing autobio-
graphicallyon the complexities and contra-
dictions of his own persona, he wrylychar-
acterized himself as a thinker who thought
too much, a writerwho deleted more than
he ever wrote, and an architect
manqui.
Notwithstanding this characteristically
ironic self-reflection on his own place in
history-and the suspicion that the chorus
of praise might also be a way of burying
him-it seems that the time is now propi-
tious to reassess a figure whose career has
coincided with the trajectory of Anglo-
American architectural thought since
World War II and at the same time has
served significantlyto define it.
Rowe's recent publication of a three-
volume compendium of his "recollections
and miscellaneous essays" confirms this
sense of timeliness. Engagingly titled As I
Was Saying and edited by his longtime
friend and former student Alexander Cara-
gonne, the collection contains published
and unpublished writingsdating from 1953
to 1995, including critical reviews and re-
flections, memoirs, interviews, correspon-
dence, expositions of the work of students
in his urban design studio at Cornell, obitu-
aries of close friends like James Stirling
and Alvin Boyarsky,memorandums to him-
self, occasional pieces, and a number of
448 JSAH / 57:4, DECEMBER1998
Review
Essay
major essays that originally appeared in
ephemeral publications. Accompanied by
new reminiscences and autocritiques, the
collection-organized roughly chronologi-
cally as Texas,Pre-Texas,Cambridge;Cornel-
liana; and Urbanistics-has the retrospec-
tive flavor of a coda to a career, despite the
title's implication that the author is still in
mediasres. These miscellanea also consti-
tute the author's largest body of published
work to date. Together with a book-length
essay entitled TheArchitecture of GoodInten-
tions:Towardsa PossibleRetrospect, published
in 1994-a "Geistesgeschichte piece" in the
author's description-it expands the Rowe
repertory beyond the canonical early ar-
ticles collected two decades ago (again with
retrospective addenda and corrigenda) as
TheMathematicsof the Ideal Villa and Other
Essays(1976) and the postmodernist mani-
festo Collage City, coauthored with Fred
Koetter (1978). It also gives credence to
the legend of this singular figure, now in
his late seventies, as one of the most bril-
liant yet idiosyncratic architectural think-
ers of our time, suggesting why, despite his
relativelymodest output, he has been such
a charismatic presence for more than one
generation of architectural students, prac-
titioners, and colleagues.
Further attesting to his continued influ-
ence has been a stream of critical interpre-
tations, honorific events, lecture occasions,
and republications. In addition to the fest
at Cornell, which elicited, among other
contributions, a perceptive appreciation by
George Baird, subsequently published in
Assemblage,'there is now a book on the
"Texas Rangers"-a fully detailed
chronicle and interpretation by Caragonne
of the architectural pedagogy devised at
the University of Texas at Austin in the
mid-fifties by Rowe, together with John
Hejduk, Bernhard Hoesli, Robert Slutzky,
and others.2 This book makes a case for
Rowe's major but largely "underground"
influence on postwar architectural educa-
tion. There has also been a monographic
double issue of ANY magazine entitled
"Form Work: Colin Rowe" (1994). Guest
edited by Robert Somol, this includes sev-
eral sharp contributions, especially by Stan
Allen and Paulette Singley (the latterinvolv-
ing the conceit of reading Rowe's philoso-
phy in terms of his furniture), as well as an
affectionate but left-handed omaggioby Pe-
ter Eisenman, demonstrating that Rowe's
thinking is still sufficiently radical to pro-
voke oedipal reactions from the latter-day
avant-garde.3
Lastyear an internationalsymposium at
the Eidgen6ssischeTechnische Hochschule
in Zurich,"Learningfrom ModernArchitec-
ture," organized by Werner Oechslin, con-
vened Roweand others in the Texas-Cornell
orbit for the thirtieth anniversary of the
Institutffir Geschichte und Theorie der Ar-
chitektur,founded by Hoesli. The Swissar-
chitect, who died in 1984,joined the ETH
facultyafter returning from Austin and was
responsiblefor a book publicationof "Trans-
parency" in German in 1968. Written by
Rowe in collaboration with the painter
Slutzkyin 1955-1956 in Texas, "Transpar-
ency" may be Rowe'smost seminal writing.
A two-partessay that belatedly appeared in
the Yalejournal Perspecta in 1963 and 1971
after being rejected by Nikolaus Pevsner at
Architectural Review(presumedlyfor its anti-
Gropius bias), it widely established the au-
thors' distinction between literal and phe-
nomenal transparency, takingcubistpainting
and Gestalt psychology as the bases for a
new theory of visualperception in architec-
ture. (The German publication contained
only the first part of the essay,amplified by
Hoesli's extensive commentary as well as
previouslyunpublished notes by the authors
in English.) The ongoing relevance of
"Transparency" within architectural dis-

ColinRowe,Lockhart, by RobertSlutzky
Texas,1955.Photograph
course has been something of a phenom-
enon in itself, as it has continued to be
republishedover the yearsand its categories
applied to design teaching. Part one was
translatedinto French for the first time in
1992 in the series "Droits et regards," di-
rectedbyPaulVirilio--who washimselfinter-
ested in Gestalt theory in the fifties-and
reissued in 1997 in both German and En-
glish by Birkhaiuser.All three editions con-
tain a new introduction by Oechslin.4
The divagations and involutions of
Rowe's thinking are apparent to anyone
with a passing familiaritywith his work:his
fundamental ambivalence about modern-
ism, his perambulation of different cul-
tures (British, American, Italian), his per-
verselyeclectic tastes,his often infuriatingly
indirect approach to his quarry, and the
dazzling breadth of his erudition, ballast-
ing a historical imagination that can insti-
gate a leap from Giuseppe Terragni to
Benjamin Disraeli with acrobatic ease. Yet
one underlying idea, or set of ideas, has
remained his constant preoccupation-
one may say obsession-over the course of
his career.It is hardlyfortuitous that he has
seized on Isaiah Berlin's distinction be-
tween the hedgehog and the fox-"The
fox knows many things but the hedgehog
knows one big thing"-as a way of classify-
ing different architectural temperaments.
To wit, Frank Lloyd Wright is a hedgehog,
EdwinLutyensa fox, Le Corbusiera combi-
nation.5 Rowe himself, while partaking of
the nimble wit of the fox, unquestionably
qualifies as a hedgehog. His continuing
theme has been the failure of the utopian
project of modernism, the naive and tragic
aspiration on the part of modern archi-
tects to construct the future of society
through architecture. Believing itself to be
engaged in "a bout with destiny,"modern
architecture engendered only "a morning-
after nausea," in Rowe's judgment.6 This
theme, which, as I suggest below, inevitably
reflects the relationship between Rowe's
ideas and his biography, leads him to at-
tack all Zeitgeistconceptions of architec-
ture, whether inspired by Hegelian, Chris-
tian, Marxian, socialist, technofuturist, or
any other teleologies, and ultimately to
project his gaze both backward and for-
ward: backward to premodern architec-
tural theories frankly based on style and
taste, forward to the possibilities of form
disburdened of absolutist apologetics and
a postmodern "end of ideology."
The theme is alreadyimplicit in Rowe's
well-known first essay, a comparison be-
tween the geometry of Andrea Palladio's
Villa Malcontenta and Le Corbusier'sVilla
Stein-de Monzie at Garches, published in
1947 while he was a student of Rudolf
Wittkower'sat the WarburgInstitute.7With
this remarkabledebut, Rowe demonstrated
his facilityat W6lfflinianclose-formalread-
ing and the neo-Palladian thematics im-
plicit in Wittkower'sArchitectural Principles
in theAgeofHumanism,published two years
later. More subversively,Rowe countered
the avant-gardeaura of Le Corbusier's ar-
chitecture by showing how ingeniously and
eclecticallyone of the most polemical mod-
ernists had appropriatedand recontextual-
ized the Classical tradition. Likewise, in
subsequent essays on modern architec-
ture's tendencies to absorb both manneris-
tic and classicizing devices, Rowe further
REVIEW
ESSAY 449
undercut modernism's claims to being a
schismatic break with the past. He not only
demonstrated the inevitabilityof historical
precedent as a source of formal invention
but also disclosed modern architecture's
penchant for "inverted spatial effects," as
well as its "unsuspecting pursuit of symme-
try and centralization."8
But if (premodern) history was already
one element of Rowe's revisionist reading
of modern architecture by the 1950s, the
other, somewhat paradoxically, was mod-
ern painting. The two "Transparency"ar-
ticles could almost have been titled "Archi-
tecture toward Painting." So, for that
matter, could Henry-Russell Hitchcock's
book PaintingtowardArchitecture of 1948, in
which Hitchcock declared the superiority
of formal values over functional ones and
"the vitalityof abstractart as a major influ-
ence on modern architecture."' The turn
to painting in the fifties as a model for
architecture,especiallycubism and neoplas-
ticism, must be understood as an attempt
to reorient the discipline awayfrom func-
tionalist criteria toward aesthetic ones.
Rowe and Slutzky'sconcern with opticality
("retinal intelligence"), frontality, and
structured ambiguity-whether produced
by spatial stratification or compressed on
the facade plane-parallels the preoccupa-
tions of Clement Greenberg, the foremost
American art critic of the period. In an
essay of 1949 entitled "Our Period Style,"
Greenberg asserted that a new unity was
emerging among the visual artsin America
at midcentury, based on the painterly aes-
thetics of self-referentialityand flatness.'0
Similarly,in their first "Transparency"
article, Rowe and Slutzky privileged the
paradoxical and painterly effects of phe-
nomenal transparencyover those of literal
(see-through) transparency in architec-
ture. Taking Le Corbusier'svilla at Garches
and League of Nations project to repre-
sent the first attitude, and Gropius's Bau-
haus building at Dessau to represent the
second, they demonstrated that the analyti-
cal cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso,
Georges Braque, andJuan Gris were para-
digmatic for Le Corbusier's reconceptual-
ization of modern architectural space. In
the second article-anticipating postmod-
ernism's reinvestigation of the facade-
they analyzed the dynamics of configura-
tional ambiguity and oscillation on the
elevationalsurface,substitutingLe Corbusi-
450 JSAH/ 57:4,DECEMBER
1998
er's Algiers skyscraperfor Garches and the
United Nations Secretariatbuilding for the
Bauhaus.Drawinganalogies to Michelange-
lo's proposed facade for the Church of San
Lorenzo and to Piet Mondrian's Victory
BoogieWoogie,they now accounted for the
effects of phenomenal transparency in
terms of laws of visual perception derived
from Gestalt psychology.
Significantly, Greenberg's art criticism
helped bring about the ascendancy of post-
war abstract expressionist painting, while
Rowe and Slutzky,like Hitchcock, remained
wed to the prewar aesthetics of European
modernism. This difference in taste cul-
tures may be explained partly in disciplin-
ary terms (architecture requiring a more
highly structured and rationalist model
than painting). But it also reflected the
architectural authors' orientation to Eu-
rope as opposed to Greenberg's chauvinis-
tic intent to establish the superiority of a
new and specificallyAmerican avant-garde.
Rowe's formalism, on the other hand,
was a product of his training first at the
Warburg Institute and then at Yale in the
early fifties, where he went to study with
Hitchcock, and where the Bauhaus e'migre'
JosefAlbers was propagating his influential
theory of color relativityand visual percep-
tion in the art school. (Rowe would get to
know the latter more directly in Texas
through Slutzkyand otherYale-trainedfac-
ulty imported to teach there by the school's
chair, Harwell Hamilton Harris, a Califor-
nia modernist architect open to formal
experimentation, or at least to Rowe's sug-
gestions.)1l
In broader political terms, however,
postwar formalism-the renunciation of a
socially engaged role for aesthetic practice
and the recourse by Rowe, as by the ex-
Marxist Greenberg, to a theory of formal
autonomy-reflected the widespreaddisen-
chantment of Western intellectuals with
political orthodoxies, whether of the left
or the right, and the increasingly apolitical
context of cold-war culture.'2 Like many
intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic
who had witnessed the catastrophes of to-
talitarian ideology, Rowe came to distrust
large sociopolitical visions that subordi-
nated democracy, civil liberties, and indi-
vidualism in the present to an elusive rec-
ompense in the future. Nor, on the other
hand, did he wish to endorse an affirma-
tive modernism deadening in its pragma-
tism and failure of imagination. The latter
was especially being purveyed, in Rowe's
view,in the social or sociological "pabulum"
that Gropiuswaspromoting at Harvard.
The abstract aesthetics of formalism in
the 1950s thus represented a dissent car-
ried out in the cultural sphere against both
the ideologically prescribed "realism" of
totalitariandictatorshipin the East and the
bureaucratic functionalism of an ascen-
dant establishment culture in the West.
The rigoristapproach to architecturalform
adumbratedin "Transparency"and Rowe's
other early essays appeared a radical alter-
native to modern architecture's postwar
institutionalization. This was the purport
of the pedagogy developed in Texas and in
the early years at Cornell, and it was also
the salutary shock of Rowe's writings and
personality on those around him in the
1950s and 1960s. Not least among the lat-
ter was Eisenman, who first encountered
Rowe at Cambridge Universityin 1960 and
the following year accompanied him on a
pilgrimage to Como. Eisenman would pro-
duce an apoliticaland autonomous reading
of Terragni's Casa del Fascio that pushed
Rowe's preference for form without ideol-
ogy to an extreme conclusion-ironically,
one that Rowe, too steeped in the tragic
knowledge of history, could never have ar-
rivedat himself.
The historical revelation that the great
achievement of the modern movement was
not a better world but a new formal style
was, as just suggested, not Rowe's alone,
although he was among the earliest and
bravestto articulate it. Rather it belongs to
the generation of architectural historians,
critics, and practitioners who came to ma-
turity in the first decades following World
WarII-those who interrupted their archi-
tectural education, as Peter Smithson put
it, to make the world safe for modern
architecture. In contextualizing Rowe's
contribution, we must therefore return to
the situation of those immediate postwar
years. Rowe was in his fourth year of archi-
tecture school at the University of Liver-
pool in 1942 when he was drafted. Upon
fracturing his spine while training as a
parachute jumper, he returned to Liver-
pool to complete his education, and when
his injury made it difficult for him to work
over a drafting board, he accepted a fellow-
ship to study at the Warburgin London. At
Liverpool in the early forties, whereJames
Stirling and Robert Maxwell were among
Rowe's schoolmates, the attitude toward
modern architecturewas "liberaland toler-
ant" rather than doctrinaire; the school
also had a pro-American bias. By
1949-1951, however, "while an old guard
still clung to anti-modern architecture
propositions,while a middle guard was able
to devote itself to the propagation of alleg-
edly far out performance, there was coming
to exist, embryonically, a species of van-
guard,increasinglyconcerned with the vacu-
ity of content which modern architecture
wasbeginning to reveal."13The cold warwas
at a head at this moment, and while ener-
vated Britonslined up for MarshallPlan aid,
the rivalsuperpowerswere fighting it out on
the terrain of ideology. This was the forma-
tive moment for Rowe. The dissipation of
modern architecture'srevolutionaryrole in
the triumphalismof capitalisthegemony and
the dreary administration of the welfare
state-signaled by the completion of the
United Nations and Lever House in New
York and the false cheer of the Festivalof
Britain in London-engendered a loss of
innocence. "On both sides of the Atlantic,
the alliance of modern architecture with
power (whether the power of liberal senti-
ment, Madison Avenue, or governmental
bureaucracy)was now an evidentfait accom-
pli. ... One recallshow painfulall thiswas."14
In Britain, members of Rowe's genera-
tion like Stirling, Reyner Banham (despite
his abiding faith in the deus ex machinaof
advanced environmental technology), and
Alan Colquhoun would soon come to con-
clusions similar to Rowe's about the funda-
mentally aesthetic significance of the he-
roic period of modern architecture.
Meanwhile, in the United States,the young
Polish emigre architect Matthew Nowicki
also gleaned the implications of modern
architecture's postwar transformation. In
an essay of 1951, "Origins and Trends in
Modern Architecture"-which Rowe
would subsequently credit'5-he wrote:
I suspect that I shall no longer provoke you as much
as I should by opening with a statement that some-
time ago, our design became a style ... A style, with
alltherestrictions, andbless-
limitations,
disciplines,
ingsthatweusuallyassociate withthe term.... We
cannotkeepon pretending thatweareableto solve
ourproblems withouta precedent in form.Wehave
to realizethatin theoverwhelming ofmod-
majority
ern design,formfollowsform
and notfunction.16
Nowicki's revindication of style in modern
architecture emerged from a specifically
American context, one that Hitchcock and
Philip Johnson's exhibition The Interna-
tional Style:Architecturesince 1922 at the
Museum of Modern Art had been instru-
mental in preparing two decades earlier.
Nowicki proceeded to suggest that in the
postwar period modern architecture had
moved from the "decoration of function"
to the "decoration of structure," noting
with approval that architects had rediscov-
ered the symbolic meaning of a column.
With the curious locution "decora-
tion"-by which he meant something like
"preoccupation" or even "fetishization,"
probably having in mind Mies van der
Rohe's famous buit-up corner column de-
tail at Illinois Institute of Technology-
Nowicki put an optimistic interpretation
on the new architecturalformalism.
But if Nowicki's thesis "form follows
form" looks directlyforwardto the celebra-
tory postmodernism of Robert Venturiand
his concept of the decorated shed in the
1960s, it is clear that by the 1950s the pro-
gram of modern architecture was under
drastic revision. All around the world, as
Rowe observed, the new forms were at once
prospering and being purged of their radi-
cal residues. While Mies trod the line be-
tween pragmatismand metaphysicsto make
modernism the prestige image of corporate
capitalism,Gropiusat Harvardengendered
a school of "decorated diagrams."" Mean-
while, as CIAM's grandiose aspiration to
functionalize everything from the spoon to
the city was being translatedinto the com-
mercialism of Good Design, architects like
Johnson, Edward Durrell Stone, and Mi-
noro Yamasakiwere literallydecorating the
modernist box. The postwar International
Style, now an American export rather than
the import it wasin 1932, circulatedglobally,
spawning imitations of Lever House from
Caracasto Copenhagen. Hailed in the pages
of the British Architectural in 1957-
Reviewa
and even by critical modernists like Peter
and Alison Smithson-as a flexible kit of
parts,the "newvernacular"of the modular
steel and glasscurtainwallwasseen as a new
kind of pattern book that would make it
harder to design bad buildings and help
bring coherence to the postwarlandscape.
Rowe remained skeptical. In his view
"ModArch"had become an instrument of
crushing visualbanalityas well as social com-
placency, belying the dream of the ville
radieusethatstillhaunted the modernist con-
sciousness, or conscience, like the hope of
kingdom come. In an article of 1959 com-
menting on an exhibition of Le Corbusier's
work at the Building Centre in London,
Rowe acknowledged the supreme value of
the latter'sarchitecturalcontribution while
criticizing his urbanism as predicated on
rigid social-planningtheory:
[T]oday Modern architecture may be felt to have
become all that it was never intended to become.
For it was an architecture which was sustained by
the faith that it was to change the world, to regener-
ate society and, in short, to redeem mankind. And
except for provincial pockets of resistance it is now
as successful as any architecture is ever likely to be.
It is patronized by governments and endorsed by
great corporations. It is established. It is orthodox.
It is official art. And thus, rather than the continu-
ing symbol of something new, Modern architecture
has recently become the decoration of everything
existing.... [T] here is therefore a certain pathos
which attaches itself to this large exhibition of Le
Corbusier's work. The millennium, on the possibil-
ity of which so many of his principles were predi-
cated, seems now to be infinitely remote; while in
the retrospective, precedent-ridden climate of the
present his highly abstracted idea of society and his
single-minded commitment both seem to belong
to an age entirely lost beyond recall.18
In the face of this epic degeneration of
modernism to normative practice, it was
urgent for intellectuals-and notjust those
concerned with architecture-to redefine
the political imperatives of their disci-
plines. In an essay of 1954 entitled "The
New Orthodoxies," the English poet and
art critic Stephen Spender wrote, "The
greatness of the modern movement lies
perhaps in the fact that after the answer
there comes the question."'9 The central
question facing those who still believed in
the greatness of the modern movement
despite its failure on the ideological plane
was how to save the baby while throwing
out the bathwater:how to salvage modern-
ism from both its misguided missionary
vocation and its devolution at the hands of
mainstream culture.
In Italy the Marxist critic Giulio Carlo
Argan posed precisely this question:
One cannot objectively deny that the architecture
of the last fifty years constitutes a considerable
heritage; it has done away with many prejudices,
REVIEW
ESSAY 451
has defined new concepts of space,form, function;
it has perfectednew workingmethodsboth in
designing and in execution;it has establishednew
relationships,with townplanningon the one hand
and with industrialproduction on the other. Can
we accept this great heritage for all it is worth, ticle of 1959 cited above, "Le Corbusier:
separatetheseformalandtechnicalachievements Utopian Architect," written during a two-
from the ideological tendencies and intereststhat year return to England to teach at Cam-
producedthem?20
Like Spender, Argan posed the question
without answering it. For Argan's student
ManfredoTafuri,however,the acknowledg-
ment of the end of utopia would engender
intellectual despair, surmountable only by
stoicism. In Architecture and Utopia(1973),
Tafuri famously repudiated contemporary
"hopes in design." There could be no
"architecture for a liberated society," only
a critique of architectural ideology. Ini-
tially drawn to those architects engaged in
a hermetic pursuit of their own form-
language-from Stirling to Aldo Rossi to
the NewYorkFive-inasmuch as their work
seemed to constitute a criticalprotest, or at
least a symptomatic defense, against inevi-
table complicity with the machinery of the
late capitalist culture industry, at a later
date Tafuri disavowed the work of most of
these architects as solipsistic play. Bril-
liantly articulated as it was, his implacable
position from the late sixties through the
eighties offered architects only a cul-de-
sac, a holding action in the face of the
infinitely deferred revolution. It afforded
little opening for those seeking to advance
architecture beyond the boundaries
charted by the modernist avant-garde.
It was Rowe, however, who eventually
negotiated-for better or worse-a waybe-
yond nihilism. As the two most important
theorists of form without utopia during
the postwarperiod, comparable in intellec-
tual and moral intensity, Rowe and Tafuri
present an instructive comparison. If, like
the younger Italian critic, Rowe initially
experienced the failure of modern architec-
ture's revolutionaryvocation with a sense of
tragedy,he eventuallydid so with relief.And
as in the case of Tafuri,the annunciation of
the end of utopia ultimatelybecame a messi-
anic message in its own right, at first deliv-
ered with ambivalence,laterproclaimedwith
the fierce conviction possessed by those be-
trayed in their fundamental beliefs. Rowe's
entire criticaloeuvre from the late forties to
the present may be read as a series of strate-
452 JSAH / 57:4, DECEMBER1998
gic efforts to exorcise and overcome the
utopian spiritof modernism.
A revealing instance of Rowe's initial
vacillation about the future of modern ar-
chitecture may be found in the short ar-
bridge. Struggling to come up with a post-
Corbusian model, Rowe concluded with
the following question: "If Le Corbusier's
Utopianism does seem to have been such a
powerful agent of change in the 1920s and
1930s, is it not also reasonable to suppose
that if change is required, then another
Utopian attitude might well again provide
the stimulus?"21In this characteristic exer-
cice du stile--the redundancy of "ifs," the
subjunctive tense, the negative interroga-
tive-one readily senses the author's un-
ease, and indeed upon republishing it in
the first volume of As I WasSaying,he is
quick to disclaim its conclusion as naive. In
an almost contemporary essay, however, a
more full-blown and historical treatment
of the same theme, entitled "The Architec-
ture of Utopia," Rowe succeeded in dis-
patching the troubling Geist somewhat
more persuasively.Adopting the definition
given by Karl Mannheim in Ideologyand
Utopia(1929), he characterized utopia as a
reality-transcendingorientation that is in-
herently unrealizable and inimical to life
even if, in its very changelessness, it often
serves as an instrument of change.
Republishing this essayin TheMathemat-
ics of the Ideal Villa, Rowe appended an
addendum denouncing utopia in stronger
terms. Now also drawing on the philoso-
phy of KarlPopper, which he discovered at
Cambridge around 1960, Rowe con-
demned utopian thought as implying a
planned and hermetically sealed society,
leading to stasis in the guise of change,
intolerance, suppression of diversity,and
ultimatelyviolence.22Yet Rowe also sought
to chart a more moderate position than
Popper's, qualifying the latter's critique by
acknowledging that a "good society" re-
quires a dialectical interchange between
freedom and order. As such, it is impos-
sible ever to banish the ghost of utopia
completely:
Utopia,in anydevelopedform,in itspost-enlighten-
ment form, must surelybe condemned as a mon-
strosity;but, while alwaysa flagrantsociologicalor
politicalnightmare,as a reference (presenteven in
Popper), as a heuristic device, as an imperfect
image of the good society,Utopia will persist-but
should persist as possible social metaphor rather
than probablesocialprescription.23
Rowe thus arrived at the compromise of a
"limited" or "metaphoric" notion of uto-
pia, yet only as a hedge against anarchy,no
longer as a social desideratum or historical
telos.
In tracing the evolution of Rowe's cri-
tique of utopia, we might also mention-
for the sake of the title, but also for the way
it so precisely defined the dilemma of an
architectural culture on the cusp of post-
modernism-his double review of Ven-
turi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architec-
ture (1965) and Banham's The New
Brutalism:EthicorAesthetic(1966). Entitled
"Waitingfor Utopia," this article was pub-
lished in the New YorkTimesin 1967. While
somewhat underestimating the impact that
Venturi'sbook would soon have, Rowe char-
acterized with elegant succinctness the re-
spective contributions of the American and
British authors, showing how Banham's
discernment of the gap between the theory
and practice of modern architecture, on
the one hand, and Venturi'srehabilitation
of style and taste as the primary determi-
nants of form, on the other, were "intrinsi-
cally related," even as they also repre-
sented "the polar extremes between which
architecture now oscillates."24Not coinci-
dentally, both authors were influenced by
Rowe's own writing.
With Rowe's introduction to FiveArchi-
tects(1972), a book introducing to a wide
architectural audience the work of Eisen-
man, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey,
John Hejduk, and RichardMeier and estab-
lishing a new generation of American for-
malists, the wedge between the "morale"
and "physique"of modern architecture-a
distinction derived from EdgarAllan Poe-
was effectively driven home. If, on first
reading, this essay appears a masterpiece
of obliquity with respect to the work it is
intended to frame, it is ultimately clear
that Rowe's subject is, as ever, the problem
of form without utopia. (Significantly, it
was Tafuri who would write the introduc-
tion to the Italian publication of FiveArchi-
tects.)25The choice between architecture's
"mostly trivial moral enthusiasm" and its
"physicalproduct" is beyond doubt. Rowe
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REVIEWESSAY 453
concluded his introduction with six
questions:
-Is it necessarythat architectureshould be simply
a logicalderivativefromfunctionaland technologi-
cal facts;and, indeed, can it everbe this?
-Is it necessarythat a series of buildings should
implya visionof a new and betterworld;and, if this
is so (or even if it is not) then how frequentlycan a
significantvision of a new and better world be
propounded?
-Is the architectsimplya victimof circumstance?
And should he be? Or may he be allowed to culti-
vate his own free will? And are not culture and
civilizationthe productsof the impositionof will?
-What is the Zeitgeist;and if this is a critical
fiction, may the architect act contrariwiseto its
alleged dictates?
-How permissibleis it to make use of precedent;
and, therefore,how legitimateis the argumentthat
the repetitionof a form is a destructionof authen-
ticity?
-Can an architecturewhich professesan objective
of continuousexperimenteverbecome congruous
with the idea of an architecturewhich is to be
popular,intelligible,and profound?26
onlywayof dealingwiththeultimateproblemsof, tion organized in Rome in 1977 that solic-
either or both, utopia and tradition;and the prov- ited urban designs from an international
enanceof thearchitectural objectsintroducedinto field of architects based on a plan of Rome
the socialcollageneed not be of greatconse- published by GiambattistaNolli in 1748-
quence.It relatesto tasteandconviction. Theob- Rowebecame affiliatedwith the new histori-
jects can be aristocratic or theycan be "folkish," cist school of architecture being advanced
academicor popular.Whethertheyoriginatein in both Europe and the United States.
or Dahomey, in Detroitor Dubrovnik, Among its most polemical exponents were
Pergamum
whethertheirimplications areof the twentiethor the Luxembourg architects Rob and Leon
the fifteenthcentury,is no greatmatter.Societies Krier, for whom Rowe became an apolo-
andpersonsassemble themselves totheir
according gist. Having previouslyinspired the formal-
owninterpretations ofabsolutereference andtradi- ist vanguard of late modernism, Rowe now
tionalvalue;and,up to a point,collageaccommo- played an instrumental role in the evolu-
datesbothhybriddisplayandtherequirements of tion of its conservative critique, even if he
self-determination.29 disclaimed the term postmodernism as yet
another pseudodoctrine spun off from
Collage was thus presented in CollageCity modernism.30
as a strategyfor "democratically"integrat- Above all, however, "the enjoyment of
ing disparate cultural impulses and hybrid- utopian poetics without ... the embarrass-
izing fragments of history. That it was also ment of utopian politics"31seems to have
an aesthetic technique associated with the meant to Rowe that it was no longer neces-
most radical art practices of the twentieth sary to domesticate the grand Corbusian,
century, and as such carried a potent ideo- Miesian, or Wrightianvisions into pathetic
logical charge, did not perturb Rowe much, late-modern simulacra. The "dear, sweet,
since the whole point was to recontextual- funny, caressable, little old Zeitgeist"could
ize things anyway. The album of "objets be let off the hook as "an alibi for the

By this date, however, these questions were
mostly rhetorical, and Rowe could have
answered them without much existential
anguish. He would resolve them defini-
tively six years later in CollageCity,which
contains the fullest exposition of his politi-
cal, moral, and aesthetic philosophy. The
good society must be predicated on "the
necessary conflicts of democracy with law,"
"the necessary collisions of freedom and
justice.""27 It requires a continuous adjudi-
cation between opposites: order and lib-
erty, necessity and contingency, tradition
and utopia, the rational science of the
engineer and the spontaneous, savage
mind of the bricoleur. The latter is a figure
taken by Rowe and Koetter from Claude
Levi-Strauss.Ajack-of-all-trades,the brico-
leur is accustomed to dealing with hetero-
geneities and ad hoc circumstances rather
than idealities and large-scale systems. Ar-
chitecture, according to the authors, re-
sides "mid-way between science and
'bricolage.' "28
For Rowe and Koetter, the aesthetic
concept closest to this oppositional vision
of society was collage:
It is suggestedthata collageapproach,an approach
in which objects are conscriptedor seduced from
out of their context, is--at the present day-the
trouvis"that concluded the book, meant to
serve as "stimulants" for the "urbanistic
collage"-premodern images evoking a
sense of nostalgia, order, awe, or ambigu-
ity-made clear that what was at stake in
CollageCitywas a license for eclectic con-
noisseurship that, however celebratory of
the complex meanings of architecturalhis-
tory, was hardly more tolerant of "low"
taste than modernism was. Nor was Rowe
persuasive in his effort to subsume his pre-
ferred figure-ground method of configur-
ing urban form under the rubric of col-
lage. As a compositional device involving
the manipulation of urban elements largely
in plan in a play of distorted axialities, it
remained closer to Beaux-Arts pattern
making.
Ironically,by the late seventies and early
eighties, the end-of-ideology position ex-
pounded by Rowe in CollageCityalso began
to amount to a new Zeitgeistinits own right.
As such, it was increasingly labeled postmod- although modernism in Rowe's view no
ernismby other theorists and historians--
from CharlesJencks and Robert Stern to
Jean-FrancoisLyotardand FredricJameson
(at diametric ends of the spectrum)-and
variously linked to the temper and struc-
tural conditions of the time. With the
book's publication and Rowe's invitation
to participatein RomaInterrotta-an exhibi-
architect's reluctance to be found talking
in terms of styleand taste."32Thejettisoning
of utopia as a prescriptivecondition could
thus lead-unlike for Tafuri-to pleasur-
able possibilities at the end of history. In
the arena of "enlightened pluralism,"there
was no longer any reason to prefer Adolf
Loos to Lutyens, or a tubular steel chair to
one by Robert Adam.
In the end, one wonders whether
Rowe's whole exercise in Geistesgeschichte
was not an elaborate ruse to recuperate
the premodern, mannered, aristocratic
forms he has evidently alwaysloved most.
In that case, might not his shift from the
modernist-inspired formalism of the fifties
to the nostalgic and academic historicism
of the seventies and eighties-which some
interpretershave found to be an irreconcil-
able contradiction-be construed in Freud-
ian terms simply as a return of the re-
pressed? But this seems too easy. For
longer deserves to be privileged, somehow
its failure has continued to compel his
attention (or stick in his craw), even after
half a century. Perhaps this is mostly for
autobiographical reasons. Yet sentimental-
ity is insufficient to account for the incisive-
ness and, indeed, empathy of Rowe'sinces-
sant readings of the workof that hedgehog-

454 JSAH / 57:4, DECEMBER1998

fox Le Corbusier, for example. Modern
architecture, according to Rowe, "may be
half extinct, but it still remains insidiously
potent."33
One might imagine that by now this
horse had been beaten to death (and, if
anything, was ready for a revival). But in
TheArchitecture of GoodIntentionsRowe once
in the news of modern architec-
again rings
ture's demise, rehearsing the epistemologi-
cal and eschatological arguments he has
advancedfor five decades. At the same time,
three chapters on "iconography,""mecha-
nism," and "organism"contain the charac-
teristic trove of illuminations and aperqus.
Once again one is in the presence of that
irrepressible animation of facts and dates,
those alwayssophisticatednuances, that "as-
tonishing parade of wit and perception."34
Recentbooksand publicationsdiscussed
in this article:
Colin Rowe, As I Was Saying:Recollections
and MiscellaneousEssays. Edited by Alex-
ander Caragonne. 3 vols. Cambridge,Mass.:
The MIT Press, 1996.
Volume1: Texas,Pre-Texas,Cambridge.288
pp., 25 illus. $31.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-262-
18167-3.
Volume2: Cornelliana.408 pp., 135 illus.
$37.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-262-18168-1.
Volume3: Urbanistics.432 pp., 134 illus.
$37.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-262-18169-X.
Colin Rowe, TheArchitecture of GoodInten-
tions: Towardsa PossibleRetrospect.London:
Academy Editions, 1994, 144 pp., over 180
illus. $35.00 (paper). ISBN 1-85490-307-1.
Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, Transpar-
ency.With commentary by Bernhard Hoesli
and introduction by Werner Oechslin.
Basel, Boston, and Berlin:Birkhdiuser,1997,
120 pp., approx. 165 illus. $19.95 (paper).
ISBN 3-7643-5615-4.
Transparenz.German-language edition of
above. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 3-7643-
5614-6.
Transparence:Rdelleet virtuelle.French edi-
tion of above. Translated from the Ger-
man by MarianneBrauschand SylvainMal-
froy. Paris: Les Editions du Demi-Cercle,
1992.FF 195 (paper). ISBN2-907757-48-2.
FormWork:ColinRowe.Monographicdouble
issue of ANY,no. 7/8 (1994). Guest edited
by R E. Somol, with contributions by R E.
Somol, Paulette Singley,MarkLinder, Stan
Allen, Colby Wong, Greg Lynn, Anthony
Vidler, Peter Eisenman, Colin Rowe, and
others, and selected bibliography. 70 pp.,
extensive illus. $15.00 (paper). ISSN 1068-
4220.
Notes
1George Baird,"Oppositionsin the
Thought of
ColinRowe,"Assemblage33
(1997): 22-35.
2Alexander Caragonne, The TexasRangers:Notes
from an ArchitecturalUnderground(Cambridge, Mass.:
The MITPress,1995).
3Stan Allen, "Addendaand Errata,"ANY7/8
(1994): 28-33; Paulette Singley, "Some Instruc-
tions for Modern ParlorGames in the Architect's
Country House," ibid., 16-23; Peter Eisenman,
"Not the LastWord:The IntellectualSheik,"ibid.,
66-69.
4Werner Oechslin's introduction is entitled
'"Transparency': The Searchfor a ReliableDesign
Method in Accordancewith the Principlesof Mod-
ern Architecture."Among other recent criticalre-
interpretationsin which the thesis and merits of
"Transparency"have been discussed, see Detlef
Mertins, TransparenciesYetto Come:Sigfried Giedion
and the Prehistoryof ArchitecturalModernity(Ann Ar-
bor: UMI DissertationServices, 1998); Eve Blau
and Nancy J. Troy, eds., Architectureand Cubism
(Cambridge,Mass.:The MITPress,1997);Terence
Riley,ed., introduction to LightConstruction
(New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1995); Anthony
Vidler, "Transparency," The ArchitecturalUncanny:
Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 1992), 217-225; and, of earlier
date, Rosalind Krauss,"Death of a Hermeneutic
Phantom:Materializationof the Sign in the Work
of Peter Eisenman," Architecture+ Urbanism(Janu-
ary 1980), republishedin PeterEisenman,Housesof
Cards(New York:Oxford UniversityPress, 1987),
166 ff. The second part of "Transparency"has
been republishedby Rowein AsI WasSayingvol. 1,
73-106; and in ArchitectureCulture 1943-1968: A
DocumentaryAnthology, ed. Joan Ockman with the
collaborationof EdwardEigen (NewYork:Rizzoli
InternationalPublications,1993), 205-225. A third
installmentof "Transparency"exists in fragments
and has neverbeen published.
5Colin Roweand FredKoetter,CollageCity(Cam-
bridge,Mass.:The MITPress,1978), 91 ff.
6Ibid.,48.
7Colin Rowe, "The Mathematicsof the Ideal
Villa:Palladioand Le CorbusierCompared,"Archi-
tecturalReview(March 1947), republished in The
Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and OtherEssays (Cam-
bridge,Mass.:The MITPress,1976), 1-27.
8 The first
phraseis from "Mannerismand Mod-
ern Architecture," ArchitecturalReview (May 1950),
republished in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,
29-51, phrase quoted, 51. The second is from
"Neo-'Classicism' and Modern Architecture II,"
written in 1956-1957, published in Oppositions 1
(1973), republished in The Mathematicsof the Ideal
Villa, 139-158, phrase quoted, 150. See also "Neo-
'Classicism' and Modern Architecture I," likewise
written in 1956-1957 and published in Oppositions
1, republished in The Mathematicsof the Ideal Villa,
119-138.
9 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Painting towardArchi-
tecture(NewYork:Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948),
14-16, 54.
10"Whatmost essentiallydefines the new unity
ofstylein architecture, sculptureandpainting,"states
Greenberg,is "theircommon tendencyto treatall
matteras distinguishedfrom space,as two-dimen-
sional. Matteris analyzedinto points, lines and the
surfacesof planesthataremeantto be feltas without
thicknessand possessingthe hypotheticallyabsolute
two-dimensionality of demonstrationsin planegeom-
etry. It is by virtueof this immateriality,
this urge to
reduce their plasticelements to the minimum of
substanceneeded to body forth visibility,that mod-
em architectureand sculpturecanbe withthe great-
est justice termed 'abstract'."Clement Greenberg,
"OurPeriodStyle,"Partisan Review
(November1949),
republished in Greenberg, The CollectedEssays and
Criticism,vol. 2, ArrogantPurpose:1945-1949, ed.John
O'Brian(Chicago:The Universityof ChicagoPress,
1986),324-325.
11See "Texasand Mrs.Harris,"in AsI WasSaying
vol. 1, 25-40. In this essayRowe'sportrayalof Jean
MurrayBangs,the "dragonlady"of Texasand wife
of Harwell Hamilton Harris, remains one of his
most devastatingand comic pieces of portraiture.
12Greenbergcontinues, in the essaycited in n.
10, "Thisartis one of the few manifestationsof our
time uninflated by illegitimate content-no reli-
gion or mysticismor politicalcertainties.And in its
radical inadaptabilityto the uses of any interest,
ideological or institutional,lies the most certain
guaranteeof the truthwith which it expressesus"
("Our Period Style,"in Collected Essays,326). This
last statement reads ironicallyin light of Green-
berg's own role as a powerfulculturalarbiter.The
contradictionsof the apoliticalculturalpolitics of
the 1950s have been treated by Serge Guilbautin
his book How New YorkStole the Idea of Modern Art:
Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War
(1983).
13Colin Rowe,
"JamesStirling:A Highly Per-
sonal and Very DisjointedMemoir,"introduction
to James Stirling: Buildings and Projects, ed. Peter
Arnelland Ted Bickford(NewYork:RizzoliInterna-
tional Publications,1984), 16.
14Ibid.
15See Rowe, "Neo-'Classicism'and Modern Ar-
chitecture I," in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa,
130 ff.
16Matthew Nowicki's article was first published
in The Magazine of Art (November 1951). It reap
peared under the title "Function and Form" in
Lewis Mumford's anthology Roots of Contemporary
Architecture(1952), a book trenchantly reviewed by
Rowe in ArchitecturalRaeview(in 1954); see As I Was
Saying vol. 1, 123-129. Nowicki's article may now
be found in ArchitectureCulture1943-1968, 149-156,
passage quoted, 150.
7 See Klaus Herdeg, TheDecoratedDiagram: Har-
vard Architectureand theFailure of the Bauhaus Legacy
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983). Herdeg
was a student of Rowe's at Cornell in the sixties.
is Rowe, "Le Corbusier: Utopian Architect," The
Listener,12 February 1959; republished in As I Was
Saying vol. 1, 135-142; passage quoted, 136.
REVIEWESSAY 455
 19 Stephen Spender, "The New Orthodoxies,"
in Robert Richman, ed., The Arts at Mid-Century
(NewYork: Horizon Press, 1954), 4.
20Giulio Carlo Argan, "Architettura e ideolo-
gia," Zodiac 1 (1957); republished in Architecture
Culture1943-1968, 253-259, passage quoted, 256.
21
Rowe, As I WasSaying,vol. 1, 142.
22Karl Popper has remained central to Rowe's
thinking since the sixties. See The Mathematicsof the
Ideal Villa, 213-216. For parts of this discussion, I
am indebted to Henry Millon's commentary on the
evolution of Rowe's concept of utopia at the 1996
Cornell symposium. For Rowe, the key writings by
Popper have been The Logic of ScientificDiscovery
(1958; orig. ed. 1934); The Open Societyand Its En-
emies (1945); and The Poverty of Historicism (1957).
Rowe was also influenced at this date by his reading
of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium
(1957), a history of millenarian and chiliastic
thought in relation to modern totalitarian move-
ments, and by the philosophical writings of
Michael Polanyi. Rowe's evolving critique of ideol-
ogy has close affinities with that of the neoconserva-
tive American sociologist Daniel Bell, who popular-
ized the phrase "end of ideology" in his widely read
456 JSAH / 57:4, DECEMBER1998
book TheEnd of deology:On theExhaustion ofPolitical
Ideas in theFifties,first published in 1960.
23 "The Architecture of Utopia," in TheMathemat-
ics of the Ideal Villa, 216. Rowe states that this essay
was written "a few months later" than "Le Cor-
busier: Utopian Architect" (cited in n. 18). This
chronology is not quite borne out by the dates, as
"The Architecture of Utopia" was originally pub-
lished in Grantaon 24January 1959.
24Rowe, As I WasSaying,vol. 2, 75-78.
25The commonalities between the Italian post-
Marxist critic and the Anglo-American neoconser-
vative are striking, at least at this date. In the sixties
and early seventies, when Rowe was close to Eisen-
man and the Institute for Architecture and Urban
Studies in New York, established in 1967 under
Eisenman's direction, he was a proponent of more
or less the same architects as Tafuri-namely, the
Five, Stirling, and Rossi.
2" Colin Rowe, introduction to Five Architects:Ei-
senman, Graves, Gwathmey,Hejduk, Meier (New York:
Wittenborn, 1971), 7.
27Rowe and Koetter, CollageCity,97.
28Ibid., 103.
29 Ibid., 144-145.
30 On Rowe's objection to the term postmodern,
see "Questions for Colin Rowe," ANY 7/8(1994):
35; also "Interview: 1989," in As I WasSaying,vol. 2,
358-359. With respect to the term historicist,I should
note that I am using it not in the sense of Popper,
who employs it to criticize those who try to discern
historical laws in order to predict the future, but in
the more familiar architectural one that gained
currency in the 1980s to describe the antimodern-
ist tendency in contemporary architecture. For
Rowe's defense of the work of the Krier brothers-
not without reservations, however-see "Urban
Space" and "The Revolt of the Senses," in As I Was
Saying,vol. 3, 261-270; 271-283.
31 Rowe and Koetter, CollageCity,148.
32 Colin Rowe, "The Avant-Garde Revisited," in
R. E. Somol, ed., Autonomy and Ideology:Positioning
an Avant-Garde in America (New York: Monacelli
Press, 1997), 57.
33Rowe, TheArchitectureof GoodIntentions,9.
34A characterization by Rowe of the writing
of James Joyce, offered in the context of his
"quasi-autobiographical" reflections at the Cornell
conference, but equally applicable to his own
work.