Maxwell Robert - Reckoning with Colin Rowe: ten architects take position

While the first half of the twentieth century in architecture was, to a large extent, characterized by innovations in aesthetics (accompanied by succinct and polemical manifestos), the postwar decades saw emerge a more refined and intellectual disciplinary framework that eventually metamorphosed into the highly theory-focused moment of the postmodern. Colin Frederick Rowe (19201999) was a leader of this epistemic shift due to his aptitude to connect his historical and philosophical erudition to the visual analysis of architecture.

This book unites ten different perspectives from architects whose lives and ideas intersected with Rowes, including:

• Robert Maxwell
• Anthony Vidler
• Peter Eisenman
• O. Mathias Ungers
• Lon Krier
• Rem Koolhaas
• Alan Colquhoun
• Robert Slutzky
• Bernhard Hoesli
• Bernard Tschumi
• With an introduction by Emmanuel Petit and a postscript by Jonah Rowen.

In their critical assessment of a key twentieth-century formalist, these renowned architects reflect on how their own positions came to diverge from Rowes. Reckoning with Colin Rowe is a thought-provoking discussion of key schools, places, concepts, and people of architectural theory since the postwar years, illustrated with over forty beautiful black-and-white drawings and photographs.

Emmanuel Petit studied architecture at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, and received his PhD in history and theory of architecture from Princeton University, USA. He has taught at Yale, USA; Harvard, USA; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, as associate professor and visiting associate professor, respectively; and is currently Sir Banister Fletcher Visiting Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture in London, UK. He is author of Irony, or the Self-critical Opacity of Postmodern Architecture (2013).

Edited by Emmanuel Petit

First published 2015

by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reckoning with Colin Rowe : ten architects take position / [edited by] Emmanuel Petit.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Rowe, Colin. 2. Architecture, Modern20th century.I.Petit, Emmanuel, 1973- editor.II.Maxwell, Robert, 1922- Mannerism and modernism.
NA2599.8.R69R432015
720.92dc232014032743

ISBN: 978-0-415-74154-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-74155-2 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-81525-1 (ebk)

Acquisition Editor: Wendy Fuller

Editorial Assistant: Grace Harrison

Production Editor: Ed Gibbons

Every effort has been made to contact and acknowledge copyright owners. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not acknowledged here and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future printings or editions of the book.

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Emmanuel Petit

Robert Maxwell

Anthony Vidler

Peter Eisenman

O. Mathias Ungers

Lon Krier

Rem Koolhaas

Alan Colquhoun

Robert Slutzky

Bernhard Hoesli

Bernard Tschumi

Jonah Rowen

The idea for this book was launched in 2000one year after Colin Rowe had passed awayat the initiative of Alan Colquhoun and Peter Eisenman. Alan and Peter wanted to illustrate how Rowe had spawned a myriad of very different theoretical positions as a reaction to his own theses in architecture; they detected that I had a vivid interest in the hypotheses of formalism, and thus asked me to gather this collection of essays.

All texts are original contributions with the exception of Bernhard Hoeslis; unlike Jim Stirling and John Hejduk, who I would certainly have asked to write essays had they still been alive, Hoesli had written an explicit response to Rowe before he died in 1984; I reprinted the Addendum from his Transparency, which the Institute for the Theory and History of Architecture (gta) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich had first published in 1968. I thank De Gruyter for permitting the reprint of this text. Anthony Vidlers essay is a revised and much expanded version of his Up Against the Wall: Colin Rowe at La Tourette, published in Log 24 (WinterSpring 2012): 717. Robert Slutzkys text is the result of a series of conversations, which I recorded and transcribed in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, in 2002, before he passed away in 2005; these interviews were later edited to their current form by Joan Ockman. O. Mathias Ungers and Alan Colquhoun died in 2007 and 2012, respectively, but had given me their essays a few years earlier.

This book is made possible with the support of the Yale School of Architecture and especially the generosity of Robert A. M. Stern, Dean. Further support comes from the A. Whitney Griswold Faculty Research Grant from the Whitney Center for the Humanities.

I thank Jonah Rowen for his witty and efficient help with the book as assistant editor, and for writing the Postscript. Thanks also to Robert Somol for interviewing Rem Koolhaas about Rowe in Los Angeles in 2002 and for transcribing the conversation for the book and to Eduardo Vivanco for his help with the book in earlier stages of its production.

I thank Routledge and Wendy Fuller, Emma Gadsden, and Grace Harrison for making this collection of texts available in the form of a book, and for guiding me through the maze of the world of publishing.

The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. We thank Fondation Le Corbusier, Galerie Strecker, Rosa Feliu Atienza, Richard Bryant, Arcaid, Artists Rights Society, Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Massimo Listri, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, Architectural Review, The Provost and Fellows of the Queens College in Oxford, Cemal Emden, OMA/AMO, Spiegel, MIT Press, John Hill, Peter Eisenman, Ungers Archiv fr Architekturwissenschaften, Archives dArchitecture Moderne, Lon Krier, Ralitza Petit, Burcin Yildirim, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Joan Ockman, Miroslava Brooks, Mark Jarzombek, and Archives Bernard Tschumi for granting permission to reproduce the images in the book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The editor and the publisher apologize for any errors or omissions in the preceding list and the credits and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.