Architecture of Good Intentions by C. Rowe

by Colin Rowe

Colin Rowe displays a witty and inspirational view of today's architectural scene.

Mass Market Paperback

First published October 31, 1994

About the author

Colin Rowe was a British-born, American-naturalised architectural historian, critic, theoretician, and teacher; acknowledged as a major intellectual influence on world architecture and urbanism in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, particularly in the fields of city planning, regeneration, and urban design. 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 the majority of his life he taught as a Professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In 1995 he was awarded the Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects, the professional group's highest honor.

Reviews

[Tom M (London) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Architecture now (says Colin Rowe) is pervaded by humourless experimentalism and "...talk about linguistics and miscellaneous intellectual bric-a-brac...instead of drawings for the purpose of building, mostly we are immersed in an affair of drawings for the purpose of critical réclame". He cannot shake off nostalgia for the grand récit of Modern Architecture: its manifestoes, its Masters; at least that was something.
He gives us five essays on the modern experience: the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the triumph of Science, the languages of Eclecticism- but stops short at 1927 and although headings like Mechanism Epistemology Eschatology Organism and Iconography may sound hifalutin they are not in themselves a thesis.
His Introduction makes matters worse; groping for an image to describe our present condition, he loses himself (and us) in a tussle with semantics, unable to define what the term Modern Architecture actually means. His very quandary seems itself quintessentially modern.
In "Mechanism" he investigates the roots of the contemporary architect's mind-set. The information-gathering that Diderot initiated with the Encyclopédie is fundamental to an architectural design process based on Science, Method, and Data. Unfortunately Rowe only alludes to how this subsequently deteriorated; one misses a full explanation as to how (as he asserts) the accompanying social project got lost, leaving Systems, Information, and Technology as the very poor surrogate for Liberté Egalité Fraternité.
Whether this is right or not, Rowe himself seems pretty sure that the age of Modern Architecture is all over, and has ended badly; before us he sees only darkness; but his view is very lop-sided. A chapter heading such as "Iconography" might lead us to expect a general critique of Modernist architectural language but proves, alas, to be just another of his brilliant essays on Le Corbusier.
Rowe requires our absolute submission and co-operation; he is in charge, we follow -down the rabbit-hole. The images he then vouchsafes are as madly intriguing as Tenniel's: candelabras by Ghirlandaio are all mixed up with the ventilators of a power station; the Abbé Laugier's Primitive Hut and Corbu's Maison Dom-Ino stand as neighbours on adjacent lots.
We encounter Count Rumford, a lean figure with half a smile, warming his behind at an iron stove of his own invention (the Rumford Stove). Alongside him (leaning against the wall, as it were) is a picture of the Rococo interior of Balthasar Neumann's church of Vierzehnheiligen, completed in 1762. What's the connection?
Rowe speculates. Rumford (among other things, a founder of the Royal Society) travelled from London to a new post in Bavaria at the height of the Terror (one imagines him taking the circuitous route, avoiding France). This journey took place sometime around 1790 -a full twenty-eight years after the completion of Vierzehnheiligen, but never mind that. For Rowe "the paint at Vierzehnheiligen had scarcely dried" and he fantasises about how the "scientific" Rumford, who he assumes must have visited the new church, would have found himself rubbing up against old-fashioned and orthodox attitudes in "Catholic" Bavaria. Is this unbelievable? Simplistic? Off with your head!
Colin Rowe has never felt bound by the rules of scholarship, preferring to play the confidence-trickster and provocateur of architectural theory. Here as elsewhere, he develops the most elaborate arguments on the basis of nothing more than his own imaginings as to what might have happened. In a short review it is impossible to do justice to his compendious, free-ranging, but completely undisciplined erudition, which appears to be based on the unexpected juxtapositionings he learned from Rudolf Wittkower, his tutor at the Courtauld Institute in London.

Whether you believe or not Rowe's proposition that William Le Baron Jenny (in Chicago around 1870) must have possessed a copy of Viollet-Le-Duc's Dictionnaire Raisonée de l'Architecture (France 1868) it gives him a fine excuse to propose (with the aid of some very carefully selected illustrations) that the Frenchman must surely have been a major influence on the American - with all that this would then imply, were it by any chance true (which seems so far-fetched as to be impossible).
As his speculations proceed, there emerges -indistinct and unformed- a possible alternative agenda for architecture that has nothing to do with the crispness, clarity, method, and systematic thinking of the Moderns and, instead, everything to do with eclecticism, precedent, paradigm and interpretation and for which, one hopes, Rowe might at some point have compiled a kind of illustrated primer. Whether he is a scholar or a fantasist, in the quest for a redefinition of architecture his magpie-like, cherry-picking approach would surely be the more enjoyable.
Some of the less free-ranging souls currently engaged in this quest, from retrograde Léon Krier to progressive Peter Eisenmann, claim Rowe as their Master - to his considerable amusement. He and his predominantly American coterie of devoted acolytes do have their own fixed points of doctrine, the most unquestioned of which is that the expression "Modern Architecture" equals Le Corbusier (but only before Ronchamp) and nothing else. Rowe drags us, almost yelling and screaming, up the ramp of the Villa Stein/Savoye (the two houses seem to intermingle) round and round (as in Corbu's sea-shell sketches) managing en route to become involved with Leon Battista Alberti, the Douanier Rousseau and of all people, Sir Edwin Landseer; and straight into the bathroom, there to contemplate the significance of the bidet. Brilliant, amusing, and possibly suggestive; but there has to be more to this idea of Modern Architecture than just early Corbu. And anyway it isn't 1927 any more; a lot has happened since then.
In the midst of his long, legendary monologues on matters such as these, Rowe has been heard to confess that he has the soul of a butler and indeed, his admiration for some rich, highly located person can at times seem like a flunky whispering reverentially in the corner of a salon, behind a curtain: "...the ever so intellectual and enthusiastic Germaine de Stael...". It can sometimes seem as though Rowe the majordomo has taken us on a conducted tour of the house, drawing our attention to its marvellous accoutrements and reminding us to keep our voices down; writing about the Palais de Justice in Paris (Louis-Joseph Duc, 1857-68) he fawns "...disclosure of staircase leading to courtroom...as a brilliantly argued performance this interior can only astound...". The floor, he says, is "impeccable".
At the end he comes back almost reluctantly to his thesis, having lost his way, with a few desultory grumbles about his "dismay" concerning the "present condition" of architecture. What architecture? What condition? He doesn't explain. It doesn't seem to matter much to him. What does he propose? We'll never know.