Colin Rowe
Architect, Urbanist & Teacher
Colin Rowe was born Rotherham, England 1920 and died November 5, 1999, Arlington County, Virginia, U.S. He became a naturalised American citizen well-known as an architectural historian, critic, theoretician, and teacher, and is 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. This information is from espondent Anthony Eardley:-
"Anthony Colin Rowe (1920-1999) was an architect, urbanist, teacher and essayist who spent much of his professional life teaching in American universities, and whose influence on architectural education and practice on both sides of the Atlantic has been, to say the least, immense. He is certainly as important as Rotherham's other famous urbanist, Raymond Unwin (1863-1940).
You can find a summary of his career in Wikipedia, which, ironically, has also neglected to include him in its own list of Rotherham notables, and a better summary in the Cornell University Chronicle for November 11, 1999, which I reprint for you below:"
"Colin Rowe, one of architecture's most influential scholars and one of its leading commentators, died Nov. 5 in Arlington, Virginia. He was 79. Rowe, the Andrew Dickson White Professor of Architecture Emeritus, taught at Cornell from 1962 to 1990.
Rowe was a driving force in architectural theory in the post World War II era. His essay, "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa," initially published in 1947 when Rowe was just 27, was one of the first explanations of modern architecture's dependence on history and past precedents.
In subsequent scholarly pieces on cubism and modern architecture he further developed his theories, and he was the author of several books, including Collage City (MIT Press, 1978), which shifted the focus from individual buildings to whole cities; Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (MIT Press, 1976); The Architecture of Good Intentions (Academy, 1994); and As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays (MIT Press, 1996).
Rowe, who taught at Cornell in four different decades, received one of architecture's highest honors in 1995 when he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal of Architecture by Queen Elizabeth and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The medal cited Rowe as the "most significant architectural teacher of the second half of the 20th century" and "one of modern architecture's most consistent and inspired critics."
The British-born architect and scholar was saluted in 1983 for his "contribution to the development of architectural theory in our time" with election as an honorary fellow of the RIBA. Two years earlier, Rowe was awarded the Topaz Medal by the American Institute of Architects for his "seminal influence on architecture in this country." He was honored with a Festschrift at Cornell in the spring of 1996.
Rowe began his studies at the Liverpool School of Architecture in 1939, left to enter the British infantry in 1942, but returned after World War II to complete his degree and teach. He then studied with architectural historian Rudolf Wittkower at the Warburg Institute in London, earning a master's degree in the history of art.
Arriving in the United States in 1952, Rowe studied briefly at Yale, worked in California and taught at the University of Texas in Austin. He then taught briefly at Cornell, returned to England to earn a master of architecture degree at Cambridge University in 1958, and joined Cornell's permanent full-time faculty in 1962. He became the Andrew Dickson White Professor of Architecture in 1985 and held that post until his retirement in 1990. He moved to Washington, D.C., in 1994, where he was associated with the Program in Architecture at the University of Maryland, College Park."
From Anthony Eardley, Professor of Architecture, Retired, Dean Emeritus, College of Architecture, University of Kentucky, Dean Emeritus, Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto. (born, incidentally, in 1933, just six miles to the north of you, in Wath-upon-Dearne).