I Almost Forgot - Unpublished Colin Rowe

Unpublished writings of Colin Rowe—letters, essays, lectures, and a postcard—clarify his thinking on key concepts while revealing his wit and erudition.

Colin Rowe (1920–1999) was one of the great architectural historians of the twentieth century, publishing the influential works The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (1976) and Collage City (1978). While his written work was rigorous and authoritative, his lectures and letters were more casual, “carefully careless,”both witty and erudite. I Almost Forgot gathers twenty-three such writings—letters, essays, lectures, a postcard, and a eulogy. Both edifying and entertaining, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, occasionally scathing, they fill in personal details and clarify key concepts in Rowe’s work.

In these writings, Rowe tells of the “Corbu superstructure upon a beaux-arts base” that refugee Polish architects and their stu