Collage City

Rating:
Summary: Most Important Book on Urban Design Theory Today
Review: Colin Rowe proposes a form of inclusive urbanism that meshes the modern city with the traditional city.

Rating:
Summary: Inaccessible, and badly edited
Review: Does not contribute much to the discussion, written in a lengthy, self-important, arrogant manner.

Rating:
Summary: The Theoretical Underpinings of Rowe's Urban Design Studio.
Review: Rowe and Koetter's brilliant excursus of urban design theory via the texts and contexts of intellectual history.

Rating:
Summary: Pompous garbage
Review: This book is the most pompous garbage I have ever seen. It is unreadable drivel that has no point and adds nothing to the search for solutions to our urban problems. What were the authors thinking? They deserve the "Emperor has no clothes" award for this trash. Save your money and buy "A Pattern Language," "Edge City," "Changing Places," "Home from Nowhere," or any of many meaningful books that say something relevant.

Rating:
Summary: the best to understand cities now and then
Review: this book, published for the first time in 1978, ask the main principle of the modern mouvement. Rowe and Koetter write about the opposition of the concept of "tabula rasa and an urban tradition taken from the historical memory and progressive sedimentation of the cities. "Collage" is a possible assimilation of the two different problematic, in the way that it's take past and future in a complex present.