It would be fair to say that Rowe and Koetter’s Collage City is beyond my comprehension. In my reading of Collage City–and I accept that it could be due to my lack of comprehension–I never felt there was any definitive thesis driving the paper. The text progressed at an aggravating rate, firing off on tangents and overloading sentences with clauses so frequently that re-reading paragraphs was typically called for, and re-reading sentences became a regular habit. Once, or rather, if, you can navigate the text (and by navigate I don’t mean comprehend in its entirety, but parse out meaningful ideas), it is packed with thought provoking philosophy on Modern Architecture. What I found to be the most interesting of these ideas was Rowe and Koetter’s writing on Superstudio and the “The symbolic American utopia” (Rowe and Koetter 42) which they saw in Disney World. To me, Disney World, the text is specifically referring to Disney’s Main Street, draws similarities to the style of New Urbanism seen elsewhere in Florida. We saw an example of this style the other day in Seaside, Florida, which served as the set for Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998). How fitting that we can liken for purposes of this argument, Disney World and the residential “utopia” of Seaside Florida. Rowe and Koetters qoute Robert Venturi of Superstudio professing “Disney World is nearer to what people want than what architects have ever given them,” and to this I would argue that, and I believe Rowe and Koetters might back me up, Disney World is nearer to what people think they want than what architects have ever given them. I’ve always maintained a cautious skepticism in my enjoyment of Disney World which follows the saying “not all that glitters is gold”. The commercial, manufactured, isolated, controlled “utopia” that is Disney World thrives, and really and truly thrives, by appealing to all of our materialistic, comfort-driven sensibilities. A closer examination would show you however, that such an elimination of the daily stimuli we categorize as nuisance leads to an entirely unstimulated experience of life. My favorite quote to emerges from the text comes when Rowe and Koetters preach that “Main street is an exhibition of a reserved and scarcely agreeable reality, of a reality which engages speculative curiosity which engages the imagination, and which for its understanding insists upon the expenditure of mental energy” (Rowe and Koetters 46). I’m glad that my skepticism of the off-putting façade of Disney World, a façade which drove the premise of one of my favorite movies, The Truman Show, is supported by an architectural theory which advocates that “Disney’s Main Street is no so much an idealization of the real thing as it is a filtering and packaging operation involving the elimination of unpleasantness” (Rowe and Koetters 46)
Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 1978.