In these excerpts from Rowe and Koetter’s ‘Collage City’, Rowe and Koetter present a cynical view of some of the concepts like Modernism we are learning in class, and I will examine some quotes from these excerpts to analyze them deeper.
In the second excerpt, Rowe and Koetter examine the people that design the buildings, not those that actually build them themselves. In these dense texts, I believe that Rowe and Koetter summarize the points of this chapter well with this final passage..”perhaps it can only be added that the Job ahead should be envisaged as no matter of making the world safe for democracy, it is not totally different; but certainly, it is not this. For, surely, the job is that of making safe the city (and hence democracy) by large infusions of meytaphor, analogical thinking, ambiguity; and, in the face of a prevailing scientism and conspicuous laissez-aller, it is just possible that these activities could provide the true Survival Through Design.” Rowe and Koetter are, in my opinion, attempting to explain that a balance between methods is ultimately the key to a successful project, and too much input from any one group along the way tarnishes the project; a balance between the hyper scientific mentality, mixed with the laissez faire, ad hoc mentality discussed earlier, will yield the best results; for the city but also the individual. Compared to the first excerpt and this brilliant quote “A choice of utopia or else, the urbanist vision of the nineteen-twenties is propounded in terms of the moral or biological problem of salvation; and building holds the key…The machinery of society, profoundly out of gear, oscillates between an amelioration, of historical importance, and a catastrophe.” Using examples from history such as Woodrow Wilson and Christian events involving Christ, Rowe and Koetter do a decent job of providing a different viewpoint of Modernism, providing some negative aspects of it that are definitely worth consideration.
Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Basel, Basel-Stadt: Birkhäuser, 2009