In all honesty, I wasn’t fully following Rowe and Koetter’s argument on the hedgehog vs the fox in Collision City and the Politics of ‘Bricolage.’ But, as they moved through the argument and broke down Le Corbusier’s style to determine if he was a “fox,” they stated something that I disagreed with. “The public world is simple, the private world is more elaborate: and, if the private world affects a concern for contingency, the public personality long maintained an almost too heroic disdain for any taint of the specific.” (Rowe and Koetter 93) In my opinion, and based on many examples throughout history, I believe the public is much more complicated than the private in mostly everything.
Looking back on the dozens of urban designers that have presented ideas throughout history, the success rate of them getting a clean slate and creating a city based solely on their design is small. Taking LC as the first example, Ville Radieuse and Ville Contemporaine are holistically unsuccessful. While some of his smaller ideas are widely used throughout many cities, neither of his large scale designs were introduced with tabula rasa. His smaller ideas that are widely used are the ideas for more private spaces. On top of that, there are a multitude of urban designers during that time with ideas that contradict Le Corbusier’s ideas. In comparison, I have noticed that on the private level, architects tend to have similar views and follow the styles of the time period they are in. It is much easier to have a private design that is accepted by a large majority of people in the present. Whether those designs are accepted throughout history is a different story.
Take FLW for example, Fallingwater, Robie House, and Farnsworth are objectively accepted as beautiful and well designed private houses. I would say that these have been successful both in his time and well past it. He was able to implement his prairie style principles to many of his private space projects and have the product be accepted by both the laymen and the architecture community. I cannot say the same for LC’s principles for his urban planning. Moreover, one of the most famous public projects that FLW did was the Guggenheim Museum. This project had to take into account the many complications of trying to design a space that is visited by people from all over the world and still have it be a practical place for the display of modern art. I would say that he succeeded in the physical appeal but fell short on the practicality on many fronts, one being the constant slope of the ramp making it difficult to display art pieces. In a private space the design is much more clean cut. You are designing for a specific consumer who you know has interest in your style/principles.
During my study abroad, the concept of public vs private was something that we focused on very heavily. I found it very easy to understand the concepts behind the more private areas because I was able to wrap my mind around the specific styles of Scarpa and Palladio. They had very specific rules that they applied to their designs and fit well into the city as a whole. One example, the Villa Rotunda is a private spaced turned public. The villa’s characteristics are much more clear when applied to private space and more murky now that it is a museum for the public.
Overall, the public world is very much not simple as Rowe and Koetter stated. I would argue that it is many times more complicated and LC and FLW are a few of the many examples where their designs for private spaces were more successful than their designs for public spaces.
Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1983