(Dossier Colin Rowe) Influences without footnotes: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy & Colin Rowe

Abstract

Colin Rowe is considered one of the most relevant thinkers in the architectural field since the 1960s. His complex theoretical framework shows a person capable of critically reconciling a wide variety of currents and discourses of his time, hence the richness and complexity of their texts. In the case of Collage City, its proposal is framed in a critical period in relation to urban doctrines derived from the thinking of modern architecture. The work done in the Urban Design Program at Cornell University, under Rowe's direction, beginning in 1965, served as the foundation for the publication. The perceptual theory of the Gestalt, the structuralist criticism of Claude Levi-Strauss, the political utopia of Judith Shklaar or the anti-historicism method of Karl Popper, can be traced more or less directly among its sources.

The recent release of Daniel Naegele's edited book, the letters of Colin Rowe: five decades of correspondence (2016), gives us access to the professor's most intimate history and sheds light on the editing process. Among all this infrastructural correspondence, one mention in particular opens a new path of interpretation of the work. Matrix of Man (1968), a book dedicated to urban history written by historian Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, appears to have been one of the guide books that Rowe consulted during the editorial process of Collage City. However, there is no mention of this publication in the work of Fred Koetter and Colin Rowe. This article will attempt to analyse to what extent Sibyl Moholy-Nagy's book could have influenced Colin Rowe, proposing new interpretations of Collage City.