Colin article SP

C - 1. This is an amazing comparison (only made possible by Google Earth). Lower Manhattan is on the left and the Pudong area of Shanghai is on the right. Each image shows one square mile. Both are printed here at the same scale along with the Pudong skyline.

It is a warning. The richness of Manhattan’s streets and blocks have been erased leaving just the towers in a melancholy emptiness.

C - 2. Diagrams of interaction: Richard Feynman and Colin Rowe.

C - 3. A Model of Urban Form

C - 4. The basic form of “city” stays the same no matter the time or place. The city is a complex formal type. To label it as historical or traditional is misleading.

C - 5. Sketch of the overlapping spaces in Piazza della Signoria seen from the north. The Palazzo Vecchio seems to be standing in a completed rectangular space. (See Marvin Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence, 1997).

C - 6. The master detective, Nero Wolf (seated), and his loyal assistant, Archie Goodwin, discussing The Case of the Missing City.

C - 7. Top: the finished plan; and bottom: the empty site before we started — there was no city at this point.

C - 8. The end run: completing the fortifications from the Gianicolo at the Porto Portese in Trastevere, so that the Nolli urban fabric can enter the site.

C - 9. Work in progress: literally pasting it up and gluing it together.

C - 10. Trying out the Paris Opera in Rome — high and low. Left on the Aventine, right in the valley south of the Palatine.

C - 11. Note at the bottom of Colin’s “Opera Plan” that it was OK and done. Things changed the next week.

C - 12. Two sketches that try to define the larger strategy and so guide the particulars. On the left, a collision of set piece fields on each hill with unresolved “interstitial loose debris.” On the right, a solid/void continuous fabric.

C - 13. Exploring solutions for the Circus Maximus: left, a floating figure of trees replicating the original stadium; and right, a built-in piazza.

C - 14. The final plan of pasted-up pieces just before we drew it up. Several things didn’t make it into the final: the solid buildings around the Coliseum, over Nero’s house; the confusing multiple roads in the valley between the Palatine and the Celio; and the French Hotel on the Aventine.

C - 15. A line drawing of the uphill axis, parallel to the Circus Maximus, that is aligned with the dome of Saint Peter’s. It shows the multiple effects of the French Garden technique in expanding the local space to break out of the set piece blues (C - 16).

C - 19. From the left: Archie Goodwin (aka SKP); Nero Wolf (aka CR); Pope Leo X (aka GL de’ Medici); and Cardinal Rossi (aka nephew Luigi).

C - 18. A Partial Model of Urban Form

C - 16. Last version of the set piece space: the Villa Pia has replaced the Paris Opera.

C - 17. Roma Interrotta Nolli Map, Sector 8 by Colin Rowe Team and Sector 9 by Michael Graves.