i'm a friend of their's, and in addition to being great architects, they're great people too.. what up alf

It is rare to find such a great devotion and perseverance towards city issues, urban design concepts and developments in one book. It is the compilation of years of partnership of work at KK Associates: a professional focus on strategies and plausible design scenarios for contemporary cities. A must in the library of seriously contextual architects and developers.

Colin Rowe's essays are exceptionally insightful and truly enlightening. These essays were written decades ago but they're still enormously valuable and still very fresh. The first essay, from which the book takes its title and probably Rowe's most famous, is an analysis of the geometrical and proportional similarities between Le Corbusier's villa at Garches and Palladio's Villa Malcontenta. A brief but dense tour de force. Perhaps his next most famous essay is "Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal," written with Robert Slutzky. Also a real eye-opener. In other essays he discusses the curious relationship between the Chicago frame and modern architecture; neo-classicism and modern architecture; mannerism and modern architecture; La Tourette; 19th century thinking about architectural character and composition; and the architecture of utopia. These essays make you think, look at things differently, look at things you hadn't noticed, and they ultimately enlarge your understanding of architecture and your architectural field of vision. I'm grateful to Colin Rowe for that. After reading this book I bought his three-volume collection of essays, "As I Was Saying." I just had to have more. The essays in this book put your mind to work but Rowe's writing is also quite engaging. He's a genuinely independent thinker and a rigorous one too. These are wonderful essays and the book is highly recommended.

This collection of essays by Prof. Colin Rowe is considered to be among the most important analytical essays on architecture in this century. Prof. Rowe has won the Gold Medal in Architecture from Queen Elizabeth and was Professor of Architecture at Cornell for over 25 years.

Rowe's obtuse, convoluted writing style buries his ideas in a morass of verbal sludge, rendering them totally inaccessible to the layman and barely comprehensible to the typical architecture student. After encountering this book several times in the course of various classes, I was surprised to realize how comparatively simple the ideas it contains are. In the typical fashion of upper-level humanities academia, however, Rowe hides his point behind impossibly twisted sentences and an onslaught of outside references that seems designed more to impress the reader with Rowe's own wide-ranging knowledge than to enlighten. The ideas of this book could be condensed to a short essay, and the only thing lost would be the page count.

This book is not out of print and is available from the publisher. It has been published in Germnan and in English so if you want an English version make sure you order the correct edition.

I'm a student, Transperency: the book gives you a new way to think about architecture, outlining a basic characteristic in architecture that transcends major movements. Crucial to the understanding of buildings. best of all. .. Colin Rowe is really easy to read.

Does not contribute much to the discussion, written in a lengthy, self-important, arrogant manner.

This book is the most pompous garbage I have ever seen. It is unreadable drivel that has no point and adds nothing to the search for solutions to our urban problems. What were the authors thinking? They deserve the "Emperor has no clothes" award for this trash. Save your money and buy "A Pattern Language," "Edge City," "Changing Places," "Home from Nowhere," or any of many meaningful books that say something relevant.

this book, published for the first time in 1978, ask the main principle of the modern mouvement. Rowe and Koetter write about the opposition of the concept of "tabula rasa and an urban tradition taken from the historical memory and progressive sedimentation of the cities. "Collage" is a possible assimilation of the two different problematic, in the way that it's take past and future in a complex present.