Collage City presents a critical analysis of the origins, ideologies and shortcomings of Modernist city

planning through studies of the attempts of Modernisms opponents to solve the resultant issues through
their antithetical proposals. The messianic Modernist movement had striven to start afresh and build the
new Utopian city. However, Rowe and Koetter argue that a retarded conception of science and
reluctant recognition of poetics1 led to the failure of these urban design proposals. In a Post-Modern
reaction to this total-design approach, the authors propose that urban design must be considered
through fragmentation, bricolage and metamorphoses of interpretation to produce a functioning
network of pocket utopias.

Following the introduction, the book is split into 5 chapters Utopia: Decline and Fall?; After the
Millennium; Crisis of the Object: Predicament of Texture; Collision City and the Politics of Bricolage; and
Collage city and the Reconquest of Time. They conclude with an Excursus of possible objet trouvs [to be
used] in the urbanistic collage.2

Utopia: Decline and Fall?, after a quick mention of modernism and a few of its protagonists, introduces
the history of Utopian visions with a brief explanation of the ascetic, Christian values of the Classical
Utopia, and the transformative Platonic Utopia founded more in activism than the ephemeral. Flying
through history and notable examples of ideal city designs, the authors eventually land back in the early
20th Century, in the Ville Radieuse. The chapter illustratively demonstrates the ambiguities and
contradictions of Modernist urban planners and discusses why their visions were so highly influential but
doomed.

After the confusing journey through Utopias, After the Millennium starts to clear up what issues the
authors would actually like to deal with. With fewer citations and name-drops than the previous chapter,
this chapter is a discussion of the first major reactions to Modernism after its stagnation through the 40s
and 50s. Through comparisons of Disney World and the work of Superstudio, they look at the 2 extremes
seen in the contemporaneous critique of the Ville Radieuse. The hyper-rationality of Superstudios
egalitarian utopias and the picturesque artifice of Disney World both find themselves so extreme that
their theories do not make their way into reality outside of the photomontage or theme park. The authors
ask why should we be obliged to prefer a nostalgia for the future to that for the past?...Could not this
ideal citybehave, quite explicitly, as both a theatre of prophecy and a theatre of memory? a theme
revisited in later chapters.

Crisis of the Object: Predicament of Texture finds its way back from the fantasy world and into the
realised city. Public space (and its appropriation) and the texture of the urban fabric are the main themes
explored through this chapter. Dismissing the continuous void of the Modernist tendency to place
towers in parks ( la Le Corbusiers Plan Voisin) the authors suggest that the mystery of what is beyond
brings more life to the city. Speculative pleasure of the city walker creating his own narrative to spaces
that are inaccessible to him allows for a more connected experience to be had, rather than allowing free
reign to meander across every open space in the city. However, the Modernist view of buildings as objects
is not disregarded in its totality. Their proposal suggests that buildings should act both as space occupier
and space definer maintaining an individual presence whilst providing continuity to the urban texture.

Further compromise is found through Collision City and the Politics of Bricolage where the authors
turn their discussion towards those who design and create the spaces rather than the spaces themselves.
As discussed in earlier chapters, Utopian ideals have always relied on an engineered total design or total
architecture in order to realise their prescriptions, but this monistic reactionary approach to problems
causes only more problems due to its reliance on data which can quickly become obsolete. Adversely, the
ad-hoc nature of Levi-Strauss bricoleur piecing together instant solutions from a limited palette of
tools does not achieve workable results either, with solutions acting for the present and not necessarily
continuing, with much effect, further into the future. Rowe and Koetter suggest (again) that architects and
urban designers should aim for a middle ground, somewhere between the scientific engineering and the
ad-hoc bricolage, to produce solutions which can be both contemporary, efficient, but flexible enough to
move with the times and adapt to future situations.

Collage City and the Reconquest of Time sees the authors drawing together the fragments of argument
presented in the preceding chapters to form a conclusive proposal to apply to future urban designs. The
outcome: a proposal of Collage City a city of fragments from the past, present and future, taking
inspiration from working examples in existing cities; some scientific, others picturesque; some antique,
others contemporary; some may be rational, whilst others disordered. Collage city would offer the poetics
of Utopia, but the juxtaposition and layering of smaller designs into a whole (rather than a totalitarian,
fresh slate approach) would allow for the city to be free of the unchangeable finality of Utopian politic. A
post-modern composition lacking prescription of remembrances, shifted contexts, recycled meanings,
metamorphoses allowing the city to create itself, to read itself and to form its own meanings from
borrowed fragments

As an example of what some of these fragments may be, existing and historic urban objets trouvs are
presented to the reader in Excurses an appendix of urban objects to be implemented into the urban
collages (hopefully) designed by their audience. Memorable streets, Stabilizers, Potentially Interminable
Set Pieces, Splendid Public Terraces, Ambiguous and Composite Buildings, Nostalgia Producing
Instruments, Gardens all utilised correctly and in moderation, can go towards an effective application of
the Collage City proposal. Some may argue that many contemporary cities, due to the nature of their
development over time are already collages of historic fragments and epochs. But the nature of Collage
City is that the fragments are applied strategically and affably so as to allow the city to develop and
nurture itself, free from prescription which may still linger in cities already containing said fragments.

The final paragraph reads: Utopia as metaphor and Collage City as prescription the disintegration of
modern architecture seems to call for such a strategy; and, possibly, even common sense concurs. And,
I think that, although their argument at times can be hard to follow through the ambiguity of the
paragraph length sentences, common sense does prevail through the proposal of Collage City.