Peter G. Rowe is the Raymond Garbe Professor of
Architecture and Urban Design at the Harvard University Graduate
School of Design where he has taught since 1985. He also served
as Dean of the Faculty of Design, 1992-2004. He offers courses in
housing and urban design, including a current lecture course Urbanization
in the Pacific Asian Region and option studios. Recent studios
have included: A
Cross Section through the City: Redevelopment of the Han Jiang Riverfront
in Wuhan, China; Backward
and Forward in Time: Urban Rehabilitation in the Xicheng District
of Beijing; Tokyo: Inner
City Revitalization; Shan
Shui City: Urban Development in Wenzhou, China; Environments
of Opportunity: Redevelopment on the Waterfront of Las Palmas de
Gran Canaria, Spain; Attraversare
la Città: Redevelopment around the Via Appia Nuova in Rome;
Isopolis: Addressing the Scales
of Urban Life in Athens; Open
City, Rebuilding Downtown Beirut's Waterfront; and Yi-Ti-Liang-Yi
Zhi Jian, Redevelopment in Suzhou, China. Recent seminars
include: Pudong
New Area, Shanghai, China; Territorialization
in the Region of Romagna, Italy; The
Design and Provision of Housing in the United States.
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Isopolis
(1997) |
The general focus of Rowe's work is on the evolving
cultural conditions of modernity, especially as they apply in
various regions and to various aspects of the built environment.
His recent book Civic Realism,
for instance, probes the question of how best to create viable
public space in today's contemporary, heterogeneous and democratic
societies. Similarly, the more recent L'Asia
e il Moderno (Asia Modern) explicitly addresses the manner
in which standard western cultural concepts of modernity are being
extended and even transformed in rapidly urbanizing areas within
Asia, and Projecting
Beirut examines similar questions in the Middle East.
Three of Rowe's most recent books Shan
Shui City: Urban Development in Wenzhou, China, Architectural
Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China, Modern
Urban Housing in China: 1840-2000 and Shanghai:
Architecture and Urbanism for Modern China deal explicitly
with modernizing China, and in Modernity
and Housing, as its title suggests, Rowe responds to the
question of how best to understand and architecturally tackle
today's complex housing environments. Indeed, the two broad recurring
orientations in both Rowe's teaching and research are urbanism
and housing, usually from a historical perspective, but again
with a specific emphasis on the twentieth-century and twenty-first
centuries.
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