Research & Writing as Practice: Peter Rowe
“Chinese Modern: Episodes Backward and Forward in Time" by Peter G. Rowe, Liang Wang, and Zhanliang Chen. "Korean Modern: The Matter of Identity" by Peter G. Rowe, Yun Fu, and Jihoon Song. "Southeast Asian Modern: From Roots to Contemporary Turns" by Peter G. Rowe and Yun Fu. (Birkhäuser 2021-22)
Research & Writing as Practice: Peter Rowe, Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD)
This exhibition celebrates four decades of the academic oeuvre of Peter Rowe, Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). His writings are uniquely situated in the disciplines of architecture and urban design, given the various thematic domains he has covered. Rowe has interrogated questions and issues all the way from those of methodologies to theorizing emergent paradigms in a range of geographies—Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, China, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States.
This spectacular trajectory is characterized by a pragmatism where conditions on the ground are observed and rigorously discerned and theorized. Simultaneously Rowe has situated these thematic underpinnings of his writings within the pedagogical formulations he has propelled as professor at the GSD. These have spanned environmental issues, housing, emergent forms of urbanism globally, and reflections on the emergence of the digital and the challenges these pose for the practice and teaching of architecture and urbanism more broadly.
Along the way, Professor Rowe, in his prior role as the Dean of the GSD (1992-2004), designed platforms for the engagement with and propagation of these issues through the establishment of the Harvard Design Magazine and the Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design as well as establishing student groups such as the Asia GSD which became the forerunner to other such collectives. Peter Rowe’s body of work is expansive in content, insightful in its contribution to the field, and generous in its spirit of collaboration and dissemination. This seminal body of work epitomizes a model of practice—one that leads design through research and writing.
– Rahul Mehrotra, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design and John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization
