While reading Rowe and Koetter’s Collage City, I was inspired by the the statement (regarding architectural objects in the collage approach): “whether they originate in Pergamum or Dahomey, in Detroit or Dubrovnik, whether their implications are of twentieth or of fifteenth century is of no great matter.” In my diagrams, I took this fairly literally and thought of taking pieces from multiple different cities and creating a new composite city. This new city would only exist in my imagination, which responds to the argument in the reading that “the ideally open city, like the ideally open society, is just as much a figment of the imagination as its opposite.”
I chose three cities which I am very familiar with and which were mentioned in Collage City: Florence, Athens, and New York. I chose these cities in particular because I wanted three completely different approaches within my collaged city. Combining New York’s strict and radical grid with Athens’ disorganized clusters and Florence’s centralized plazas created a great representation of a “collage city.” When choosing the specific sections of each city I wanted to focus on I kept the terms “memorable streets,” “stabilizers,” “potentially interminable set pieces,” “splendid public terraces,” “ambiguous and composite buildings,” and “nostalgia-producing instruments” in mind. Below are three versions of my collage city and reference images of the three cities.
