In 1978, Colin Rowe's Collage City, a highly influential text for architects and urban planners, claimed urban renewal's city of jumbled disparate objects was just as problematic as the city it set out to remedy - the dense traditional city of slums. During the urban renewal architects and planners believed that a building could only be understood as an object when in field space, but Rowe disagreed, arguing that the increasing value of urban real estate in the modern city did not allow for the ample green space required to support Le Corbusier's “towers in the park.” Rather, this residual space is paved for parking lots that detach buildings from the rest of the city fabric. Hence, Rowe called for a transcendence of space fixation and object fixation to create an urban environment where building and space achieve balance and a figure ground with shared dialogue between solid and void.
