This book brings together 303 letters written by legendary architectural historian and critic Colin Rowe to family, friends, and esteemed colleagues. Spanning a period of nearly sixty years, from the early 1940s until his death in 1999, Rowe's letters are to, among many, his parents in England and to friends Henry Russell Hitchcock and Ernst Gombrich; to colleagues Robert Maxwell, Judy Di Maio, Alan Colquhoun, Joan Ockman, Alvin Boyarsky, Phyllis Lambert, Mary Stirling, John Miller; to architects Louis Kahn, James Stirling, and Peter Eisenman; to many of his former Cornell students, and most intimately and candidly, to his brother, sister-in-law, and nephews in Oxford, England. Informal and elegant ruminations, they detail Rowe's life in Austin, Ithaca, Rome, London, and Washington addressing a wide range of subjects from furniture, landscapes, politics, history, education, and aging to architecture and the urban condition. Resounding with wit and wisdom, each is written in the incomparable style for which Rowe is justifiably famous. Letters are annotated and a chronology and revised biography of Rowe's life is featured.

Daniel Naegele is an architect and associate professor of architecture at Iowa State University. A graduate of Yale University and of the Architectural Association in London, he completed his dissertation, Le Corbusier's Seeing Things: Ambiguity and Illusion in the Representation of Modern Architecture, under the supervision of Joseph Rykwert at the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. His writings on Le Corbusier, Wright, Kahn, Duchamp, Picasso, and on architectural photography have been translated to seven languages and published throughout the United States and in the UK, Western Europe, New Zealand, and Korea. Naegele wrote theses on Colin Rowe at the AA and at Yale University. His analyses and reviews of Rowe's writing have been published in Harvard Design Magazine and elsewhere.