The architectural historian, critic and educator Colin Rowe, who has died aged 79, was tutor to the renowned architect Sir James Stirling, and won the profession's most prestigious awards: the Royal Institute of British Architects' Royal Gold Medal in 1995, and the American Institute of Architects' Topaz Medallion. An influential teacher in England and America, influencing a whole generation of architectural thinking, Rowe's graduate urban design studio at Cornell University pioneered a critique of the physical form of the contemporary city, introducing "contextualism" as a specific theory of urbanism.
Rowe trained first as an architect before establishing his name as a historian at a crucial moment in the postwar diaspora of modernism. His brilliant recognition of the essential historical continuum within which architecture flourished, and his succinct illustration of this enlarged perspective, enabled bright architects of a new generation to find their way to a richer, more stimulating range of ideas.
Rowe was the son and grandson of schoolmasters from Bolton-upon-Dearne in south Yorkshire. He attended school at Wath-upon-Dearne and won a scholarship to Liverpool University in 1938, his choice as the outstanding architectural school of the day. He joined the Parachute Regiment in 1942, but his spine was badly injured in a landing and he was invalided out, and went back to the studio drawing board.
Graduating from Liverpool in 1945, he took up a Warburg Institute junior fellowship. His unpublished thesis, The Theoretical Drawings of Inigo Jones: Their Sources and Scope, was much quarried - yet unacknowledged - at the time of the 1989 Royal Academy Exhibition. It remains a definitive source.
Rowe's critical debut in the Architectural Review in March 1947 - Mathematics of the Ideal Villa - compared and aligned together Renaissance and modernist villa: Palladio's Villa Foscari (the malcontenta of c1550-60) and Le Corbusier's 1977 Villa Stein at Garches. In a brilliantly incisive, analytical comparison, Rowe in one swoop drew together similarities of spatial concept and organisation, effectively reuniting architecture with its past against the correctitude of professional pundits.
From then on there were to be a series of such articles in which Rowe would choose a particular issue on building of immediate relevance to the day, as a means of reorientating the flow of architectural critique.
Rowe returned to Liverpool University School of Architecture after this, to teach for two years. It was here, in 1948, that he was thesis tutor for (now) Professor Robert Maxwell and, in 1949, James Stirling. Rowe's influence on these two later highly distinguished individuals was marked, and they remained lifetime friends. Rowe then left for the United States and Yale, studying under Henry Russell Hitchcock.
He taught at the University of Texas School of Architecture, Austin, from 1954 to 1956, and with his peers completely revolutionised the course structure, which remains a model. Rowe then taught at Cooper Union, New York, and briefly at Cornell, before accepting an invitation from Sir Leslie Martin to join the staff at Cambridge University School of Architecture (1959-62). He returned to teach permanently at Cornell in 1962 eventually being named Andrew Dickson White professor of architecture and in 1987 he took American citizenship.
Rowe frequently visited his beloved Italy with students, with occasional diversions to London. Collage City, co-authored with Fred Koetter, was his lasting urban thesis, embracing as early as 1978 the application of concepts of "bricolage" to urban theory, prefiguring subsequent postmodernist thinking. After retiring from Cornell in 1991, Rowe completed The Architecture of Good Intentions, a valedictory, cautionary critique of current discourse; and his three-volume compilation As I Was Saying, a collection of essays in architecture, urbanism and of personal memoirs.
Dean Henry Millon, of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, in 1996 referred to Rowe's "omnivorous analytical eye, ravenous appetite for ideas, and egregious delight in a mordant or piquant turn of phrase", remarking on Rowe's ability "to construct a deep visual critique of architecture from a seemingly endless storehouse of appropriate sentiments". This talent was married to a complicit commitment as teacher to his students, who have spread across two continents to occupy a similarly proactive role in their own schools and practices.
Colin Rowe had become, in his time, perhaps the single most critical influence in architectural education of the mid-20th century, establishing a confluence between cultures that is almost impossible to repeat.
He is survived by a brother, David.
Michael Spens
Colin Frederick Rowe, architectural historian, born March 27 1920; died November 5 1999