As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays, 3 vols.

They've been twisting his arm again. Since 1947, when his elegant, shocking essay 'The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa' appeared in AR, a new book by Colin Rowe has been published on average once every 16 years - most prefaced with weary acknowledgement that only extreme pressure from friends has overcome his reluctance to appear between hard covers. One imagines blood in the study. If so, it was worth his pain and our patience. For here at last are no less than three volumes of Kowe's papers, written since 1953.

Decades before Robert Venturi and Leon Krier exposed to public ridicule the pretensions of unexamined Modernism, Rowe began its systematic debagging. He was well qualified to do so. Trained as an architect - Liverpool University - he has understood Modernism's austere allure from within; indeed, he has never concealed his respect for its 'good intentions' and the thrall in which its formal language, its romance even, still holds him. But trained as a scholar - Warburg under Wittkower, Yale under Hitchcock - he acquired the historical perspective in which to locate, and by which to judge, its achievements and failures. To this binocular vision add a tart mischievousness, and how deliciously must his two-slide comparisons between Mies and Michelangelo, Palladio and Le Corbusier, have outraged both anti-historical Modernists and anti-everything-since-1830 art historians.

These three volumes reveal how little Rowe's main themes have changed: his love of Italy and the dandified artifices of sixteenth-century Mannerism, and his contempt for what he sees as Modernism's delusive and destructive vices: 'physics envy, Zeitgeist worship, object fixation and stradaphobia'.

This last vice, the assault on the building-enclosed street, he countered not only on the writing desk but also on the drawing board - or rather, because a wartime parachute accident made draughting painful, the drawing boards of the students in his Urban Design Studio at Cornell. The Cornell projects, from 1965 to 1988, are generously illustrated here, together (this doesn't always happen, so is worth recording) with the names of their student designers. A skilful and inspiring studio teacher, as I can attest from experience, he lent this work a polemical power which, in those places where urban design is still believed in and practised, continues to be influential.

Some of the essays and reviews in these volumes would have been published before, Rowe tells us, but were suppressed by academic politicking or editorial dogma - the villains here include Harvard, Yale, the BBC and (can it be true?) the AR [Not in living memory -Ed]. Others were published, but only in journals and other ephemera. Yet because for these reasons his writings 'long enjoyed a piratical, xeroxed, student circulation which', as he has noted, 'can only be gratifying', a certain regret attends their hardbacked publication now - perhaps the melancholy of the samizdat dissident who, the old walls having fallen under the force of his argument, feels little sympathy for the new regime and misses the sly delights of clandestine opposition.

The pictures in these books are foggy (in one case upside-down) and the urban plans too small to be clearly read. However, although Rowe's writing style sometimes affects a courtly, snuff-boxy tone, all diffidence and hesitant qualification, it is always cultivated, jargon-free and transparent. With some 50 pieces in this collection there is some repetition of content but, for the same reason, the reader may safely skip in search of favourites. The longer, more theoretical essays include the sequel, written with Robert Slutzky, of their previous 'Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal', and sharp sympathetic reviews, each a model of the genre, of Stirling and Gowan's Churchill College competition entry, Venturi's Yale Maths Building extension, and Stirling's Sackler Museum. Shorter memoirs include an eye-popping account of the eccentricities of the Texas academic aristocracy of the 1950s and tributes to his long-time friends Alvin Boyarsky and Stirling.

Myself, I most enjoyed those pieces where Rowe declares the pleasure he derives from the United States, its people and landscapes, and the lessons he learns from the 'vast, diversified, and noisy theatre' of its architectural scene. Unfortunate indeed the AA speaker whose lecture, one gathers, exhibited a killjoy and complacent anti-Americanism; for Rowe then delivered, by previous invitation, the elaborately contemptuous vote of thanks reprinted here. Three volumes are not enough: I want more.

PHILIP TABOR