Athena awards honor trio with Cornell roots

Beginning in 2006, CNU began awarding the Athena Medal to early pioneers whose analysis, theories and writings influenced and laid the groundwork for the new urbanism movement. This year, the Congress for the New Urbanism will award the Athena Medal to Michael Dennis and Fred Koetter.

Also, for the first time, we will award a posthumous medal to Colin Rowe. These three men have in common a shared history, a legacy of teaching and writing, and an unwavering commitment to urban design principles that were the underlying foundation for new urbanism.

Michael Dennis, author of Court and Garden: From the French Hôtel to the City of Modern Architecture, currently teaches urban design and urban form at MIT, and maintains a thriving architecture practice in Boston at the firm he founded, Michael Dennis & Associates.

Fred Koetter, who co-authored Collage City with Colin Rowe, served as dean of Yale University’s School of Architecture from 1993 to 1998. He is a founding partner at Koetter Kim & Associates, Inc., Architecture and Urban Design.

Koetter and Dennis have worked consistently to integrate robust principles of urban design with appropriately scaled beautiful and functional architecture, both in cities as well as on academic campuses. Their efforts have been recognized with national and international awards.  

These urban design trail-blazing firms and their prominent heads started from the same roots. Koetter and Dennis, who were college roommates at Cornell, shared the same teacher — Colin Rowe.

Rowe was teaching in the era of high modernism, a time when it seemed as if the traditional urban form would be erased in favor of high structures and highways. However, in his teaching and writings, Rowe was one of the first to outwardly decry modernism. He emphasized contextual thinking, architectural discourse that centered on city form, and a deep commitment to repairing the divested urban fabric. The real-world results of can be seen clearly in Dennis’s and Koetter’s successful, comprehensive designs.

This year, with the awarding of the Athena Medal to two of his most successful students, it is clear that Rowe unknowingly was a founding father of the new urbanism movement. Rowe and Koetter’s revolutionary Collage City paved the way for a new generation of architects and planners. In his book Global City Blues, author and CNU founder Dan Solomon said “Never before Collage City had the fury of language been directed so magnificently at the failings of the modernist city …”

Today, Dennis and Koetter continue this educational tradition through their teaching, writing, and through the urbanist design of college campuses across the country. Through their master planning efforts, Koetter and Dennis are showing the next generation the benefits and power of sound urban design principles.  

The award will be presented to Koetter and Dennis at CNU 19: “Growing Local” in Madison, Wisconsin, June 1-4.