Rowe was the Andrew Dickson White Professor of Architecture at Cornell University, where he taught from 1962 until his retirement in 1990. In the course of his brilliant and very influential academic career he focused on developing an alternative method of urban design derived in part from the earlier work of Camillo Sitte but largely original, and based on the making of cities through a process of collaged, superimposed pieces; the ideal model for this pragmatic, anti-doctrinaire approach was the ruined villa of the Roman Emperor Hadrian at Tivoli, outside Rome.