Aldo Rossi: The Architecture of the City (1966)

Reviewed by Thisvi Christou

The Architecture of the City was written by Aldo Rossi in 1966 and it was characterized as one of the most influential books for urban studies. The Architecture of the City constitutes a system of City analysis, by giving the reader the chance to rethink architecture from several aspects instead of just functional aspects which were promoted by the Modern Movement. Rossi criticized functionalism by providing historical methods for city analysis. He assumes the City to be architecture, which is a construction overtime. He describes Architecture as a man-made object and as a construction of urban artifacts . The Architecture of the City is an analytic material for Urban Artifacts.

The Structure of Urban Artifacts
Urban Artifacts are unique places of the City and withstand the passage of time; they are characterized by their own form and history. Urban Artifacts can have different functions overtime which are independent of their form and they can shape the City. An example which is given by Rossi, is Palazzo della Ragione in Padua. The Palazzo as Rossi states, forms the City, its function varied throughout the years, and it has historical value. The uniqueness of Urban Artifacts depend on their form, which is affected by time and space and by being considered as a work of art, because they are related to space, events and the form of the City.
In order to criticize naive functionalism which addresses typologies in relation to function, Rossi emphasizes typological questions. Functionalism considers an artifacts’ function to be static, but Rossi argues that this classification causes problems to the City. He supports his idea through his argument that Urban Artifacts change depending on time and needs. Rossi considers type as a logical principle, which constitutes the form and the permanence of an object. Moreover, he believes that function can be articulated into form, and form has the possibility to exist as an Urban Artifact, so form can be articulated as an Urban Element. The form can persist through transformation and become an Urban Artifact par excellence.
Although Urban Artifacts are complex, some features to understand them are: their permanence beyond function, their nature is like a work of art and also they have a collective character. Rossi describes the City as a totality, as a result of its collective character. Concerning the Urban Artifact in its totality, this gives us a complete picture of the City.

Monuments and the Theory of Permanence
Permanence is mentioned by Rossi based on Poete’s theory about persistence that says that monuments are the physical signs of the past. Rossi conceptualises permanence as having two sections. The first one are the propelling elements which have different functions overtime but still condition the urban space, for instance Palazzo della Ragione in Padua. The second section are the pathological elements, which are artifacts not in use and are isolated in the City; an example is the Alhambra in Granada. Persistence can transform an artifact into a monument, and a monument takes part in urban development.
‘A monuments persistence or permanence is a result of its capacity to constitute the city, its history and art, its being and memory. ‘
Rossi considers that the qualities of the parts of the City have sociological, formal and spatial characteristics that are cultivated through time and space. He opposed the Modernist idea of zoning based on function. Rossi believes that you can understand a part of the City from different aspects such as physiological, historical, geographical aspects. In this case Rossi uses the dwelling area as a study area in order to emphasise his side of the arguement. A study area can be the area of an Urban Artifact, it belongs to urban context and is a constituent part which is useful to analyze the City.

Primary Elements
A residential district is a part of the City’s form and it has a close relationship to Urban structure; for example Berlin’s dwelling area division affected Urban structure. It reflects peoples’ lifestyle and problems of the City and it needs long periods of time to get altered. Residential district can be considered as Primary Elements.
Rossi introduced the concept of Primary Elements which are elements capable of accelerating the process of urbanization in the city in a permanent way and also constitute physical structures of the city along with area. They permanently take part in a City’s revolution, being ‘nuclei of aggregation’. They can be considered as fixed points in the City. An example of a Primary Element is the Amphitheatre in Nimes, which became a small city. Other examples are the Pantheon and the Roman Forum which are transformed overtime.

The concept of Locus
Rossi also introduced the concept of Locus, which is the relationship between a location and the buildings that are situated there. Locus gives singularity to an Urban Artifact and it can be identified by a particular event that happened there. The Roman Forum, for instance, had some primary characteristics which were shaped by topographic conditions that were persisting through transformations. Through permanence the Roman Forum can be considered as a great Urban Artifact and as a monument that shows the history of the City. Based on Cataneo’s theory that the City forms an indivisible body with its region, Rossi mentions history as the formation of Urban Artifacts, and that history is the collective imagination and continuity of urban structure and as a result he conceptualises the City as a collective memory.
Following the above, Rossi talks about Athens and argues that it not only relates to myth but also to politics and administration. Athens was considered as the first example of an Urban Artifact where the development of thought and imagination became history. During Athens's evolution its Primary Elements were variously located within the residential district.

The Evolution of Urban Artifacts
In the last part of the book Rossi focuses on the evolution of the City and the forces, mainly political and economic, that influence this process. Based on Halbwachs's thesis, he describes expropriation. Halbwachs classifies expropriation in two parts. The first part he relates to individuals and in the second part he relates expropriation with Urban Artifacts.
Rossi also mentions Bernoulli’s studies on urban development. Bernoulli was against private land ownership, and he believed that the communal should belong to the collective. However, Rossi argues and supports that expropriation and land subdivision were necessary for the evolution of the City.
The Industrial revolution transformed the City. However, the scale of the transformation modifies an Urban Artifact but does not erode its quality. In addition Primary Elements were created from this transformation, for example the Adelphi residential district by the Adams Brothers which were designed based on a sketch by Leonardo Da Vinci.
At the end of the book Rossi mentions that a City can choose its image by choosing a political institution. Citizens can choose the political institution which controls the City’s transformation. Some examples of Urban Artifacts that present political ideas are Athens, Rome, Paris etc.

Peter Eisenman on ‘The Architecture of the City’
Eisenman believes that Rossi sees the Architect as the Subject that studies the City and the City is the Object of the study. By using a humanist conception, Rossi integrates the Subject into the Object as a way to oppose the practice of Modernism that separates the Subject and the Object.
According to Eisenman, Aldo Rossi reintroduces the elements of history and typology. History as a collective Artifact allows us to understand Rossi’s metaphor of the City as a giant man-made object, through the process of production and time. Time is in Rossi’s concept of Permanence; based on that concept he presents housing and monuments as Primary Elements and states that monuments can accelerate or retard city growth.
Eisenman discusses Rossi’s concept of Locus as an individual Artifact. Similar to permanence Locus is determined by space, time, event, topography, and form. A locus constitutes an event itself, a 'locus souls'. Furthermore, he argues that Rossi considers history as a form that relates to its original function, but only the form remains vital and history becomes memory. Time is a collective memory and type becomes an analytical material of history. Rossi discovers in typology the possibility of invention, because type is both a process and an object.
Eisenman criticized Rossi for two reasons: the first one because he sees the City as a man-made object separated from man, like Modernist architects did. The second reason is although Rossi seems to believe that individuals cannot influence history, he sees the city as human achievement par excellence which opposes this view.

Conclusion
In conclusion, Rossi used historical methods to oppose the Modernism’s concept of the City. He assumes the City to be architecture which is a construction over time. He also mentions the multiple forces within the Urban Artifacts in the City. As Rossi said

‘This book is a corner stone of urban studies rather than the perfect theory and it will be gradually completed by supplements of new considerations related to the city.’

Aldo Rossi: The Architecture of the City (1966)

Reviewed by Xiaoxue Bu

Aldo Rossi (1931—1997)was the leader of the Italian Neo-rationalist architecture movement, and was also one of the most influential theorists in the architecture field during the period 1970s and 1980s. He accomplished the unusual feat of achieving international recognition in four distinct areas: theory, drawing, architecture and product design. In 1966, Aldo Rossi published the book ‘The Architecture of the City’, which subsequently was translated into several languages and enjoyed enormous international success. This book is an important work about building and urban theory. Originally some thought that this book was defined as a study of architecture, in fact, its subject is the whole city, not only different buildings in the city and the urban visual image, but also the city's construction process. In this book, Rossi re-evaluated the modern architecture movement and at the same time he also analyzed the rules and forms of urban development. Rossi did not focus on reviewing the forms of buildings, or the standard images of modern architecture, but he especially discussed the neglect and destruction of "people's collective memory". On the one hand, he attacked functionalism and the modern movement; on the other hand, he tried to restore the position of compositional techniques, and make it become the only correct study object of architecture research. Long ignored values in urban research have appeared in different forms in various periods. The language of urban architecture is an important means to improve the image of the city. In Rossi's view every architectural style is connected to certain dominant building types, such as the Romanesque is represented by the abbey church while gothic is represented by the civic cathedral. These building types are the iconic structures in some cities, which provide the city image. When we look at a city, and are moved by it, what kind of role do these forms play? When people generally consider the structure of the city, is the city spirit shrouded in these buildings being ignored? "So we should pay attention to urban geography, urban topography, architecture and other disciplines" Rossi declares. Surely, in addition to melting into the city environment, and reflecting the local characteristics, it is also an important characteristic of the buildings in the city that it contributes spirit to the city, since every city has its own soul. The soul is the city's personality and characteristic. What architecture has to do is to reflect the city's spirit and only in this way, can it become the real urban architecture.

Rossi proposed that as an organic part of the whole city, the creation of any building should not disturb the organization of the city, and should be combined with the existing living space. The actual city forms condensed the meanings and characteristics of human living. In his view, "although the building just reflects one part of the complex and huge entity structure, as the final and established fact of the entity or structure, buildings constituted the most specific actual starting point of discussion". And "type" replaced the concept of function because the standard of classification can contain much broader city information and provide helpful permanence to comprehend the urban structure. The city is the form most closely related to specific human life in time and space, including history. It is the performance of human culture in urban form. Therefore, Rossi thought he should put aside all shallow fantasy about functionalism, proposing architecture return to another form of order, so as to find a morphological relationship - defined by the relationship "architecture is a small city and the city is a big building". Finally Rossi raised architecture to a new height: The rules of the city may be just like the rules that controlled personal life and fate. Each biography has its own span, although is limited between birth and death. Certainly, urban architecture is the collective embodiment of this biography, beyond the meanings and emotions of the city that we know. In Rossi's philosophy, building types are closely related to the people's life style. A way of life seems to be a kind of type, the specific form due to different societies and having very different expressions. Forms are just the skin of things; the way of life is the deep structure of buildings. We need to access this kind of deep meaning from history and memory, and archetypes. In a particular place, the architect must rely on collective memory to determine the model of buildings to create a city.

Architecture + Urbanism recommends "Aldo Rossi's Ambivalent Theories of Analogical Imagination in Architecture"

MARC guest lecture JEAN-PIERRE CHUPIN "Aldo Rossi's Ambivalent Theories of Analogical Imagination in Architecture" 2.00pm 20 November 2012 Room C5.1 (Wing C) Ellen Wilkinson Building, University of Manchester

Architecture + Urbanism recommends 'La Tendenza: Architectures Italiennes 1965-1985'

La Tendenza, Architectures italiennes 1965-1985 by centrepompidou

The first retrospective exhibition in France devoted to one of the founding movements of post-war architecture, from Italy, "La Tendenza, Italian Architectures, 1965-1985" presents a selection of over 250 drawings, models, photographs, paintings and films, as well as a rich documentation. The exhibition traces the highlights of the movement led by Aldo Rossi. Rejecting the notions of avant-garde and Utopia to initiate a political and critical architecture tuned into reality, La Tendenza offers a new approach to the architectural project founded on a renewal of drawing and the image.

Centre Pompidou, Paris June 20 - September 10 2012


La Tendenza, Architectures italiennes 1965-1685... by centrepompidou

Interview with the artist Arduino Cantafora (in French)

Aldo Rossi: The Architecture of the City (1966)

Reviewed by Kihong Kim

Introduction
‘The Architecture of the City’ was firstly published in 1966 by Aldo Rossi, based on his notes and lectures, when functionalism predominated. As Rossi stated, this book did not cover new issues, but it was sensational for architects in that era because it gave them a chance to rethink architecture with respect to the city as a meaning of collective life, history, and reality instead of from a functional aspect.

Chapter One: The structure of urban artifacts
In the first chapter, Rossi states that the form of the city is summarized by the architecture of the city, since it is concrete data of real experiences. Hence, it is the form that allows him to approach the city’s problems. He describes the architecture of the city with two different meanings; first, the city is seen as a gigantic man-made object, growing over time; second, as urban artifacts characterized by their own history and form. These two aspects relate to the quality and uniqueness of the urban artifact. In the case of the Pallazo della Ragione in Padua, it is the form that shapes the city, regardless of functional multiplicity and is modified over time. In this sense, urban artifacts are superior to newly constructed buildings in terms of historic richness. However, the quality and uniqueness of urban artifacts are derived not only from their form which was developed in both time and space, but also from their characteristics as works of art. According to Rossi, the urban artifact as a work of art intimately relates to a specific place, event and form in the city. In this sense, Rossi criticizes the study of Camillo Sitte since Sitte, although, adding “beauty” as a criterion in his study, reduced the meaning of the city to a narrow and handy cipher which is insufficient to grasp the city as a concrete form and overall experience.

Rossi emphasizes the typological questions with criticism of naïve functionalism since he regards the type as a logical principle constituting form and a permanent object. In addition, the type developed the need and desire for beauty which tied into form and a way of life. On the other hand, functionalists overlook various aspects, except for function. For Rossi, the city is a totality, in other words, all urban artifacts and the city are a collective. Hence, concerning the urban artifact in its totality, this gives us a complete picture of the city. He also mentions permanence and classifies it into two sections; one is a historical or propelling permanence; the other is a pathological permanence. According to him, persistence changes urban artifacts into monuments, which take part in the process of a city’s development as a catalyst. As a result of the first chapter, Rossi underlines that the value of the city and the urban artifact is estimable not by their functions but by their permanent forms, since the form of the city is closely bound up with time of the city, while the functions are changeable and can be lost over time.

Chapter Two: Primary Elements and the Concept of Area
In the second chapter, the author says that there are specific and disparate qualities within parts of a city due to its sociological, formal, and spatial characteristics that are formed by time and space. In this sense, he opposes Robert Park and Ernest Burgess’s study about the zoning of the city of Chicago, since they considered the city’s diverse parts merely as embodiments of functions without any other considerations. For Rossi, proper understanding of a part of the city could be derived from overall aspects such as psychology, linguistics, geography, history and their relationships. In order to support his opinion, Rossi describes the dwelling area due to its close relationship with urban structure. For example, the form of Vienna was derived from the Hofquarierspflicht, and the change of Berlin’s urban structure was as a result of police regulations and the segmentation of dwelling types.

In addition to the concept of area, the concept of primary elements, as nuclei of aggregation, should be added to characterize the formation and evolution of the city. Since primary elements not only participate in the process of a city’s development in a permanent way, but also constitute physical structures of the city along with area. Due to the collective and public nature of urban elements, Rossi uses the term “primary element” as fixed activities. This collective characteristic links with urban dynamics and eventually constitutes the beginning and end point of the city. Rossi supports his opinion by a practical example: the amphitheatre in Nimes changed into a fortress then became a little city. To sum up, a city develops according to the dynamics within urban elements and it can be analysed by its form. On the other hand, the phenomenon of decay of certain zones is closely connected to a group of buildings that has outlived the dynamics of land use in the surrounding area and configuring reserve areas.
The author announces that there is an unbreakable connection between the urban history and its geography since entire parts of the city specifically indicate their own form, their own way of life and the trace of their memories, and in turn it raises the concept of the locus. In this respect, all the cities have their own individuality, derived from a specific destiny and a life of each urban artifact, and furthermore urban artifacts and primary elements participate in the process of evolution of the city.

Chapter Three: The Individuality of Urban Artifacts; Architecture
According to Rossi, the locus is a relationship between a certain location and the buildings within it. From this view, the entire urban artifact acquires its singularity from its locus. For example, he refers to the transcendent space of the Catholic religion, and even in this ultimately homogeneous space there are singular points due to a particular event or infinite variety of other reasons that occurred there.

Saying that it is useful to analyse the architecture and the urban artifact in order to define the urban elements, the author describes the difference between the architecture and urban artifact in this way. The former constitutes new urban artifacts and its form presents the urban form when the architecture coincides with the actual situation of the city. To sum up, the difference between them depends on its meaning, reason, style and history with regard to the connection between the event and sign at a particular moment. He also underlines the importance of both form and the rationality since they embrace many different values, meanings, and uses. Rossi takes the case of the Roman Forum for instance, though its functions have changed many times according to social demands, its primary characteristics as a meeting place and the centre of Rome have never been changed within its original form which was shaped by its topographic conditions. Through its permanent characteristics, the Roman Forum became a great artifact. In this way, the form of the architecture in the city is revealed in its various monuments, and each of the monuments shows us the sequence of the city and finally, it shows us the history of the city.
In addition to this, he mentions history as the actual formation and the structure of urban artifacts that relates to the collective imagination and the continuity of urban structure. From this point of view, the city itself becomes the soul of the city, the collective memory of its citizenry and like memory, it associates with objects and places and in turn it becomes the locus of its people. Likewise, each urban artifact has its own singularity by the actions of individuals and the urban structure is formed by the collective and individual nature of urban artifacts. The singularity of the city which derived from the collective aspect of the city connects to the initial principle, an event and form. In this sense, Rossi describes the ancient cities with regard to their myth, the foundation of the city. In addition to this, he takes the case of Athens which is distinguishable from other cases, since Athenian citizenry and their city were bound up not only by myth but also for political and administrative reasons.

Chapter Four: The Evolution of Urban Artifacts
In the final chapter, Rossi focuses on the process of evolution of the city and how various forces are applied within it and how their application causes different changes. According to him, the forces could be an economic, political, or of some other nature. In the first part of this chapter he describes the economic forces: expropriations and land ownership, and in the last part, he refers to political force.
Rossi refers to the thesis of Halbwachs to describe expropriation. According to Halbwachs, the way of expropriation varies, depending on its location and its period. He classifies these variations into two parts; first, the expropriation relates to the role of the individual; second, it is bound up with the order of succession of a given series of artifacts. For instance for the former, the structure of Paris is defined as an overlapped image of Louis XIV, Louis XV, Napoleon I and Baron Haussmann. For the latter, he refers to the nationalization of clerical property in Paris, since the nationalization affected the road system and finally it changed the form of Paris. On the other hand, Rossi mentions the study of Bernoulli with regard to land ownership. Bernoulli insisted that the communal estates should have been maintained as collective property after the French Revolution to prevent the side effect of land subdivision. However, Rossi points out that the division of the great properties was necessary in economic phases in the evolution of Western cities and that the Industrial Revolution has nothing to do with the qualitative differences of urban problems. Rossi states that the problem of the large city has always existed and it is related to the city itself. As a result of these two aspects, he insists that expropriation and land subdivision are typical phenomena of urban evolution since they can lead to immediate and radical transformation.
Meanwhile, he also refers to reducing metropolitan problems, which are not the problem of scale and the changes in scale have nothing to do with the quality of urban artifacts. In addition to this, he indicates that great primary elements could be built by a change of housing as seen in the examples of Leonardo da Vinci’s plan and the project of the Adam brothers for the Adelphi residential district.
Since the city chooses its own image by its political institution, the sign of citizenry’s will, Rossi considers politics as problems of choice. In addition, he says that politics reveals its own semblance in the urban artifacts when we consider everything in the city as a sign of the city’s progress, as seen from the cases of Athens, Rome, and Paris.

Conclusion
The attitude to grasp the city with naïve theories is inappropriate since the establishment of the city and its evolution relates to various factors. Thus, the efforts of Aldo Rossi to analysis and understand the city with regard to the architecture of the city is persuasive, since not only the form of the architecture constitutes the concrete form of the urban structure but also the city which was established and evolved depends on multiple forces within the urban artifacts in the city. As the author said, this book is a corner stone of urban studies rather than the perfect theory and it will be gradually completed by supplements of new considerations related to the city. However, Rossi’s “The Architecture of the City” is extraordinary in the fact that this allows us a magnificent foundation for the study of the city.

Aldo Rossi (1931-97): The Architecture of the City

Reviewed by ANGAD KASLIWAL

Introduction

The architecture of the city is a significant departure from the past models of urbanism in the contemporary context of Italy . The first version of the book was published in 1966. Rossi in his writings has tried to redefine the ‘architecture of the city’ with a concentration on ‘urban artefacts’, the catalysing monuments from the past.

Daedalus, the architect of mythology, in his creation of labrynth explains the corelation of the book with its cover page; the form is interpreted in two ways, one, spiral as mausoleum, symbolically a place of death. In case of book unconsiously on his part – death of humanism and two, spiral as labrynth which is symbolic to transformation. The spiral has further message for Rossi which symbolizes his own right of passage – his role as a part of generation progressively more distanced from the positivism of modern architecture by the collapse of historical time and left drifting to an uncertain present.

Urban artifacts and Theory of the city

According to Rossi, costruction is a process that is inseparable in value to time. Ever from its evolution, mankind has built favorable surroundings with its roots in its civilization. These built forms transform themselves over the years overlapping the theme of its own development and thus there is a contrast in the existence of the structure over time. The change of nature of the ‘urban artifact’ may diminish the value of the evolution, overriding the rational design of ‘locus’. Singularity of one region of the city is what characterizes them as locus solus. Urban singularity has to take care of these artifacts. The development of the city about these artifacts or a group of them in a certain locality constitutes the nature and morphology of the city and this frame of reference helps Rossi to define ‘Urbanism’.

Individuality of urban artifacts

The form of the city can be studied with respect to the works of engineering and massive structures, and structures characterized by their own history. The mis-corelation of these two entities imples the complex reality which needs to be addressed for an urban future. Richness of the history is the characterstic of an urban artifact, its auspicious character and omnious moments of life makes it an indispensable part of the city. An urban artifact is a work of art. A city is always seen as a piece of human achievement over the years and this piece of art holds the major contribution for the collective individuality of the city.

Typological questions and critique of naive functionalism

Since architecture is distinct with reasons of its own; typology, classification and their characterstics influencing the city are important features of urban perspective. The individual classicism to lowest classifications initiates the theory of typology. The loweset featured element that is co-product in different constructions is a vital basic element of the city. Type is thus constant and manifests itself with the character of necessity. Even though it is pre-determined it reacts dialectically with technique, function and style.

The term function is not being discussed for typology considered with urban artifacts. For urban artifacts the function changes with time and its typology may become uncertain for the instance. If cities were classified on a broader perspective, it would delimit its typology to the commercial, cultural, military etc. Rossi questions the change of function for urban artifacts. The change of its naive function may obstruct the transfer of culture, of which the city is an important element. Urban artifacts are not the elements of consumption for the city, till considered in the domain of architectural and moral value. Typology and functions contradict if they are studied from the urban artifact point of view, hence the naive functionalism of the structure in time is considered.

Complexity of Urban Artifacts and the Theory of Permanence

After discussing Milizia’s work which explains the perception of building as private and public based on its streets and architecture. In other words the description of function is easy to verify which goes beyond naive functionalism. Rossi was often asked for his considerations o why only a historian can give a complete picture of city, to which Rossi replies, it is only the historians who are in totality concerned with the defining of urban artifacts and their evolution in different eras.

To think of urban science as historical science is a mistake, history contributes to urban science and hence is very important. This statement concerns the theory of permanence. The city is always considered as a man-made object and the past will always be partly experienced and gives meaning to permanence. This permanence can be experienced in terms of the existence of form and a direction that the city is directed to with ‘propelling’ elements and ‘pathological’ elements. Rossi explains that there is nothing new about these analogies but is an attempt to formulate the theory of urban artifacts.

Primary elements and dynamics of urban elements

Rossi defines urban artifacts as primary elements because their existence has contributed to the morphological and cultural evolution of the city. Any element capable of accelerating the process of urbanization in the city is a primary element, including an empty space.

At the end of the pax romana cities had marked boundaries by erecting walls around them, at times well furnished items were abandoned and cities enclosed a smaller surface area, but the potential of the urban artifacts helped develop the new cities in their current form. For example the amphitheatre at Nimes was transformed to a fortress and became a small functional city of two thousand inhabitants. The city beyond the wall grew with the form of the amphitheatre as a major element.

Monuments, Geography and History

Rossi advancing this theory for urban artifacts and with a novel vision for urbanism says that a city is a collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is locus of collective memory. This relationship between locus and citizenry then becomes a city’s predominant image, a great shape history moulds its future to. A related example of the roman forum will explain the co-relation between the parameters talked about here.

The Latins and the Sabines lived near the forum valley. The principal city was formed by tribes which scattered throughout the hills. The fifth century forum ceased as a market place and changes its function to a place of worship. The dynamism of these urban artifacts played an important role in the development of the space.

Conclusion

In his attempt to evolve the city with the perspective of urban artifacts, Aldo Rossi has convincingly proposed his theory. Not only considering the hypothetical idea of developing a city in words, Rossi also tries to incorporate the facts of politics and other socio-economic issues, citing Athens and its strong theoretical base for its existence, he concludes his idea of this manmade object as an achievement to mankind and its existence. The architecture of the city is a physical sign in man’s biography, indulged beyond the meanings and feelings with which we may recognize it.

Aldo Rossi (1931-97): The Architecture of the City

First published as L' Architettura della Citta in 1966

A précis by Nima Dibazar

The Evolution of Urban Artifacts
In further study of urban development, Rossi emphasized on Bernoulli’s thesis. Bernoulli focuses on two principal issues that he believes constitute a strong constraint on urban development. The first concerns not only the negative character of private property ownership but also the harmful consequences of its extreme division; the second sheds light on the historical reasons for this situation and its consequences after a certain point for the form of the city.
Division of the urban land initiated from French revolution in 1789, when the large estates of the aristocracy and the clergy were sold to themiddle class and to farmers. The monopoly on land was transformed into private ownership; land became a remarkable entity like anything else. In other cities, this phenomenon occurred with similar consequences. In Germany, Berlin's financial law of 1808 permitted government land to be used to liquidate government debts and to be transformed to private ownership.
Rossi criticized Bernoulli's explanation and believed the breaking up of the land promoted city development. The division of the great states, expropriations, and the formation of a new land registry system were all necessary economic phases in the evolution of western cities and what varies from city to city is the political context in which this process came about.

The Urban Scale
The change caused by industry is characterized historically in three phases:
The first phase and therefore the origin of the transformation of the city, is marked by the destruction of the fundamental structure of the medieval city, which was based on the identity between the place of work and the place of residence, both being within the same building. In this way began the end of the domestic economy as a unified entity of production and consumption. Workers' housing, mass housing, and rental housing appeared; only at this point the housing problem emerged as an urban and social problem.
The second phase was characterized by a progressive expansion of industrialization. It created a separation of house and work place. Parallel to this evolution was the separation between the work places that produced merchandise and those that did not. Production and administration were distinguished and the division of labor in its most precise meaning began. The central administration of an industrial complex tried to have banking, administration, and insurance as neighbors rather than production places and this concentration came about in the center of the city.
The third phase of the city's transformation began with the development of means of individual transportation and the full efficiency of all public transformation to the work place. The citizen moved into any part of the territory he wished, giving rise to the phenomenon of the commuter.
In the sense of new urban scale, it is conceivable that a change in scale modifies an urban artifact in some way, but it does not change its quality.



Primary Elements and the Concept of Areas
The theory of Zoning was first advanced scientifically in 1923 by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess with respect to the city of Chicago. In the study of Chicago, zoning came to be defined as the tendency of the city to be disposed in concentric residential districts around either a central business district or a governmental core. In this description of this city, Burgess indicates a series of concentric zones which corresponded to well-defined functions.

Rossi’s metaphor of the city as a giant artifact
This giant house comes into being through a double process. One process is that of production, in the sense of the city as a work of manufacture (manufatto), an object literally made by the hands of men; the second process is that of time, which ultimately produces an autonomous artifact.

The Structure of Urban Artifacts
Description of the city is concerned with its form and the architecture of the city summarizes the city’s form and from this form we can consider the city’s problems.
Camillo Sitte in his research for the laws of the construction of the city took full account of the “beauty” of the urban scheme. “We have three major methods of city planning. The major ones are the gridiron system, the radial system and the triangular system. All three are concerned exclusively with the arrangement of street patterns. A network of streets always serves the purpose of communication, never of art, since it can never be grasped as a whole except in a plan of it.”

Monuments and the Theory of Permanences
The theory of permanences is in some respects related to the hypothesis of the city as a man-made object. One must remember that the differences between past and future, in large measure reflect the fact that the past is partly being experienced now, and this may be the means to give permanences: they are a past that we are still experiencing.
Poete presents a historical theory centred on the phenomenon of the “persistence”. These persistences are revealed through monuments, the physical sign of the past, as well as through the persistence of a city’s basic layout and plans. Cities tend to remain on their axes of development, maintaining the position of their original layout and growing according to the direction and meaning of their older artefacts.
Persistence in an urban artefact often causes it to become identified as a monument. A monument’s persistence or permanence is a result of its capacity to constitute the city, its history and art, its being and memory. In reality, we frequently continue to appreciate elements whose function has been lost over time; the value of these artefacts often resides solely in their form, which is integral to the general form of the city.



The collective memory
One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of the collective memory. The value of history seen as collective memory is that it helps us to grasp the significance of the urban structure, its individuality, and its architecture which is the form of individuality.