Aldo RossiThe Architecture of the City

“The Architecture of the City”

• First published as L’architettura della citta in 1966

• Proposes a return to reason & logic, history & memory, & the city

• The city must be valued as a construction over time

Themes

• Critique of Functionalism and Modernism’s utilitarian basis

• Autonomous monuments and the permanence of form

• A city of fragments, a city of monuments

• The memory structure of the city

Permanence of Form

Palazzo della RagionePadua, Italy

• A City Hall from the 1200’s, converted into a marketplace

• Form is permanent and complex

• Form can be adapted to new uses

• Not “form follows function”

Project for the ColiseumRome, Italy

• Project to transform the Coliseum into a forum for a centrally planned church

• Proposed by Carlo Fontana, 1707

• Unrealized• Maintains the idea that existing

artifacts can be adapted for new uses

• “Whereas the Functionalist seeks the greatest possible suitability to the most specific purpose, the Rationalist desires to obtain the greatest potential of adaptation to the largest number of needs”

Type and Elemental Forms

Teatro del MondoVenice Biennale 1979-80

• “Theatre of the World” • Simple, unornamented

forms• Recalls floating theatres

characteristic of Venice in the 18th century

• Based on Rossi’s childhood memory of a puppet theatre

Type and Memory

• Reminiscent of

De Chirico • The city composed of

recognizable types• Types allow people to

connect through collective memory

• Autonomous forms as archetypes

• Form follows memory

Fagnano Olona Primary School, Italy 1972-76

• A “little city”• The idea of theatre in the central space• Large stair sets up view with class portrait in mind• Rossi alludes to the time of childhood, as a memory

Time

• The presence of clocks indicates an event is over• Roland Barthes saw this fixation in photography• Like De Chirico’s paintings, Rossi’s architecture

possesses a haunting, melancholy quality

San Cataldo CemeteryModena, Italy 1971

• Rossi won the competition for the project of extending the existing cemetery

• A city for the dead• Strips detail• Unbound by the constraints

of time• Here he subverts the

corridor “type” to reflect on the silence and loneliness of death

• Ossuary building’s absence of windows marks the absence of inhabitants

Memory Structure of the City

• Nolli Map of Rome, 1748

• The city designed as links from one monument to the next

• Mimics how our memories work

• Monuments and memory are fundamental to the city structure

Conclusion

• The city and its architecture are inseparable

• Permanence of form• Type and elemental

forms• Type and memory• Time• Memory structure of the

city

“The architect masters meaning and, through it, he is able to enter into the process of society’s transformation”