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Aldo RossiThe Architecture of the City
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“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
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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
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Permanence of Form
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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”
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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”
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Type and Elemental Forms
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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
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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
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Fagnano Olona Primary School, Italy 1972-76
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• 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
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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
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San Cataldo CemeteryModena, Italy 1971
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• 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
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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
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Conclusion
• The city and its architecture are inseparable
• Permanence of form• Type and elemental
forms• Type and memory• Time• Memory structure of the
city
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“The architect masters meaning and, through it, he is able to enter into the process of society’s transformation”