Since its first edition in 1966, The Architecture of the City has been the text that has most influenced urban planning reflection, restoring centrality to the great, forgotten question of form. Every city is form, and any attempt to understand it solely through its functions is doomed to failure. In form, tradition demonstrates its capacity to change and endure over time, and a community’s self-image resonates with the practical needs it must address. Architecture thus becomes a collective act, uniting two human needs: aesthetic intentionality and the need to create a life-sustaining environment. This is not a theoretical encounter, but an alchemy that generates concrete spaces: streets to travel, buildings to inhabit, monuments in which to enshrine identities. This city, so lively and so human, emerges from time, grows upon itself, acquires consciousness and memory, setting the stage on which opposing demands collide and synthesise: particular and universal, individual and collective, rational design and locus . Only by embracing the complexity of this field of heterogeneous forces is an architectural approach that is simultaneously aesthetic and political possible. Through a survey of ideal cities and real places—from Berlin to Stockholm, from the Roman Forum to the ancient theater of Arles transformed into a residential neighborhood—Aldo Rossi constructs a watershed text in urban planning literature. L’architettura della città (The Architecture of the City) is an essay written with Renaissance rigor and a declaration of the poetics of one of Italy’s most important architects and intellectuals; a book that opens itself to ever-fertile and new interpretations because, like a symphony or a great contemporary novel, it has the depth and fascination of an open work.
The Architecture of the City
