The architecture of the city
The book that is issued by
Marsilio publishing house in 1966 within “Polis” book series
directed by Paolo Ceccarelli – written by a young architect, Aldo Rossi
(Milano 1934-97) who has already acquired a wide experience as critic in virtue
of his ten-year lasting participation in Ernesto Nathan Rogers’
“Casabella” editorial staff, is not, as it could be paradoxically
said, the worldwide success book, the one that has been read, contrasted,
hated, loved, followed as the Gospel or pointed at it as the source of all
evils in architecture, in the following decades.
The book has not changed, with
the exception of few editing encumbrances added along with the different
issues, but interest and passion as well arising from it ended with the
distortion of the book proper aims, conceived by the author both as an in progress synthesis of an extremely
fertile time period as far as researches and studies are concerned and a
business card to gain access to a long and lucky university career carried out
among Milan, Zurich and Venice.
It would be of no sense to
point out such a difference between the original reasons of an essay and the
way it has been welcomed by the architects community always looking for
theoretical orientation, if such an essay weren’t, still today, one of
the very few basic texts written from the inside of architectural culture and
practice in the last forty-five years.
And this mainly because all the
matters mentioned and partly developed by Rossi are still waiting for further
consideration that the author himself deemed necessary by starting from the
idea that his essay was nothing more than “a sketch of an established
urban theory”.
For this reason we can consider
this book in the same way as one of those unfinished
works really beloved by the author who continuously comes back to it
through his whole architect career with the knowledge that the subject of his
research, in this case the city and more precisely the historical city, cannot
be explained or simply represented by final considerations or acts nor
interpreted through unchanging schemes.
Actually the city is intended
as a work of art as well as a changeable substance and it is for this reason
that the usual time parameters and the normal space definitions are inadequate
to explain its global meaning.
In designing such a structure
of city, Rossi takes back all the data found by all those geographers,
anthropologists, economists or historians who have focused their attention on
everything concerning the urban world but, at the same time, he is strongly
determined to use every single datum according to a point of view deeply rooted
within architecture culture.
Rossi’s essay does not
deal with cities in general but, in particular, it deals with everything
representing all that can be clearly seen, or the formal aspect of the city
itself.
In this book the Author tries
to investigate the life of urban shapes by taking it as the true specific
phenomenon peculiarity, the only one able to explain its particular, synthetic
nature, beyond any sort of social, economic and functional point of view and
identified as essential though partial.
Rossi’s approach is, at
the same time, extremely selective and widely inclusive.
As a matter of fact, he looks
at the whole variety of reasons contributing to the definition of the
phenomenon that is the object of the study, but, on the other hand he takes
them into account mainly in terms of physical impact and with respect to this,
he focuses on some events.
Such an approach is not
intended to face the case of single city, but the case of the cities, or, that
is better, “the soul of the cities”, to recall the title of the
chapter devoted to this phenomenon in Der
Untergang des Abendlandes (1918-22) by Oswald Spengler, published in Italy
in 1957 and known to Rossi since the time of his working experience at
“Casabella” editorial staff.
Maybe the highest value of L’architettura della cittą lies in
its ability to look at things that are under everybody’s own nose with
different eyes, by restoring the global dignity of a knowledge like the one the
architects own, that is extremely constrained, as far as the years in which it
is conceived are concerned, in a mainly professional domain.
The book is at the same time
the essay of an academic and the design of an architect.
By standing firm on his point
of view as an architect, he manages to make clear his own original contribution
that in the following years would modify so much the world architecture culture
attitudes and ways of being thus drawing the attention to the phenomenon of the
city as an essential background of both architect knowledge and profession.
Alberto
Ferlenga
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