Aldo Rossi - The Architecture of the City

The architecture
of the City

Aldo Rossi

OPPOSITIONS BOOKS

Introduction by Peter Eisenman Translation by Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman

Revised for the American Edition by Aldo Rossi and Peter Eisenman

Published for The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, Illinois, and

The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York, New York, by:

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

First paperback printing, 1984

Copyright 1982 by

The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

Rossi, Aldo, 1931 The architecture of the city. (Oppositions books)

Translation of: L'architettura della citta.

"Published for the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, Illinois, and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York,

New York." Includes index.

1. City planning. 2. Architecture.

I. Eisenman, Peter, 1932

II. Title.

III. Series.

NA9031. R6713 711'. 481 19382

ISBN 13: 978 0 262 18101 3 (he. alk. paper)

978 0 262 68043 ( pb . alk. paper)

Typography by The Old Typosopher in Century Expanded. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Cover drawing: Wooden armature for the construction of vaults. From Principj di Architettura Civile, Francesco Milizia, 1832.

Other titles in the OPPOSITIONS BOOKS series:

Essays in Architectural Criticism: Modem Architecture and Historical Change

Alan Colquhoun

Preface by Kenneth Frampton

A Scientific Autobiography

Aldo Rossi

Postscript by Vincent Scully Translation by Lawrence Venuti

OPPOSITIONS BOOKS

Editors

Peter Eisenman Kenneth Frampton

Executive Editor Joan Ockman Managing Editor Lindsay Stamm Shapiro Assistant Editor

Thomas Mellins, Designer Massimo Vignelli, Design Coordinator Abigail Sturges, Production Susan Hull

Trustees of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies

Armand Bartos, Chairman Charles Gwathmey, President Douglas H. Banker

Richard F. Barter, A. Bruce Brackenridge, Colin G. Campbell, Walter Chatham,

Peter D. Eisenman, Ulrich Franren, Frank 0. Gehry, Gerald D. Hines, Eli Jacobs,

Philip Johnson, Edward J. Logue, Gerald M. McCue, Robert M. Meltzer, Paul Rudolph

Carl E. Schorske, Frederieke S. Taylor, Marietta Tree, Massimo Vignelli, John F. White,

Peter Wolf

Contents

* subscript 3-4 indicates hardcover page numbers (Notes & bibliography are mixed)

1. Editor's Preface

3-4 The tradition of the architect-writer is well precedented in the history of architecture in Italy. From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, it was characteristic of certain architects to present their ideas in a systematic treatise. Based on the model of Vitruvius, Alberti produced the Renaissance model for such writing. This was followed by treatises like those of Serlio and Palladio. Serlio produced a series of volumes which constitute a handbook of architecture, starting with ancient building and including speculations about unbuilt future work. These unbuilt designs, which were to become more important than his modest built work, are not so much significant in terms of specific projects, but are rather models which begin to elaborate many of the types to which Palladio would refer. Palladio wrote the "Quattro Libri" ten years before his death, as a kind of resume of his career. These books contain the redrawing of his projects and buildings, thereby serving as much as a record of his intentions as of his actual work. Whether drawing Roman ruins or redrawing his own projects, Palladio was primarily interested in the derivation, invention, and ultimately the distortion of types from existing models. thus, the idea of the interrelationship of drawing and writing became part of an architectural tradition.

This tradition has continued in Italy up to the present century. The writings of Scamozzi, Milizia, and Lodoli, not to mention the more recent writings and designs of Giuseppe Pagano, certainly must be seen as its bearers, as, indeed, must Aldo Rossi's "The Architecture of the City." To understand Rossi's architecture, it is also necessary to understand his writings and his drawings. Yet "The Architecture of the City" is also a significant departure from past models. This is because, while purporting to be a scientific theory, a modern-day equivalent of the Renaissance treatise, it is on another level a unique anticipation of Rossi's subsequent architecture.

The task of this preface, then, is to locate this book for an American audience not only in its own tradition, in the context of Italian theoretical writings by architects, but also in the more contemporary context of Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. The first edition of this book, taken from Rossi's lectures and notes, appeared in 1966 during the traumatic years of student discontent as a polemical critique of the Modern Movement position on the city. A second Italian edition appeared in 1970 with a new introduction. The book was then translated into Spanish, German, and Portuguese editions. Finally, in 1978, a fourth Italian edition appeared with new illustrations. To reissue it now, in its first English language edition, with all of the supplementary material that it has acquired during its successive publications, is to recognize the unique cultural context within which it was first produced and continued to develop; all of this material is part of the book's history. In this way, the book stands as a singular and parallel record of ideas that Rossi has been developing in both drawing and other writing over the last fifteen years. As such, it is in itself an "analogous artifact."

In its American edition, "The Architecture of the City" is not so much a literal transcription of the original as a carefully revised edition revised so as to provide the style and flavour of the original without encumbering it with some of the rhetorical and repetitive passages which are part of the original text.

The rather academic style of presentation in the Italian occasionally makes for a certain stiltedness in English, and in such cases, we have preferred to opt for clarity and simplicity.

My own introduction which follows is in certain ways not only about this book, but also about the Rossi that this book anticipates. In this sense, it is a kind of analogous writing of Rossi's ideas. Like his analogous drawings, and his writings which also can be seen as analogous instruments, it attempts to collapse and dislocate the time and place of the evolution of Rossi's ideas. For this reason, it is taken from a reading of his later writings, including "A Scientific Autobiography, " and from many private discussions with him, as much as from the text at hand. Like the fourth Italian edition, which brought together the preceding pieces of the book's history, all of which themselves had separate memories, this book is similarly, and to an even greater degree, a "collective" artifact. My own introduction attempts to enter into this memory and in this sense serves as a kind of analogy of an analogy, a creation of yet another artifact with its own history and memory. It seeks in this way to illustrate the analogous current which washes back and forth from drawing to drawing, and from writing to writing, in Rossi's work.

P. E.

...the relief and design of structures appears more clearly when content, which is the living energy of meaning, is neutralized, somewhat like the architecture of an uninhabited or deserted city, reduced to its skeleton by some catastrophe of nature or art. A city no longer inhabited, not simply left behind, but haunted by meaning and culture, this state of being haunted, which keeps the city from returning to nature...