Architectural Context Part 4: Aldo Rossi
Architectural Context Part 3: Camillo Sitte
The critical importance of looking at the cities not as fixed entities but as objects that undergo continuous transformation is highly demonstrated by Aldo Rossi in “The Architecture of The City.” Rossi highlights that comprehensive analysis of the city should not only include the current visible image of the city and the sum of its different architectures but rather the architecture of the city as construction over time.¹ Rossi argues that throughout the time the city grows upon itself and thus acquires consciousness and memory. The city renders its image more precise through continuous redefinition while at the same time preserving some of the original themes that were laid at its foundation.² In his work, Rossi is primarily concerned with the form of the city.³ He analyses the city from two main perspectives. First, the city as a huge man-made object that undergoes continuous transformation and the second city as a sequence of political choices by which it realizes itself through society’s idea of a city.⁴
To illustrate how these two concepts shape the architecture of the city, Rossi brings the example of Palazzo della Ragione in Padua. He argues that throughout its existence the building was capable of containing a plurality of functions entirely independent from its form, yet the form is precisely what is experienced by an observer and it is the form that serves as a means for structuring the city.
However, he also highlights that merely form is not enough for the building to find its place within the city. He writes:
The form of the city is always the form of a particular time of the city; but there are many times in the formation of the city, and a city may change its face even in the course of one man’s life, its original references ceasing to exist.⁵
Rossi believes that In order for the building to gain individuality within the city it has to be a complex entity that develops not only in spatial dimension but also in the temporal dimension. That is, the building should have an imprint on the collective memory of the city. This statement is well saturated in his example of Palazzo della Ragione. In the twelfth century, the building looked very different from what one might see today. Originally, the upper floor was divided into three sections, with a central hall in which four columns supported a trussed roof. In the early years of the fourteenth century, the palace was remodelled, two new elements were introduced: the roofing and the two-floor loggias. After a fire destroyed much of the building, the wooden structures that supported the flooring of the hall and the ceilings of the loggias were replaced by brickwork vaults. In addition, the partitions in the Salone were removed, making it a single vast room. Thus, over time the form of the building became the physical archive of its history.⁶ Its form turned into an assemblage of different architectures each responding to a particular time and event in the history of the city.
In order to be able to analyze building like Palazzo della Ragione and its relation to the city, one has to study the historical context that contributed to the current appearance of the structure, otherwise forming a consistent understanding of the relationships of the building with its context would not be possible. Rossi highlights that the study of history offers the best verification of a certain hypothesis about the city since the form of the city itself can be read as an archive of history. He attempted to show this interrelation of history and form in his study of residential districts. Rossi argues that historical analysis of the city of Rome, for example, could allow us to trace its evolution back to the agricultural city and from there observe the evolution of public spaces of the imperial age their successive transformation into courtyard houses of the Republic and to the creation of the great plebeian insulae.⁷ Additionally, he suggests that the shapes and measurements of the plots within the city can represent the history of distribution of urban property to an extent that an analysis of the areas of the plots and evolution of their shape could reveal the ongoing class struggle and gradual concentration of capital.⁸ When this analysis of social content is done from the viewpoint of urban topography, it becomes capable of providing us with a fairly accurate knowledge of the city and the contextual forces that shape formal aspects of urban artefacts.
For Rossi, the city embodies the collective memory of its people and memory should always be associated with objects and places. For this purpose, he reintroduces the concept of Locus as a certain relationship between a location and the buildings that occupy it. It is a concept that at the same time is singular and universal.⁹ He explains the nature of Locus in the example of the space of the Catholic religion. The space of religion, according to Rossi, covers the whole earth and is universal in nature. For this kind of space, the individual locations and boundaries become of secondary importance. However, even in this total undifferentiated space individual points of pilgrimage continue to exist in the form of churches and sanctuaries. In other words, local churches become signifiers of the universal religion. In the same manner, the city is the Locus of the collective memory, i.e., a local signifier of a universal phenomenon. Therefore, if a house were to be extracted from the context of the city, it would reveal that its form was derived not only from its local context but also from distant kinships and general fields of influences.¹⁰ Thus, Rossi considers locus the characteristic principle of urban artefacts. As certain artefacts become part of cities memory, new artefacts emerge, and with them, new ideas occur and flow through the history of the city. Rossi wrote:
The union between the past and the future exists in the very idea of the city It flows through in the same way that memory flows through the life of a person; and always, in order to be realized, this idea must not only shape but be shaped by reality.¹¹
For Rossi, architectural forms change together with the larger changes of a site. Transformations that are taking place within the architecture of the city are serving to the universal events that are causing them and at the same time causing new events through their very transformation.¹² Thus, the architecture of the city is not merely concerned with form, function or materials but rather it is a synthesis of series of values and political choices embedded in collective imagination that shapes the form of the city over time. The city is composed of many people seeking general order that is consistent with their own particular setting and Cities like Athens, Rome, and Paris are the form of their politics, local signifiers of the universal will of the collective.¹³ Therefore, we can assume that any city extends beyond its physical form and represents an idea of a city. This property of cities is what allows us to speak about cities like Babylon even though they have disappeared physically.¹⁴ It is for this very reason we are able to link the Rome of today with the Rome of the classical period despite both of them being entirely different urban artefacts. Rossi suggests that urban artefacts can be viewed as assemblies of different architectures each responding to a particular moment in the history of the city and all unified with the collective idea of the city. For Rossi, the concepts of locus and collective memory together formulate multifaceted ground from which the figures of urban artefacts emerge. He used historical methods to oppose Modernism’s concept of the city and show the dimension of the historical context in the cities is not something that can be omitted from the discourse.
References
[1]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 21.
[2]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 22.
[3]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 32.
[4]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 23.
[4]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 61.
[5]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 128.
[6]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 50.
[7]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 50–51.
[8]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 50–51.
[9]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 103.
[10]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 111.
[11]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 131.
[12]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 106.
[13]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 163.
[14]: Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984), 128.
