In the first excerpt, Aldo Rossi emphasizes the complex dimensions of the city and how buildings can soak up numerous aspects of a city’s history. He draws parallels between the use of artifacts to generate significant contextual information on ancient civilizations, in the field of archeology, and the use of buildings as documentation of the social, economic, and political fabric of the city, in the field of architecture.
One idea I found most interesting was the connection between myths and institutions and the shaping of ancient cities. Rossi delves further into this in the second excerpt where he draws the connections between the Athenian democracy and the city’s form. In Athens, religious, secular, administrative, and commercial spaces were not neatly segregated. Rossi explains that the temples and houses formed the core of the city. He then contrasts this with how other ancient cities such as those of the fertile crescent (for instance Babylon) were defined by buildings and segregating structures (such as city walls) which represented extremely hegemonic societies. What I got from this was that a connection was being drawn between political and religious freedom and the city’s structure (since the somewhat egalitarian nature of Greek city-states serves as a precedent to modern western democracy).
Rossi delves further into the connection between a city’s institutions and its form by discussing how the absence of city walls around Greek cities reflected the political structure of the City-state. The main point was that the City-state was essentially an idea. This meant that you did not have to reside in the city to be considered Athenian and therefore the countryside was an extension of the city-state. I do agree that there is a connection between the recurrence of walls and segregating-structures in a city and the nature of the city’s social, political, and religious fabric. In Sierra Leone, 8 ft. barbed wire-topped concrete fences are frequently accounted for when designing private and public buildings. I do not have to delve into the reasons for that for I think they are obvious. The funny thing is however that the same people living in these houses are descendants of people who for millennia lived in the communal environment of pre-colonial West African villages and towns.
I do also think that fences and city walls are not all always symptomatic of bad conditions and I think this becomes clear when we examine the context surrounding these ancient cities. Within most ancient middle eastern cities were clearly delineated religious spaces — temenos. Within these complexes were man-made mountains, ziggurats, dedicated to Gods. One thing to note is that the ancient Mesopotamian Gods could be considered as much angrier versions of the Greek Gods. In Greek mythology, the Gods were associated with intrigue (although Greek gods were prone to devastating acts they were also light-hearted, and according to mythology, they even interacted with humans). On the other hand, Mesopotamian Gods had to be constantly appeased in the citizens’ bid to stave off the occurrence of natural disasters which brought harm to the city. Hence Greek religious institutions might not have been as rigid as those of the cities of the Euphrates and the Tigris and it made sense that there were no clear segregating temenos boundaries between the temples and the surrounding buildings.
Rossi, Aldo, and Peter Eisenman. The Architecture of the City. Cambridge, MA, MA: MIT Press, 1982.