Aldo Rossi explores the meaning of architecture and thus the meaning of a city through architecture. At the end of his introduction to the book he concludes, “perhaps, as I said at the beginning, this is the meaning of the architecture of the city; like the figure in the carpet, the figure is clear but everyone reads it in a different way. Or rather, the more clear it is, the more open it is to a complex evolution.” (Rossi, 19) He then dives into a complex analysis of the city with a significant focus on the evolution and growth of the city over time, which I will argue, is the fabric of his theory.
To begin, this focus is explored alongside Rossi’s definition of “architecture of the city” which is the following; “…first, the city seen as a gigantic man-made object, a work of engineering and architecture that is large and complex and growing over time; second, certain more limited but still crucial aspects of the city, namely urban artifacts, which like the city itself are characterized by their own history and thus by their own form.” (Rossi, 29) Here, he is already eluding to the importance that the history of a city holds. One element that Rossi describes as crucial to the success of cities is Urban Artifacts, which inherently are the children of history. Urban Artifacts can be a myriad of things but one type that he focuses on, that again relates back to the importance of history, is the Theory of Permanences. Rossi writes, “One must remember that the difference between past and future, from the point of view of the theory of knowledge, in large measure reflects the fact that the past is partly being experienced now, and this may be the meaning to give permanences: they are a past that we are still experiencing… persistences are revealed through monuments, the physical signs of the past, as well as through the persistence of a city’s basic layout and plans.” (Rossi, 57-58) Permanances are important to the fabric of the city because they remind us of the city’s growth. Monument’s provide a visual representation of the city’s history and are essential to the experience. This relates to Eisenman’s concept of knowing where you are as an important factor in architecture (I will mention the parallels between Eisenman and Rossi but not explore them) which leads me to my next point. Rossi includes an interesting quote by Karl Marx that suggests that all (in this case architectural) history derives from Greece. The quote goes;
“The difficulty, however, does not lie in understanding that Greek art and the Epic are associated with certain social developments. The difficulty is that they still give us aesthetic pleasure and are in a certain respect regarded as unattainable models. A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not enjoy the naïveté of the child, and does he not himself have to strive on a higher level to reproduce the child’s veracity? In every epoch, does not its essential character in its natural veracity live in the nature of the child? Why should not the historical childhood of humanity, where it unfolded most beautifully, exert an eternal charm, even though it is a stage that will never return? There are ill-bred children and precocious children. Many of the ancient peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm their art has for us does not conflict with the undeveloped stage of the society in which it grew. On the contrary [its charm] is inseparably linked with the immature social conditions which gave rise to it, and which alone it could give rise to, and which can never recur.” (Rossi, 134)
To simplify, Rossi is suggesting that all city histories can be traced back to Athens because it was the “normal child” that all future cities tried to replicate (not in exact likeness, but through the successful architectural elements) through innumerable transformations. Eisenman suggests a similar theory that all architecture is based on the perfect standard achieved in ancient Greece and therefore that there is no new architecture, only transformations of the original architecture. These theories indicate that the history of a city is dogmatic to its identity and success because history is what informs the development of the city as a man-made object. The development and growth of a city over time as a history in itself and the historical references derived from Athens are the founding elements behind the meaning of architecture.
Rossi, Aldo, and Peter Eisenman. The Architecture of the City. Cambridge, MA, MA: MIT Press, 1982.