URBAN DESIGN-THEORIST

Aldo Rossi
(3 May 1931 – 4 September 1997)

“One can say that the city itself is the

collective memory of its people, and like
memory it is associated with objects and
places. The city is the locus of the collective
memory.”

- Aldo Rossi
Introduction
 He was an Italian architect and designer

 Theory, drawing, architecture and product design.

 He was the first Italian to receive the Pritzker Prize for

architecture in 1990.

 In 1955 he had started writing for, and from 1959 was one of the
editors of, the architectural magazine Casabella-Continuità.

 During the early 1960s he began his lifelong career as a teacher,

working for a time at the Polytechnic of Milan and the Istituto
Universitario di Architettura in Venice (IUAV).
• In 1966 Rossi published his seminal publication The Architecture of
the City, which quickly established him as a leading international
theoretician.

• Rossi was also sometimes classified a postmodernist because he

rejected aspects of Modernism and utilized aspects of historical
styles.

• Among Rossi’s first works to be built was his winning competition

design for the Cemetery of San Cataldo (1971–84) in Modena, Italy.
THEORIES AND PHYLOSOPHY
 He engages in a determined search for essential forms based on
what is referred to as "repetition and fixation”. Aldo Rossi
attempts to recover the "immovable elements of architecture," not
as empty catalogs of forms but as a search for an ageless originality
found in formal types.
 He argued that a city must be studied and valued as something
constructed over time of particular interest are urban artifacts
that withstand the passage of time. Despite the modern movement
polemics against monuments.
 He held that the city remembers its past and uses that memory
through monuments; that is, monuments give structure to the
city.
 Collective memory of an place.
 “Genius loci” – try to sustain the sprit of the place or the
distinct atmosphere over there.
Genius Loci
 During 1960s and 1980s with the contribution of Kevin Lynch, Aldo
Rossi “social culture” became a significant component in the urban
design arena.
 With their ideas the “Place” was identified as a strong media that
incorporate the human and the world in a more powerful way.
 It highlights the uniqueness of each and every place that cannot
reproduce the same sense or the expression in another place. With
these discussions “Genius Loci” one of the oldest mythologies exists
in Late Roman emerged gradually in urban design.
 There are two psychological functions that move with the spirit of
the place: Orientation and identification.
 Orientation facilitates the person to identify where he is and
keep himself safe in the context.
 Identification is needed to receive character and the spirit of
belongingness to the place over the time when the place evolves.
 He tries to see Genius Loci in terms of the strong connection
between the time and the space.
Collective Memory
 “The soul of the city” becomes the city’s history, the sign on the
walls of the minicipium, the city’s distinctive and definite
character, its memory.
 One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its
people and like memory is associated with objects and places. The
city is the LOCUS of the collective memory.
 The Architecture, landscape and the artifacts becomes part of the
memory.
 Thus we consider LOCUS the characteristic principle of urban
artifacts: the concepts of locus, architecture and history together
help us to understand the complexity of urban artifacts.
 Memory becomes the guiding thread of the entire complex urban
structure and is this respect architecture of urban artifacts in
distinguished art and later it is an element that exists for itself
alone.
IMPORTANT WORKS:
San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena, Italy:
• It came at a time when architects were questioning the
tenets of the Modern Movement.
• Unadorned exterior, insistent static volumes and chilly
uniformity of negative space is a visual reticence that is
solemn, yes, but also eerie and discomforting
• The cemetery is the very embodiment of this notion of
collective memory, and Rossi here creates a haunting and
enigmatic city of the dead.
• Rossi is syncretic, a human bridge between objective history
and sublime subjectivity, rational consciousness and the
irrational-unconscious, collective and personal memory—a
man whose reconciliation of diametrically opposed
imperatives finds him, to borrow his words, “somewhere
between logic and biography.” Much like his façades and
interior spaces, Rossi’s syncretism is deceptively simple
• other drawings his beloved enamel coffeepot is also bisected
to reveal a brick wall and staircase.
IMPORTANT WORKS:
Teatro del Mondo -Venice Italy:

• Built earthily on the edge of the water, it is a light

floating octagon theatre.
• Its structure expresses the solid certainty of inert
matter, against the fluid, watery agitation of life around.
• Determined to survive in memory the way its masonry
withstands time, and it hides its timeless monumentality
behind a casual conjunction of schematic pieces
bordering on the picturesque in the coloristic cube of the
seaside tavern.
• The mineral impassivity of its geometry is what freezes
its forms in a still landscape.
• The idea was to recall the floating theatres which were so
characteristic of Venice and its carnivals in the 18th century

• He often employed archetypal forms in an attempt to re-establish a

connection with the collective memory of the urban environment.

• The form includes a conical dome, and a composition of basic

geometry, often seen in all his designs.

• Volumes - cube, cylinder, and prism and their elemental

identities as towers, columns, ... out of his theoretical base
came designs that seem always to be a part of the city fabric, rather
than an intrusion

• Design also shows recessed windows with cornices. Flat roof with
conical tower tops.
Role of his theory in current Scenario
 Most of the places in the country many of the artifacts and
monuments are not maintained properly.
 The historic character of the places has to be enriched more and
its also affected by the new development around.
 Awareness should be created among the people to preserve the
uniqueness of the city.
 Repetition and fixation in style or architecture is not followed.
 Even some the monuments and other artifacts still in its places but
they are in endangered conditions.
 Strict rules and regulations should be followed for preserving them
 Very few cities follow strict regulations in preserving the historic
value of the city.
Facts from “The Architecture of the city”
 Chapter One: The structure of urban
artifacts
 Chapter Two: Primary Elements and
the Concept of Area
 Chapter Three: The Individuality of
Urban Artifacts; Architecture
 Chapter Four: The Evolution of Urban
Artifacts
Chapter One: The structure of urban artifacts:
• First, the city is seen as a gigantic man-made object, growing over
time; second, as urban artifacts characterized by their own history and
form.

• These two aspects relate to the quality and uniqueness of the urban
artifact

• In this sense, urban artifacts are superior to newly constructed

buildings in terms of historic richness.

• According to him, persistence changes urban artifacts into

monuments, which take part in the process of a city’s
development as a catalyst.
Chapter Two: Primary Elements and the Concept of
Area:
• In the second chapter, the author says that there are specific and
disparate qualities within parts of a city due to its sociological, formal,
and spatial characteristics that are formed by time and space.
• Rossi, proper understanding of a part of the city could be derived
from overall aspects such as psychology, linguistics, geography, history
and their relationships.
• Due to the collective and public nature of urban elements, Rossi uses
the term “primary element” as fixed activities. This collective
characteristic links with urban dynamics and eventually constitutes
the beginning and end point of the city.
• Rossi supports his opinion by a practical example: the amphitheater in
Nimes changed into a fortress then became a little city.
• In this respect, all the cities have their own individuality, derived from
a specific destiny and a life of each urban artifact, and furthermore
urban artifacts and primary elements participate in the process of
evolution of the city.
Chapter Three: The Individuality of Urban Artifacts;
Architecture:
• he refers to the transcendent space of the Catholic religion, and even in this
ultimately homogeneous space there are singular points due to a particular
event or infinite variety of other reasons that occurred there.
• To sum up, the difference between them depends on its meaning, reason, style
and history with regard to the connection between the event and sign at a
particular moment.
• he mentions history as the actual formation and the structure of urban artifacts
that relates to the collective imagination and the continuity of urban structure.
• From this point of view, the city itself becomes the soul of the city, the collective
memory of its citizenry and like memory, it associates with objects and places
and in turn it becomes the locus of its people.
• Likewise, each urban artifact has its own singularity by the actions of individuals
and the urban structure is formed by the collective and individual nature of
urban artifacts.
• In addition to this, he takes the case of Athens which is distinguishable from
other cases, since Athenian citizenry and their city were bound up not only by
myth but also for political and administrative reasons.
Chapter Four: The Evolution of Urban Artifacts:
• In the final chapter, Rossi focuses on the process of evolution of the city and
how various forces are applied within it and how their application causes
different changes.
• According to him, the forces could be an economic, political, or of some
other nature.
• In the first part of this chapter he describes the economic forces:
expropriations and land ownership, and in the last part, he refers to political
force.
• For instance for the former, the structure of Paris is defined as an overlapped
image of Louis XIV, Louis XV, Napoleon I and Baron Haussmann.
• For the latter, he refers to the nationalization of clerical property in Paris,
since the nationalization affected the road system and finally it changed the
form of Paris.
• Rossi states that the problem of the large city has always existed and it is
related to the city itself.
• As a result of these two aspects, he insists that expropriation and land
subdivision are typical phenomena of urban evolution since they can lead to
immediate and radical transformation.
• he also refers to reducing metropolitan problems, which are not the problem
of scale and the changes in scale have nothing to do with the quality of urban
artifacts.
Summary
❑Introduction:
❑Theories and Philosophy in UD
1. URBAN ARTIFACTS
2. COLLECTIVE MEMORY
3. GENIUS LOCI
4. REPITITION AND FIXATION

❑Books
“ The Architecture of the city”
❑Important Works:
Teatro del mondo, Venice, Italy
San cataldo cemetry, Italy