The Architecture of the City

Paolo Portoghesi renders homage to Aldo Rossi for his book The Architecture of the City, publised in 1966. Portoghesi writes in light of the intense intellectual friendship that existed between him and the Milanese maestro. What’s more, 1966 was also the year Portoghesi’s book Roma barocca was published.

- Paolo Portoghesi

The Architecture of the City was a seminal book and the fruit of a specific decade in European history: the 1960s, when structuralism spread through Europe via the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss. Meanwhile, a new and more flexible interpretation of the Marxist legacy had come into being, over and above the official dictate which established a distinct hierarchy between economic structure and cultural superstructure. It was in this climate, and helped by the advances made by writings on the geography and history of the city such as those by Fustel de Coulanges, Mumford, Malinowsky and Lavedan, as well as Halbwachs’ work on collective memory, that Aldo Rossi was attempting to construct an urban science that would rectify the dichotomy that had arisen between urban development as a planning technique and architecture, seen primarily as individual artistic expression. Structuralism enabled Rossi to concentrate on the “structures” of the city: on the constant and systematic relations between social and cultural phenomena that condition and limit, often unconsciously, the actions of individuals. It is easy to imagine how keenly Rossi must have read the author’s remarks in