ABSTRACT
It was in 1969, in the preface to the second edition of l’Architettura della Città (The Architecture of the City) that Italian architect Aldo Rossi first mentioned, and briefly unfolded, his concept of the Città analoga (Analogous City), “a compositional procedure that is based on certain fundamental artifacts in the urban reality around which other artifacts are constituted within the framework of an analogous system.” Of paramount importance to understand the work of Rossi, the Analogous City refers not merely to a formal but to an operational idea whose fundamental modus operandi is the appropriation of projects and references that can be freely associated to recompose a new whole, linking theory and practice while allowing architects to design projects that blend their personal memory with the city’s history. From 1973 to 1979, Rossi explored and partially unveiled his concept of Analogous City through a series of exhibitions that began to frame its scope and allow for more tangible readings of his intentions.
This chapter expands on three works produced or commissioned by Rossi (Città analoga, 1973; Città analoga, 1976; and Teatro del Mondo, 1979), arguing that it was the highly public act of exhibiting that allowed the architect to further explore and later elaborate and perform his theoretical concept.
