ABSTRACT
Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City presented a paradigmatic reflection on the situation confronting the architectural discipline following the widely acknowledged collapse of the Modern Movement. Rossi’s attempt established some of the key assumptions still underpinning contemporary debates regarding the political significance and agency of architectural practice. In The Architecture of the City, Rossi combined aesthetic propositions and metaphysical axioms on the permanence and necessity of architecture, with concrete historical analyses of urban and economic development. For Rossi, the question of ‘architecture’ and the question of ‘design’ were separate but intimately linked. Rossi used scalar concepts like the ‘urban artifact’ to bracket out the economic organisation of the city.
