"La città ha per fine se stessa"/"The city is itself its own end"

De Visscher, Jean-Philippe [UCL]

(eng) This quote witnesses the radicalism of « l’architettura della città » in the history of urbanism. While modernist arguments link their urban proposals to moral and utopist goals and squeeze them into simplistic programs, Aldo Rossi constructs a theory of open urban processes, independent from external normative arguments. Through morphological descriptions, he depicts the city as a sequence of permanencies and mutations where architecture is a driving force. Then, through interpretations that could be seen as anthropological, he shows how architectural design is a political issue where a society builds up itself. Rossi values the persistence of uninterrupted urban production, regardless of its origins and direction, because this process is an opportunity for inhabitants to literally take place. Corollary, Architecture becomes the art of preserving its vitality. The first part of the presentation develops this understanding of Rossi’s book by retracing the sequence of concepts developed through the text itself. The second part discusses the limits of the model used to study the way architecture acts on the city. Urban formation is mainly presented as the product of a dialectical relation between monuments and dwelling areas. This hypothesis is very efficient to sustain the concept of urban process but is too simplistic to understand the role of important urban elements such as natural site, networks, wastelands... Moreover, through the concepts of type and style, relations between urban elements are mainly considered as matter of similitude while relations of contiguity remain undeveloped. Spatial composition, articulation, proportion, geometry … have little place in Rossi’s theory. In conclusion, arguing that “city is itself its own end” enjoins us to focus on the very moment of its production through the act of building. This proposition preserves architecture from being oriented towards established goals. It provides the decisions with the opportunity to become truly political: societal choices that one is responsible for; so that city making becomes intensely human. However, the knowledge of how to preserve and activate the urban process by building locally is a field that Rossi merely initiates.