The City as a Common Framework
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20 Aerial view of Beijing, 1943
Rossi’s early architectural projects offers a way to locate the ideas that are common to the city; then the corresponding deep structure advances an architecture of the city. The most important concepts put forth by Rossi in his L’architettura della città are “urban artifacts” and “collective memory.” The book was written in part as a critique of modernism’s naive functionalism, in which he claims that the utilitarian and unitary master plan of the modernist city has lost its validity in the face of the realities of urban life.22 Rossi returned to the historic European city as a site for architectural rejuvenation. The city, through its architecture, is an
artifact of civilization. It is the sum of the culture, politics, and history of its citizens. However, the traditional European city, composed as it is of contrasting architecture, of the rule and the exception, cannot be read as a whole. To resolve this, Rossi proposed the term “urban artifact” to refer to the architecture of the city that is both permanent and propelling. In other words, the urban artifact must both persist over time and participate in the continuous transformation of the city. Through its constancy the artifact becomes a structure that accretes the memory of the city. The urban artifact for Rossi is both the housing and the monuments of the city. The former contains the memory of