11.4 Collective Memory – Aldo Rossi

“One says that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, and like memory, it is associated with its objects and places. The city is the locus of collective memory”.

-Aldo Rossi

EXCERPT: Through historical significance, specific interventions tend to characterize a city and establish a relationship between its past and present more clearly. (Rossi, 1996, p. 30)

INTERPRETATION: This excerpt speaks about how specific urban scapes came to be perceived as and when the city evolved. The architecture of the city is the most profound source of the city, its history, its most tangible character and its reminiscence. The cities define the people, the way they are designed, create a sense of belonging, and historical relevance in the mind of its inhabitants.

EXCERPT: When a group is introduced to a part of space, it transforms it to its image, but at the same time it yields and adapts itself to certain material things which resist it, it encloses itself in the formwork that it has constructed. The image of the exterior environment and the stable relationship it maintains with itself, pass into the realm of the idea that it has of

itself. (Rossi, 1996, p. 31)

INTERPRETATION: Architecture can have a permanent place in a person’s mind if it engages the person on multiple levels of the consciousness. Recollection exists in two primary forms: first, in terms of personal accounts of the past – private memories, stories and personal artefacts that make up unique and individual accounts of the past; and second, in terms of collective memory which forms the basis of the broader public narratives of the past. Within a built environment, recollection can operate both as a means of facilitating remembrance and as a method for learning about the past. Thus, memory space often functions with a duality depending on the audience it

serves - it allows witnesses of the past to recall moments of that time, and serves a didactic

purpose of educating those who are unfamiliar with the event itself. The history is the ‘collective memory’ of people of the city, and it has an essential influence on the city itself. The history expresses itself through the structures and monuments.

Aldo Rossi saw the building of cities as part of the culture. To him, people had civilized nature and brought it under control by discovering the secrets of her materials and with them made constructions for the collective purpose. This demands organized systems of division of labour and commands, and the technological advancement to refine tools for the task.

The text of Aldo Rossi has been a study of ‘city’ considering the urban form as a whole. The context of the problem was the twentieth-century town planning approaches which had been generated some cities as machines. Here the author refers to the historical methods to get rid of the present day’s modernist concepts. His new construct begins as a critique of nineteenth-century functionalism. From this, he proposes the city as the final and verifiable data and as an independent structure. He also identified some of the key elements of the evolution and transformation of cities. Rossi assigns particular importance to institutions as truly constant elements of historical life and to the intricate relationship between myth and institution. Moreover, Rossi conceived the city as an archaeological artefact. To him, history was analogous to a ‘skeleton’ whose condition serves as a measure of time and in turn, is measured by time. His object of analysis, the city, is measured by the instrument of ‘typology’. Rossi analysed the city, as a whole constructed by its parts. In response, the study undertaken is analytical and inductive and firmly set within the domain of architecture. It

attempts to restore the craft of architecture to its position as the only valid object of architectural study. Besides, it analyses the rules and forms of the city's construction.

Every aspect of experience becomes engulfed in the process of memory. It forms our identity as individuals together to form a particular identity of social groups. Memory is also the thread which links the people with the present, the past and the future. The relationship between architecture and memory is formed in each one's appropriation of the other to make a connection in space and time; the fragmentation between present and past disappears, as one place, through imagery, unites with another