OPPOSITIONS BOOKS

Introduction by Peter Eisenman
Translation by Diane Ghirardo and
Joan Ockman
Revised for the American Edition
by Aldo Rossi and Peter Eisenman

The Architectureof the City

Published by The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies
in the Fine Arts, Chicago, Illinois, and
The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies,
New York, New York, by
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
1982

Contents

Editor’s Preface vi
Editor’s Introduction by Peter Eisenman 3
Introduction to the First American Edition by Aldo Rossi

12

Introduction: Urban Artifacts and a Theory of the City

20

C hapter 1: The S tructure of Urban Artifacts 28
The Individuality of Urban Artifacts 29
The Urban Artifact as a Work of A rt 32
Typological Questions 35
Critique of Naive Functionalism 46
Problems of Classification 48
The Complexity of Urban Artifacts 55
Monuments and the Theory of Permanences 57
Chapter 2: Prim ary Elements and the Concept of Area
The Study Area 63
Residential Districts as Study Areas 65
The Individual Dwelling 70
The Typological Problem of Housing in Berlin 72
Garden City and Ville Radieuse 82
Primary Elements 86
The Dynamic of Urban Elements 87
The Ancient City 92
Processes of Transformation 95
Geography and History: the Human Creation 97

62

C hapter 3: The Individuality of Urban Artifacts; Architecture
The Locus 103
Architecture as Science 107
Urban Ecology and Psychology 112
How Urban Elements Become Defined 114
The Roman Forum 119
Monuments; Summary of the Critique of the Concept of Context
The City as History 128
The Collective Memory 130
Athens 131
Chapter 4: The Evolution of Urban Artifacts 138
The City as Field of Application for Various Forces; Economics
The Thesis of Maurice Halbwachs 141
Further Considerations on the Nature of Expropriations 144
Land Ownership 152
The Housing Problem 155
The Urban Scale 158
Politics as Choice 161

102

126

139

Preface to the Second Italian Edition 164
Introduction to the Portuguese Edition 168
Comment on the German Edition 178

1

Notes 180
Figure Credits and Publishing History of The Architecture of the City
Index of Names 198

196

Editor’s Preface

The tradition of the architect-writer is well precedented in the history ofarchitecture in Italy. From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, it wascharacteristic of certain architects to present their ideas in a systematic
treatise. Based on the model of Vitruvius, Alberti produced the Renaissancemodel fo r such writing. This was followed by treatises like those of Serlio andPalladio. Serlio produced, a series of volumes which constitute a handbook ofarchitecture, starting with ancient building and including speculations about
unbuilt future work. These unbuilt designs, which were to become more
important than his modest built work, are not so much significant in terms ofspecific projects, but are rather models which begin to elaborate many of thetypes to which Palladio would, refer. Palladio wrote the “Quattro Libri” ten
yearns before his death, as a kind of resume of his career. These books containthe redrawing of his projects and buildings, thereby serving as much as arecord, of his intentions as o f his actual work. Whether drawing Roman ruins
or redrawing his own projects, Palladio was primarily interested in thederivation, invention, and ultimately the distortion of types from existing
mod,els. Thus the idea of the interrelationship of drawing and wilting became
part of an architectural tradition.
This tradition has continued in Italy up to the present century. The writingsof Scamozzi, Milizia, and Lodoii, not to mention the more recent writings omd
designs of Giuseppe Pago,no, certainly must be seen as its bearers, as, indeed,must Aldo Rossi’s “The Architecture of the City. ” To understand Rossi’s
architecture, it is also necessary to understand his writings and, his drawings.
Yet “The Architecture o f the City” is also a significant departure from pastmodels. This is because, while purporting to be a scientific theory, a modern-day
equivalent of the Renaissance trealise, it is on another level a uniqueanticipation of Rossi’s subsequent architecture.
The task of this preface, then, is to locale this book for an American audience
not only in its own tradition, in the context of Italian theoretical writings byarchitects, but, also in the more contemporary context of Italy in the 1960s and1970s. The first edition of this book, taken from Rossi’s lectures and notes,
appeared in 1966 during the traumatic years of student discontent as a,polemical critique of the Modem. Movement position on the city. A second,
Italian edition appeared in 1970 with a new introduction. The book was thentranslated into Spanish, German, and Portuguese editions. Finally, in 1978,
a fourth Italian edition appeared with new illustrations. To reissue it now, in
Us first English-language edition, with all of the supplementary material thatit has acquired, during its successive publications, is to recognize the uniquecultural context within which it was first produced and continued to develop;
all of this material is part of the book’s history. In this way, the book stands asa singular and parallel record of ideas that Rossi has been developing in bothdrawing and other writing over the last fifteen years. As such, it is in itself an“analogous artifact. ”
In its American edition, “The Architecture of the City” is not so much a literaltranscription of the original as a carefully revised edition—revised so as toprovide the style andflavor o f the original without encumbering it with someof the rhetorical and, repetitive passages which are part of the original text.
The rather academic style of presentation in the Italian occasionally makes
fo r a certain stiltedness in English, and in such cases we have preferred to opt
fo r clarily and simplicity.

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Dedalus” or House of Daedalus.

. . . the relief and design of structures appears more clearly when content, Editor’s Introduction
which is the living energy of meaning, is neutralized, somewhat like the ar­chitecture of an uninhabited or deserted city, reduced to its skeleton by some The Houses of Memory:catastrophe o f nature or art. A city no longer inhabited, not simply left behind, The Texts of Analogue
but haunted by meaning and culture, this state of being haunted, which keeps
the city from returning to nature . . .
Jacques Derrida
Writing and Difference
The image on the cover of the fourth Italian edition of Aldo Rossi’s UArchitettura della citta summarizes in condensed form not only the ambivalent nature of
Rossi’s architectural work, but also the intrinsic problem of its relationship to
the idea of city which is proposed by this book. This image, a horizontal section of
the Mausoleum of Hadrian in the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, reads as a spiral.
The spiral is associated with the form of the labyrinth, a construction which, ac­cording to classical myth, was the invention of Daedalus. Daedalus, as the only
architect of rtiythology and the supposed inventor of many “wondrous” works ofarchitecture, has become for history the symbol par excellence of the humanist
architect. As such, the labyrinth, Daedalus’s creation, can be consideredemblematic of a humanist condition of architecture. But this is not the spiral’s
only meaning. As an unfolding path or route, the spiral has also been interpreted
as a psychological figure, the symbol of a process of transformation. Thus, we are
obliged to interpret Rossi’s use of the image on the cover of his book in two ways:
first, in terms of the spiral as a mausoleum, as representing a symbolic place ofdeath, in this case—even if unconsciously on his part—that of humanism; and at
the same time, in terms of the spiral as labyrinth, as representing a place oftransformation.
The spiral has a further, more personal meaning for Rossi. It symbolizes his own
rite of passage, his role as part of a generation progressively more distanced
from the positivism of modern architecture by the collapse of historical time andleft drifting into an uncertain present. While this book in many ways is a critiqueof the Modern Movement, it nevertheless reflects an ambivalence with respect
to modernism. It suggests Rossi’s own uncertainty as much with the general
ideology of modernism as with the failure of the specific aspirations of modern ar­chitecture. Rossi’s anxiety with respect to modernism is thus refracted throughhis sympathy with its very concerns. It was, after all, modernism which focusedon the city as one of architecture’s central problems. Prior to modernism, cities
were thought to have evolved over time through a process which was an imita­tion of natural law. But in the view of the polemicists of the Modern Movement,
this natural time had run out, and in its place succeeded the time of historicism.

f

F or the architects of the early twentieth century, the appropriateness of the actof intervening clinically in the city’s historical and natural evolution was beyond
question. Supported by the enormous moral impetus of social and technologicalnecessity (which had replaced the model of natural evolution), they attemptedfrom the stronghold of their “castle of purity” to storm the bastion of evils identified with the nineteenth-century city. To them the stakes appeared higher thanthey had ever been. In this heroic climate of modernism the city of modern ar­chitecture, supposedly born out of a rupture of history, was progressively pro­pelled by that very history toward the vision of a sanitized utopia.
The perceived failure of modern architecture to realize this utopia—either tosupersede the nineteenth-century city or to mitigate its destruction after the3

bombings of the Second World War—became the primary condition confronting
the architects of a generation which matured in the early 1960s. Their disillu­
sionment and anger were in direct proportion to modern architecture’s failure,
as much with its unrealized aspirations—its castle of purity—as with their own
sense of loss and the impossibility of return; these feelings were directed at theheroic fathers of modern architecture, both for having been and also for having
failed. For Rossi’s generation it was no longer possible to be a hero, no longer
possible to be an idealist; the potential for such memories and fantasies had beentaken away forever. No other generation had to follow such a sense of expecta­tion with such a sense of loss. Cynicism and pessimism came to fill the void
created by the loss of hope.

Now let us . . . suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychicalentity with a similarly long and copious past—an entity, that is to say, in whichnothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the ear­lier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. . . . I f wewant to represent historical sequence in spatial terms we can only do it by ju x­
taposition in space: the same space cannot have two different contents. . . . It
shows us howfa r we are from mastering the characteristics of mental life by rep­resenting them in pictorial terms.
Sigmund Freud
Civilization and Its Discontents
The Architecture of the City along with all of Rossi’s production is an attempt tobuild a different kind of castle from that of the modems. It is an elaborate scaf­
fold erected for and by someone who can no longer climb its steps to die a hero’s
death. Proposing an other architecture, an other architect, and most impor­tantly, an other process for their understanding, it can be seen as an attempt tobreak not only from the traditional humanist definition of the relationship of ob­
ject and subject, but also from the more recent modernist one. Modernism pro­
posed a new interpretation of the subject which was never fulfilled by modern ar­chitecture; in this respect modem architecture can be seen as simply an exten­
sion of nineteenth-century functionalism. Rossi’s new construct begins as a
critique of the city of modern architecture and from this goes on to propose another object.
The other object, the architecture of the book’s title, is now defined in two ways:
as the ultimate and verifiable data within the real city, and as an autonomous
structure. But this data is not gathered and applied with the reductive scientism
used by the proponents of the Modern Movement city, but rather through amore complex rationalism provided by urban geography, economics, and above
all history. Nor is its autonomy entirely that of modernism, of the discipline ofarchitecture in itself. Rather, it resides in architecture’s specific processes andits built reality.
This twofold idea of the city as ultimate data—an archaeological artifact—and of
the city as autonomous structure not only characterizes the new city as an object,but more importantly, and perhaps inadvertently, redefines its subject—the ar­chitect himself. As opposed to the humanist architect of the sixteenth century,and the functionalist architect of the twentieth century, Rossi’s architect would
seem to be an unheroic, autonomous researcher—much like his psychoanalyst
counterpart who is similarly distanced from the object of his analysis and who no4

longer believes in science or progress. However, not surprisingly, this redefini­tion of the architect as a neutral subject is problematic.
Whereas the humanist conception attempted an integration of subject and ob­
ject, the modernist conception polemically attempted their separation. The
problematic nature of the practice of modern architecture with respect to thetheory of modernism has to do precisely with its inability to effect this separationand thus its contamination with imperatives from the humanist conception.
Rossi intuitively understands this problem; but he cannot face the consequencesof taking on the unrealized program of modernism. Therefore, his new formula­tion focuses on a mediating element: the process of the work. If the subject andthe object are to be independent, it is now the process, previously considered
neutral, which must assume the forces which formerly were contained in thesubject and the object. Into this new idea of process Rossi reintroduces the ele­ments of history and typology, but not as a nostalgia for narrative or a reductive
scientism. Rather, history becomes analogous to a “skeleton” whose condition
serves as a measure of time and, in turn, is measured by time. It is this skeleton
which bears the imprint of the actions that have taken place and will take place inthe city. For Rossi, architecture’s history lies in its material; and it is this mate­rial which becomes the object of analysis—the city. Typology, on the other hand,
becomes the instrument, the “apparatus”—to borrow a term which Rossi will
later use in his Scientific Autobiography—of time’s measurement; it attempts tobe both logical and scientific. The skeleton and its measuring apparatus become
the process and ultimately the object of the autonomous researcher. History andtype, as components parts of research, allow for transformations of themselves
which are “prearranged but still unforeseeable.”
The skeleton, an image which also appears in Rossi’s Scientific Autobiography,
is a particularly useful analogue for this idea of city. For the skeleton links thecity to history. It is a history which is limited to the historiographical act—to apure knowledge of the past, without the historicizing imperative to determine
the future. For Rossi, historicism, the modernist critique of history, is an imped­
iment to invention. Historicism deals in causes or imperatives while history fo­
cuses on effects or facts. The skeleton thus provides an analogue for Rossi’s un­derstanding of history, for it is at once a structure and a ruin, a record of eventsand a record of time, and in this sense a statement of facts and not causes. But
these are not its only attributes. For it is also an object that can be used to study
its own structure. This structure has two aspects: one is its own abstract signifi­
cance; the other is the precise nature of its individual parts. The latter is of par­ticular importance because the mere study of structure—of the vertebrae of theskeleton—is far too general for Rossi. Any generalized framework acts as amesh which always allows the most important parts to pass through—in thiscase, the city’s most singular elements and those which give it its specificity.
Thus, the skeleton, which may on one level be compared to the urban plan, whilea general structure of parts, is also a material artifact in itself: a collective ar­tifact. The skeleton’s nature as a collective artifact allows us to understandRossi’s metaphor of the city as a giant man-made house, a macrocosm of the indi­vidual house of man. Here the dissolution of scale becomes central to the argu­
ment, as will be seen. This giant house comes into being through a double pro­cess. One process is that of production, in the sense of the city as a work of manufatto (manufacture), an object literally made by the hands of men; the second
process is that of time, which ultimately produces an autonomous artifact. The
first process assumes a time which is only that of manufacture—a time with no5

before or after; it relates the object of manufacture, which has no extensive or in­determinate history, to man. The second process is not only singular as opposed
to collective, but it supersedes man in that it has its own reason and motivationand thus its own autonomous form, which, by virtue of its not being determinedby the subject man, is independent of its use.
This latter process, that of time, can be seen in Rossi’s concept of permanence,
which affects collective and individual artifacts in the city in different ways. The
two main permanences in the city are housing and monuments. With respect tothe first, Rossi distinguishes between housing and individual houses. Housing isa permanence in the city while individual houses are not; thus, a residential dis­
trict in the city may persist as such over many centuries, while individual houses
within a district will tend to change. With respect to monuments, the relation­
ship is the opposite, for here it is the individual artifact that persists in the city.
Monuments are defined by Rossi as primary elements in the city which are per­sistent and characteristic urban artifacts. They are distinguished from housing,the other primary element in the city, by their nature as a place of symbolic func­tion, and thus a function related to time, as opposed to a place of conventional
function, which is only related to use.
As a permanence and a primary element in the city, a monument is dialecticallyrelated to the city’s growth, and this dialectic of permanence and growth ischaracteristic of time in Rossi’s skeleton-city. It implies a city which not only
possesses a before and an after, but which is defined by their interrelationship.
Rossi defines primary elements as “those elements which can both retard and ac­celerate the process of urbanization in a city.” Thus they are catalytic. When amonument retards the process of urbanization, it is considered by Rossi to be“pathological.” The Alhambra in Granada is an example of one such part of a city
functioning as a museum piece. In the city whose analogue is the skeleton, such a
museum piece is like an embalmed body: it gives only the appearance of being
alive.
These preserved or pathological permanences, mummified presences in the city,
often tend to owe their permanent character to their location within a specificcontext. In this sense, the quasi-naturalistic urbanism of the contemporary“contextualists” is dialectically opposed, in Rossi’s view, to the concept ofevolutionary time. For Rossi real time tends to erode and supersede the neatly
circumscribed and meticulously observed imagery of a specific urban context. In
light of the recent development of a so-called contextual urbanism which hascome to dominate urban thought some fifteen years after the original publicationof this book, Rossi’s text can be seen as an anticipatory argument against the“empty formalism” of context reductively seen as a plan relationship of figureand ground.
However, permanences in the city are not only “pathological.” At times they
may be “propelling.” They serve to bring the past into the present, providing apast that can still be experienced. Artifacts like the Theater at Arles or the
Palazzo della Ragione in Padua tend to synchronize with the process of urbaniza­tion because they are not defined only by an original or previous function, nor by
their context, but have survived precisely because of their form—one which isable to accommodate different functions over time. Here again, the analogue ofthe skeleton can be seen to be quite precise. Like the skeleton which is not living
and has lost its original function, only its form remaining intact, the propelling
permanence continues to function as a record of time. This argument, which in it6

self is a critique of “naive functionalism,” contains within it Rossi’s concept of
specific place or locus.
The locus is a component of an individual artifact which, like permanence, is de­termined not just by space but also by time, by topography and form, and, mostimportantly, by its having been the site of a succession of both ancient and more
recent events. For Rossi, the city is a theater of human events. This theater is nolonger just a representation; it is a reality. It absorbs events and feelings, andevery new event contains within it a memory of the past and a potential memoryof the future. Thus, while the locus is a site which can accommodate a series of
events, it also in itself constitutes an event. In this sense, it is a unique or charac­
teristic place, a “locus solus. ”Its singularity is recognizable in signs that come tomark the occurrence of these events. Included in this idea of the locus solus,
then, is the specific but also universal relationship between a certain site and thebuildings that are on it. Buildings may be signs of events that have occurred on a
specific site; and this threefold relationship of site, event, and sign becomes acharacteristic of urban artifacts. Hence, the locus may be said to be the place on
which architecture or form can be imprinted. Architecture gives form to the sin­gularity of place, and it is in this specific form that the locus persists throughmany changes, particularly transformations of function. Rossi uses the exampleof the city of Split in Yugoslavia. He says:
The city o f Split which grew up within the walls of Diocletian's palace gave newuses and new meanings to unchangeable forms. This is symbolic of the meaningof the architecture of the city, where the broadest adaptability to multiple func­
tions corresponds to an extreme precision of form.
This relationship suggests a different limit to history. History exists so long as
an object is in use; that is, so long as a form relates to its original function. How­ever, when form and function are severed, and only form remains vital, history
shifts into the realm of memory. When history ends, memory begins. The singu­
lar form of Split now not only signifies its own individuality, but at the sametime, it is also a sign, a record of events that are part of a collective—that is,urban—memory. History comes to be known through the relationship between
a collective memory of events, the singularity of place (locus solus), and the signof the place as expressed in form.
Thus is can be said that the process by which the city is imprinted with form isurban history, but the succession of events constitutes its memory. The “soul ofthe city,” an idea derived by Rossi from the French urban geographers, resides
in its history; once this soul is given form, it becomes the sign of a place. Memory
becomes the guide to its structure. If time in the chronological sense belonged toa classical context, and in the historicist sense to a modernist context, then once
associated with memory rather than history, it moves into a psychological con­text.
The new time of architecture is thus that of memory, which replaces history. The
individual artifact for the first time is understood within the psychological con­struct of collective memory. Time as collective memory leads Rossi to his par­ticular transformation of the idea of type. With the introduction of memory into
the object, the object comes to embody both an idea of itself and a memory of aformer self. Type is no longer a neutral structure found in history but rather ananalytical and experimental structure which now can be used to operate on theskeleton of history; it becomes an apparatus, an instrument for analysis andmeasure. As has been said, this apparatus, while purportedly scientific and Iogi7

cal, is not reductive, but allows urban elements to be perceived as having ameaning that is always original and authentic and, although typologically pre­determined, often unforeseen. Its logic, then, exists prior to a form, but alsocomes to constitute the form in a new way.
Thus it can be said that the apparatus used to measure the object implies and also
is implied in the object itself. This returns us to the analogue of the skeleton,
which was seen to be at once instrument and object. With this recognition ap­
pears a new object-apparatus, an object—as opposed to a subject—that for the
first time analyzes and also invents. This is the other process mediating be
tween architect and architecture. In the past, innovations in architecture did not
generally occur through the object; typology was never seen as having the po­tential to be the animating force of a design process. Rossi, however, discovers
in typology the possibility of invention precisely because type is now both pro­
cess and object. As a process, it contains a synthetic character which is in itself amanifestation of form. Moreover, while the alteration of certain typological ele­ments over time is a stimulus to invention, it is also the effect of memory on typewhich allows for the new process of design. Memory fuses with history to give
type-form a significance beyond that of an original function. Thus, typology,
which previously consisted only of the classification of the known, now can serve
as a catalyst for invention. It becomes the essence of design for the autonomous
researcher.
Both the idea of the end of history, when a form no longer embodies its originalfunction, and the passing of type from the realm of history into that of memory
lead Rossi to his internalized, analogous design process. Analogy is Rossi’s mostimportant apparatus. It is equally useful to him in writing and in drawing. It is in
this context that this book can be seen as an analogous artifact itself—a written
analogue to built and drawn artifacts. The written analogue, like the drawn one,is bound up with both place and memory. Yet unlike the city, the urban skeleton,
the analogue is detached from specific place and specific time, and becomes in­stead an abstract locus existing in what is a purely typological or architectural
time-place. In this way, by displacing type from history to make a connection be­
tween place and memory, Rossi attempts through the erasure of history andtranscendence of real places to reconcile the contradictions of modernist
utopia—literally “no place”—and humanist reality—built “some place.”
The time of analogy, a bifocal lens of history and memory, takes in and collapses
chronological time—the time of events—and atmospheric time—the time ofplace: place and event, locus solus plus time-place. The place of analogy isthereby abstracted from the real city. Linking type-forms and specific places, it
dispossesses, reassociates, and thus transforms real places and real times. It is
no place, but a no place that is different from that of modernist utopia precisely
because it is rooted in both history and memory. This suppression of the precise
boundaries of time and place within the analogue produces the same kind of
dialectic that exists in memory between remembering and forgetting.
Here the analogous city can be seen to subvert the real city. Where the skeleton
was seen as the form and measure of specific times and places in the city, theanalogous design process displaces the specifics of time and place in the city for
another reality, a psychological one based on memory. While the skeleton, as aphysical and analytical object embedded in a humanist and modernist context,
represents verifiable data, archaeological artifact, memory and analogy bring
the process of architecture into the realm of the psychological, transforming
8both subject and object. The analogous process, when applied to the actual geog­
raphy of the city, therefore acts as a corrosive agent.
The subversive analogues proposed in Rossi’s work involve two kinds of trans­
formation. One is the dislocation of place, the other the dissolution of scale. In
the former, the logical geography of the skeleton is displaced through typologi­
cal invention. Rossi uses the example of Canaletto’s painting of three Palladianprojects; here, the different places of the projects are collapsed into one place. In
the latter kind of transformation, the dissolution of scale allows the individual
building to refer analogically to the city as a whole. This is illustrated in Rossi’s
example of Diocletian’s Palace at Split: “Split discovers in its typological form anentire city. From here it follows that the single building can be designed by anal­
ogy with the city.” Even more importantly, this implies, the design of cities lies
latent in the idea of the individual building. In Rossi’s view, the city’s dimensions
are unimportant because its meaning and quality -reside not in its different
scales, but in its actual constructions and individual artifacts. Once again, it istime which connects things which belong to different scales and heterogeneouscontexts. This time-place continuity opposes the discontinuity between the in­dustrial—modernist—city and the historical—humanist—city which was pro­claimed by the Modern Movement.
Rossi’s denial of the importance of scale in the context of the city is thereby a di­rect assault on most twentieth-century urbanism. Yet precisely within this con­text it becomes problematic. For with the dissolution of scale in the analogous
process there is a seeming return to the very same humanist position first pro­
posed in Alberti’s reciprocal metaphor of the house and the city: “the city is like alarge house, and the house in turn is like a small city.” Rossi’s attempt to propose
an other urban model through analogy becomes conflated with this specifically
fifteenth-century model of the city as the microcosm of a harmonic and macrocosmic universe. For Rossi, the object represents a dialectic between the giant col­lective house of the city and its individual, specific houses, the city’s artifacts. So
long as this dialectic remains internal to architecture and thereby autonomous,the city as object is separate from man. Like a truly modernist object, it grows
upon itself and refers to itself, acquiring its own consciousness and memory.
However, once it is seen to be based on a metaphorical conception of the house ofindividual man, it returns again to the Albertian humanist relationship and afifteenth-century conception of the object. Rossi never resolves this ambiva­
lence in his work. For despite the latent humanism, there is always an overrid­
ing pessimism which undercuts this potential neo-Enlightenment position. In
Rossi’s own pronouncement, “the time of each man is limited; the future, there­
fore, must be the present.”
Analogy, as has been said, allows for both memory and history. It mixes “au­tobiography and civic history,” individual and collective. In Rossi’s formulation,
all great manifestations of social life and all great works of art are born in uncon­
scious life. This leads him directly, if unwittingly, into a second contradiction.
The city, a social entity, is in psychological terms a product of a collective uncon­
scious. At the same time, as an amalgam of formal artifacts, it is a product ofmany individuals. That is, it is both a product o/the collective and a design forthe collective. In both cases the collective subject is the central concept. This re­turns us to Rossi’s idea of the locus. Whereas the locus solus defines the natureof the object, homo civilis now defines the nature of the subject. The contradic­
tion of the singular object and the collective subject further betrays Rossi’s neo­humanism, for despite his pessimism about the power of the individual to domi9

nate history, still he sees the city ultimately as “the human achievement par ex­cellence.”
In the end, there is no model for a twentieth-century city in Rossi’s work, nocity-object which corresponds to the collective psychological subject. Rossi
finally obscures the presence of a psychological context and undermines thenecessity for a psychological model. To propose that the same relationship be­
tween individual subject (man) and individual object (house) which existed in the
Renaissance now obtains between the collective psychological subject (the popu­
lation of the modern city) and its singular object (the city, but seen as a house at adifferent scale) is to imply that nothing has changed, that the city of humanist
man is the same place as the city of psychological man. Rossi’s psychological sub­ject—the autonomous researcher—still continues to seek his own home in thecollective house of the city.

Houses of Memory

Cities are in reality great camps of the living and the dead where many elements
remain like signals, symbols, cautions. When the holiday is over, what remainsof the architecture is scarred, and the sand consumes the street again. There isnothing left but to resume with a certain obstinacy the reconstruction of ele­ments and instruments in expectation of another holiday.
Aldo Rossi
A Scientific Autobiography
For Aldo Rossi the European city has become the house of the dead. Its history,
its function, has ended; it has erased the specific memories of the houses of indi­vidual childhood to become a locus of collective memory. As a giant or collective
house of memory, it has a psychological reality which arises from its being aplace of fantasy and illusion, an analogue of both life and death as transitional
states. For Rossi, writings and drawings are an attempt to explore this giant
house of memory and all those specific places of habitation encountered between
the childhood house of fantasy and hope and the house of illusion and death.
The bourgeois house of Rossi’s childhood permitted fantasy, but denied the or­dering of type. The Architecture of the City attempts, through the apparatus oftype, to place the city before us in such a way that, in spite of history, memory
can imagine and reconstruct a future time of fantasy. This memory is set into mo­tion through the inventive potential of the typological apparatus, the analogous
design process. Rossi’s drawings of the “analogous city” can be seen to evolve di­rectly from his writing of The Architecture of the City. The analogous drawing
embodies a changed condition of representation; it exists as the record of its own
history. Thus, Rossi’s drawings of the city, giving form to their own history, be­come part of the city, not just a representation of it. They have an authenticity, areality which is, precisely, that of illusion. This reality may then, in turn, be rep­resented in actual buildings.
The architectural drawing, formerly thought of exclusively as a form of rep­resentation, now becomes the locus of another reality. It is not only the site of il­lusion, as it has been traditionally, but also a real place of the suspended time ofboth life and death. Its reality is neither foward time—progress—nor pasttime—nostalgia, for by being an autonomous object it eludes both the progres­sive and regressive forces of historicism. In this way it, and not its built rep­resentation, becomes architecture: the locus of a collective idea of death and,10

through its autonomous invention, of a new metaphysic of life in which death isno longer a finality but only a transitional state. The analogous drawing thereby
approximates this changed condition of subject—man—relative to his object—city.
Rossi’s analogous drawings, like his analogous writings, deal primarily withtime. Unlike the analgous writings, however, the drawings represent the sus­
pension of two times: the one processual—where the drawn object is something
moving toward but not yet arrived at its built representation; and the other at­mospheric—where drawn shadows indicate the stopping of the clock, are a fro­
zen and constant reminder of this new equation of life and death. N o longer in theanalogous drawing is time represented by a precisely measured aspect of light,
the length of a shadow, or the aging of a thing. Rather, time is expressed as an in­
finite past which takes things back to the timelessness of childhood, of illusions,of fragments of possessions and autobiographical images of the author’s own
alienated childhood—of which history’s narrative can no longer give an effective
account. Yet for Rossi, this personal aspect of architecture is unsentimentalized.
In his personal vision of time, the same dialectic applies as in the city: history
provides the material for biography but memory provides the material for au­
tobiography; as in the city, memory begins when history ends. It encompasses
both future time and past time: a project that has to be done and one that is al­
ready completed. The images of ruin activate this unconscious memory, linking
the discarded and the fragmentary with new beginnings. Here again, the appar­
ently coherent orderliness of logic is biographical, but fragments are autobiog­
raphical. Abandonment and death—the attributes of the skeleton—are throughthis dialectic now seen as parts of a process of transformation; death is a new be­
ginning associated with some unknown hope.
Ultimately, The Architecture o f the City, notwithstanding its attempt to place it­
self within a certain tradition of “scientific” writing about the city, is a very pri­vate and personal text. It is the written analogue of yet another analogous pro­
cess: the unconscious revelation of a potential new relationship of man to object.
It anticipates the psychological subject—homo civilis—of the collective uncon­
scious; but at the same time, it also nostalgically evokes the individual subject,the mythic hero-architect of humanism, the inventor of the house. The shadow of
the humanist poet hovers continuously behind the figure of the autonomous re­searcher. The potential transformation of the individual into the collective sub­ject is left in suspension. Ambiguously, the object of the analogous city begins todefine the subject once again, not so much as a humanist-hero, nor as thepsychological collective, but as a complex, divided, and shattered solitary sur­vivor, appearing before, but not withstanding, the collective will of history.
Peter Eisenman

11

In the fifteen years since its first publication, this book has been published in four
languages and numerous editions and has influenced a generation of young Euro­pean architects. I first set forth the idea of the analogous city in the introduction
to the second Italian edition and certain clarifications in the introduction to thePortuguese edition, and since then I have preferred not to make any additions to
the text. Like a painting, a building, or a novel, a book becomes a collective ar­tifact; anyone can modify it in his own way, the author notwithstanding. The fig­
ure is clear-, as in Henry James’s “figure in the carpet,” but everyone sees it in adifferent way. James’s image suggests that clear analysis gives rise to questions
that are difficult to subject to further analysis. For this reason, when I firstwrote this book, its style and literary construction were of particular concern tome, as they always are, because only the perfect clarity of a rational system al­lows one to confront irrational questions, forces one to consider the irrational in
the only way possible: through the use of reason.
I believe that the concepts of locus, monument , and type have opened up a gen­eral discussion which, if at times inhibited by academicism, at other times has
produced significant studies and initiated a debate that still today is far frombeing resolved. For reasons of chronology, I have used great discretion in alter­ing the book, mostly modifying the illustrations and clarifying the language ofthe present translation.
America . . . For this country I have decided to write a special introduction.
Even though I was influenced by American culture as a young man, especially its
literature and film, the influence was more fantastic than scientific. My slightknowledge of the language and lack of direct experience of the country made it
alien to me as a field of work. Its architecture, its people, American things were
not yet precious to me. Even more seriously, I could not measure my own ar­chitecture—my ideas and my buildings—on the immeasurable body, static anddynamic, sane and feverish, that is the United States. Nonetheless, I was con­vinced that there was an official Italian academic ignorance of America; film di­rectors and writers understood it far better than architects, critics, and schol­ars.
In the last few years, in the course of my visiting and working in America, L ’architettura della cittd has returned to mind. Although eminently sensible critics
have found this to be a paradox, I have discovered the American city and coun­tryside to be the decisive confirmation of this book. Perhaps, one might say, thisis because America is by now7an “old” country full of monuments and traditions,or because in America the city of parts is a historic and dynamic reality; but more
importantly, it is because America seems to be constructed in accordance withthe arguments presented in this book.
What does this mean?
Once the pioneers arrived in this vast new7country, they had to organize theircities. They followed one of two models: either cities were laid out along gridlines, as is the case in most Latin American cities, New York, and other centers,or they were established as “main street” villages, the image of which has be­come legendary in film westerns. In both cases, the buildings of the by now7
bourgeois European city had a particular relevance: church, bank, school, bar,and market. Even the American hquse maintained with extreme precision two
fundamental European typblogiei:the Spanish corral and patio in Latin
America, and the English country house in the United States.
13

Introduction to the
F irst American Edition

2 View of Nantucket, Massachusetts.

I could offer many examples of this but I am hardly an expert on the history of S View o f Nantucket, Massachusetts.
American architecture and cities; I prefer to stay with my impressions, albeit 4 Project fo r the Chicago Tribune
ones rooted in a sense of history. The market in Providence, towns in Nantucket Building, A dolf Loos, 1922.
where the white houses of the fishermen are like fragments of ships and the 5 University of Virginia ,church towers echo the lighthouses, seaports like Galveston—all seem to be, and Charlottesville, Virginia, Thomas
are, constructed out of preexisting elements that are then deformed by their Jefferson, 1817.
own context; just as the large American cities exalt the urban whole of stone and 6 Ae?ial view of the University of
cement, brick and glass, from which they are constructed. Perhaps no urban con­ Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia,
struct in the world equals that of a city like New York. New York is a city of Thomas Jefferson, 1817.
monuments such as I did not believe could exist.
7 View of Wall Street, New YorkCity.
Few Europeans understood this during the years of the Modern Movement inarchitecture; but certainly Adolf Loos did in his project for the Chicago Tribunecompetition. That enormous Doric column, which to many Europeans may haveseemed only a game, a Viennese divertissement, is the synthesis of the distort­
ing effects of scale and the application of “style” in an American framework.
This framework of the American urban context or landscape makes it as impres­sive to walk through Wall Street on Sunday as it would be to walk into a realiza­tion of one of Serlio’s perspective drawings (or of some other Renaissancetheoretician). The contributions of, and the intersection with, European experi­
ences here have created an “analogous city” of unexpected meaning, as unex­
pected as the meaning of the “styles” and “orders” that have been applied to it.
This meaning is completely different from what historians of modern architec­
ture typically see: an America composed of disparate examples of good architec­
ture, to be sought out with guides—an America of a necessarily “international
style” and of the isolated masterpiece of the great artist in a sea of mediocrity
and businessmen’s buildings. The exact opposite is true.
American architecture is above all “the architecture of the city”: primary ele­ments, monuments, parts. Thus, if we wish to speak of “style,” in the sense of
Renaissance and Palladian and Gothic architecture, we cannot leave out
America.
All of these architectures reemerge in my projects. After I had completed workon the Casa dello Students in Chieti, an American student gave me a publication
on Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village at the University of Virginia. I founda number of striking analogies to my own work, yet I had previously known
nothing of this project. Carlo Aymonino, in an article entitled “Une architecture
cle l’optimisme,” has written: “If, to make an absurd supposition, Aldo Rossi
were to do a project for a new city, I am convinced that his project would resem­
ble the plans made two hundred years ago upon which many American cities
were based: a street network that permits the division of property, a church thatis a church, a public building whose function would be immediately apparent, atheater, a courthouse, individual houses. Everyone would be able to judge
whether the building corresponded to his ideal—a process and a structure thatwould give confidence as much to tl|e designer as to those who would use it.” Inthese terms, the American city'is'a hew chapter of this book rather than merely
an introduction.
Ay
I spoke in the introduction to the firsff Italian edition of a necessary chapter that I
could not yet write about colonial cities. In the magnificent book Urbanismo
espahol en America by Javier Rojas1and Louis Moreno,1there are certain plansthat deserve particular study, plans of incredible cities in which the churches,ij!---

courts, and gallerias of Seville and Milan are transformed into new urban design
elements. In my earlier introduction, I spoke of lafabbrica della citta and not of“urban architecture”: fabbrica means “building” in the old Latin and Renais­
sance sense of man’s construction as it continues over time. Still today, theMilanese call their cathedral “la fabbrica del dom,” and understand by this ex­pression both the size and the difficulty of the church’s construction, the idea of asingle building whose process goes on over time. Clearly, the Cathedrals of
Milan and .Reggio Emilia and the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini were—a r e beautiful in their incompleteness. They were and are a kind of abandoned ar­chitecture—abandoned by time, by chance, or by the destiny of the city. The city
in its growth is defined by its artifacts, leaving open many possibilities and con­taining unexplored potential. This has nothing to do with the concept of open
form or open work; rather it suggests the idea of interrupted work. The analo­
gous city is in essence the city in its diverse totality; this fact is visible in theechoes of the East and the North that one finds in Venice, in the piecemeal struc­ture of New York, and in the memories and analogies that every city always
offers.
Interrupted work cannot be foreseen by the individual. It is, so to speak, a his­
torical accident, an occurrence, a change in the history of the city. Rut, as I point
out later in this book with respect to the Napoleonic plan for Milan, there is ulti­
mately a relationship between any single architectural project and the destiny of
the city. When a project or a form is not utopian or abstract but evolves from thespecific problems of the city, it persists and expresses these problems boththrough its style and form as well as through its many deformations. These de­formations or alterations are of limited importance precisely because architec­
ture, or the fabbrica of the city, constitutes an essentially collective artifact andderives from this its characteristic features.
I concluded the first edition of this book in 1966 by waiting, “Thus the complex
structure of the city arises from a discourse whose terms of reference are as yet
inadequately developed. This discourse is perhaps exactly like the laws that reg­ulate the life and destiny of individual men; each biography, although compres­sed between birth and death, contains much complexity. Clearly the architec­
ture of the city, the human thing par excellence, is—even beyond the meaning
and the feelings with wrhich we recognize it—the real sign of this biography.”This overlapping of the individual and the collective memory, together with theinvention that takes place within the time of the city, has led me to the concept ofanalogy. Analogy expresses itself through a process of architectural design
whose elements are preexisting and formally defined, but whose true meaning is
unforeseen at the beginning and unfolds only at the end of the process. Thus themeaning of the process is identified with the meaning of the city.
This, in the end, is the meaning of preexisting elements: the city, like the biog­
raphy of an individual man, presents itself through certain clearly defined ele­ments such as house, school, church, factory, monument. But this biography ofthe city and of its buildings, apparently so clearly defined, has in itself sufficient
imagination and interest—deriving precisely from their reality—ultimately toenvelop it in a fabric of artifacts and feelings that is stronger than either ar­chitecture or form, and goes beyond any utopian or formalistic1vision of the city.
I think of a nameless architecture of large cities, streets, and residential blocks,of houses scattered in the countryside, of the urban cemetery in such a city as St.
18

Louis, of the people, living and dead, who have continued to build the city. We
may look at modem cities without enthusiasm, but if we could only see with theeye of the archaeologist of Mycenae, we would find behind the facades and frag­ments of architecture the figures of the oldest heroes of our culture.
I have eagerly written this introduction for the first American edition of the bookboth because this rereading, like every experience or design, reflects my own
development, and because the emerging character of the American city adds anextraordinary testimony to this book.
Perhaps, as I said at the beginning, this is the meaning of the architecture of thecity; like the figure in the carpet, the figure is clear but everyone reads it in adifferent way. Or rather, the more clear it is, the more open it is to a complex
evolution.

Our description of the city will be concerned primarily with its form. This form
depends on real facts, which in turn refer to real experiences: Athens, Rome,
Paris. The architecture of the city summarizes the city’s form, and from thisform we can consider the city’s problems.
By architecture of the city we mean two different things: first, the city seen as agigantic man-made object, a work of engineering and architecture that is large
and complex and growing overtime; second, certain more limited but still crucial
aspects of the city, namely urban artifacts, which like the city itself are charac­terized by their own history and thus by their own form. In both cases architec­
ture clearly represents only one aspect of a more complex reality, of a larger
structure; but at the same time, as the ultimate verifiable fact of this reality, it
constitutes the most concrete possible position from which to address the
problem.
We can understand this more readily by looking at specific urban artifacts, for
immediately a series of obvious problems opens up for us. We are also able toperceive certain problems that are less obvious: these involve the quality and theuniqueness of each urban artifact.
In almost all European cities there are large palaces, building complexes, or
agglomerations that constitute whole pieces of the city and whose function now
is no longer the original one. When one visits a monument of this type, for exam­ple the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, one is always surprised by a series ofquestions intimately associated with it. In particular, one is struck by the mul­
tiplicity of functions th at a building of this type can contain over time and how
these functions are entirely independent of the form. A t the same time, it is pre­cisely the form that impresses us; we live it and experience it, and in turn it
structures the city.
Where does the individuality of such a building begin and on what does it de­pend? Clearly it depends more on its form than on its material, even if the latter
plays a substantial role; but it also depends on being a complicated entity which
has developed in both space and time. We realize, for example, that if the ar­chitectural construction we are examining had been built recently, it would nothave the same value. In that case the architecture in itself would be subject tojudgment, and we could discuss its style and its form; but it would not yet pre­sent us with th a t richness of its own history which is characteristic of an urban
artifact.
In an urban artifact, certain original values and functions remain, others are to­tally altered; about some stylistic aspects of the form we are certain, others areless obvious. We contemplate the values that remain—I am also referring tospiritual values—and try to ascertain whether they have some connection withthe building’s materiality, and whether they constitute the only empirical facts
th a t pertain to the problem. A t this point, we might discuss what our idea of thebuilding is, our most general memory of it as a product of the collective, and what
relationship it affords us with this collective.
I t also happens th a t when we visit a palazzo like the one in Padua or travel
through a particular city, we are subjected to different experiences, different
impressions. There are people who do not like a place because it is associatedwith some ominous moment in their lives; others attribute an auspicious charac­
te r to a place. All these experiences, their sum, constitute the city. It is in this

Chapter 1
The Structure of Urban Artifacts
The Individuality of Urban Artifacts

15 Palazzo della Ragione, Padua,
Italy.

16 Palazzo della Ragione, Padua,
Italy.
17 Palazzo della Ragione, Padua,
Italy.
IS Palazzo della Ragione, Padua,
Italy. Above: “Drawing o f the remainsof the Salone della Ragione ruined by•‘ ■. f immii;a, j

a hurricane on August 17, 1956,” byGiorgio Fossati. Below: Ground floor
plan as it has existed fro m 14.25 up to
today, according to the reconstruction
by A. Moschetti. Thirteenth-century
walls in black.

17

sense th at we must judge the quality of a space—a notion th at may be extremely
difficult for our modem sensibility. This was the sense in which the ancients con­secrated a place, and it presupposes a type of analysis far more profound than
the simplistic sort offered by certain psychological interpretations that rely only
on the legibility of form.
We need, as I have said, only consider one specific urban artifact for a wholestring of questions to present themselves; for it is a general characteristic ofurban artifacts that they return us to certain major themes: individuality, locus,
design, memory. A particular type of knowledge is delineated along with each
artifact, a knowledge th a t is more complete and different from th a t with which
we are familiar. It remains for us to investigate how much is real in this complex
of knowledge.
I repeat that the reality I am concerned with here is th at of the architecture of
the city—that is, its form, which seems to summarize the total character ofurban artifacts, including their origins. Moreover, a description of form takes
into account all of the empirical facts we have already alluded to and can be quan­tified through rigorous observation. This is in part what we mean by urban mor­
phology: a description of the forms of an urban artifact. On the other hand, thisdescription is nothing but one moment, one instrument. It draws us closer to aknowledge of structure, but it is not identical with it.
Although all of the students of the city have stopped short of a consideration of
the structure of urban artifacts, many have recognized th at beyond the elements
they had enumerated there remained the ame de la cite, in other words, thequality of urban artifacts. French geographers, for example, concentrated on
the development of an important descriptive system, but they failed to exploit it
to conquer this ultimate stronghold; thus, after indicating th at the city is consti­
tuted as a totality and th at this totality is its raison d’etre, they left the signifi­
cance of the structure they had glimpsed unexamined. Nor could they do other­wise with the premises from which they had set out: all of these studies failed tomake an analysis of the actual quality of specific urban artifacts.

The U rban A rtifact as a W ork of A rt

I will later examine the main outlines of these studies, but first it is necessary to
introduce one fundamental consideration and several authors whose work
guides this investigation.
As soon as we address questions about the individuality and structure of a
specific urban artifact, a series of issues is raised which, in its totality, seems toconstitute a system th at enables us to analyze a work of art. As the present in­vestigation is intended to establish and identify the nature of urban artifacts, weshould initially state that there is something in the nature o f urban artifacts that
renders them very sim ilar—and not only metaphorically—to a work o f art.
They are material constructions, but notwithstanding the material, something
different: although they are conditioned, they also condition.1
This aspect of “a rt” in urban artifacts is closely linked to their quality, theiruniqueness, and thus also to their analysis and definition. This is an extremelycomplex subject, for even beyond their psychological aspects, urban artifacts
are complex in themselves, and while it may be possible to analyze them, it isdifficult to define them. The nature of this problem has always been of particular
32

interest to me, and I am convinced that it directly concerns the architecture of
the city.
If one takes any urban artifact—a building, a street, a district—and attempts todescribe it, the same difficulties arise which we encountered earlier with respect
to the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua. Some of these difficulties derive from theambiguity of language, and in part these difficulties can be overcome, but there
will always be a type of experience recognizable only to those who have walked
through the particular building, street, or district.
Thus, the concept th at one person has of an urban artifact will always differ fromthat of someone who “lives” that same artifact. These considerations, however,can delimit our task; it is possible that our task consists principally in defining anurban artifact from the standpoint of its manufacture: in other words, to define
and classify a street, a city, a street in a city; then the location of this street, its
function, its architecture; then the street systems possible in the city and manyother things.
We must therefore concern ourselves with urban geography, urban topography,architecture, and several other disciplines. The problem is far from easy, but not
impossible, and in the following paragraphs we will attem pt an analysis along
these lines. This means that, in a very general way, we can establish a logicalgeography of any city; this logical geography will be applied essentially to the
problems of language, description, and classification. Thus, we can address suchfundamental questions as those of typology, which have not yet been the objectof serious systematic work in the domain of the urban sciences. A t the base of theexisting classifications there are too many unverified hypotheses, which neces­sarily lead to meaningless generalizations.
By using those disciplines to which I have ju st referred, we are working towarda broader, more concrete, and more complete analysis of urban artifacts. The
city is seen as the human achievement par excellence; perhaps, too, it has to dowith those things th at can only be grasped by actually experiencing a given
urban artifact. This conception of the city, or better, urban artifacts, as a work of
a rt has, in fact, always appeared in studies of the city; we can also discover it in
the form of greatly varying intuitions and descriptions in artists of all eras and inmany manifestations of social and religious life. In the latter case it has always
been tied to a specific place, event, and form in the city.
The question of the city as a work of art, however, presents itself explicitly andscientifically above all in relation to the conception of the nature of collective ar­tifacts, and I maintain th at no urban research can ignore this aspect of the prob­
lem. How are collective urban artifacts related to works of art? All great man­ifestations of social life have in common with the work of a rt the fact that they areborn in unconscious life. This life is collective in the former, individual in the lat­ter; but this is only a secondary difference because one is a product of the public
and the other is for the public: the public provides the common denominator.
Setting forth the problem in this manner, Claude Levi-Strauss2 brought the
study of the city into a realm rich with unexpected developments. He noted how,more than other works of art, the city achieves a balance between natural and ar­tificial elements; it is an object of nature and a subject of culture. Maurice
Halbwachs3 advanced this analysis further when he postulated th at imaginationand collective memory are the typical characteristics of urban artifacts.

These studies of the city which embrace its structural complexity have an unex­
pected and little-known precedent in the work of Carlo Cattaneo. Cattaneo
never explicitly considered the question of the artistic nature of urban artifacts,
but the dose connection in his thinking between a rt and science as two concrete
aspects of the development of the human mind anticipates this approach. L ater I
will discuss how his concept of the city as the ideal principle of history, the con­nection between country and city, and other issues that he raised relate to urban
artifacts. While at this point I am mostly interested in how he approaches thecity, in fact Cattaneo never makes any distinction between city and country
since he considers that all inhabited places are the work of man: “ . . . every re­gion is distinguished from the wilderness in this respect: th at it is an immense re­pository of labor . . . . This land is thus not a work of nature; it is the work of ourhands, our artificial homeland.”4City and region, agricultural land and forest become human works because they
are an immense repository of the labor of our hands. But to the extent that they
are our “artificial homeland” and objects th at have been constructed, they also
testify to values; they constitute memory and permanence. The city is in its his­tory. Hence, the relationship between place and man and the work of art—whichis the ultimate, decisive fact shaping and directing urban evolution according toan aesthetic finality—affords us a complex mode of studying the city.
Naturally we must also take into account how people orient themselves within
the city, the evolution and formation of their sense of space. This aspect consti­
tutes, in my opinion, the most important feature of some recent American work,
notably that of Kevin Lynch.5 It relates to the conceptualization of space, andcan be based in large measure on anthropological studies and urban characteris­tics. Observations of this type were also made by Maximilien Sorre using suchmaterial, particularly the work of Marcel Mauss on the correspondence between
group names and place names among Eskimos.6 For now, this argument will
merely serve as an introduction to our study; it will be more useful to return to it
after we have considered several other aspects of the urban artifact—of the city,
th at is, as a great, comprehensive representation of the human condition.
I will interpret this representation against the background of its most fixed andsignificant stage: architecture. Sometimes I ask myself why architecture is notanalyzed in these terms, that is, in term s of its profound value as a human thingthat shapes reality and adapts material according to an aesthetic conception. It
is in this sense not only the place of the human condition, but itself a part of thatcondition, and is represented in the city and its monuments, in districts, dwell­ings, and all urban artifacts that emerge from inhabited space. It is from thispoint of view that a few theorists have tried to analyze the urban structure, tosense the fixed points, the true structural junctions of the city, those points fromwhich the activity of reason proceeds.

I will now take up the hypothesis o f the city as a man-made object, as a work ofarchitecture or engineering that grows over time; this is one of the most substan­tial hypotheses from which to work.7
I t seems th at useful answers to many ambiguities are still provided by the workof Camillo Sitte, who in his search for laws of the construction of the city th atwere not limited to purely technical considerations took full account of the34

“beauty” of the urban scheme, of its form: “We have at our disposal three major
methods of city planning, and several subsidiary types, The major ones are thegridiron system, the radial system, and the triangular system. The sub-types
are mostly hybrids of these three. Artistically speaking, not one of them is of any
interest, for in their veins pulses not a single drop of artistic blood. All three areconcerned exclusively with the arrangement of street patterns, and hence theirintention is from the sta rt a purely technical one. A network of streets always
serves only the purposes of communication, never of art, since it can never becomprehended sensorily, can never be grasped as a whole except in a plan of it.
In our discussions so far street networks have not been mentioned for ju st thatfeason; neither those of ancient Athens, of Rome, of Nuremberg, or of Venice.
They are of no concern artistically, because they are inapprehensible in their en­
tirety. Only that which a spectator can hold in view, what can be seen, is of artis­
tic importance: for instance, the single street or the individual plaza.”8Sitte’s admonition is important for its empiricism, and it seems to me th at thistakes us back to certain American experiences which we mentioned above,
where artistic quality can be seen as a function of the ability to give concrete
form to a symbol. Sitte’s lesson beyond question helps to prevent many confu­
sions. It refers us to the technique of urban construction, where there is still theactual moment of designing a square and then a principle which provides for its
logical transmission, for the teaching of its design. But the models are always,
somehow, the single street, the specific square.
On the other hand, Sitte’s lesson also contains a gross misconception in th at it re­duces the city as a work of a rt to one artistic episode having more or less legibil­
ity rather than to a concrete, overall experience. We believe the reverse to betrue, that the whole is more important than the single parts, and that only theurban artifact in its totality, from street system and urban topography down to
the things that can be perceived in strolling up and down a street, constitutes
this totality. Naturally we must examine this total architecture in term s of its
parts.
We m ust begin with a question that opens the way to the problem of classifica­
tion—that of the typology of buildings and their relationship to the city. This re­lationship constitutes a basic hypothesis of this work, and one th at I will analyze
from various viewpoints, always considering buildings as moments and parts of
the whole that is the city. This position was clear to the architectural theorists ofthe Enlightenment. In his lessons at the Ecole Polytechnique, Durand wrote,“Ju st as the walls, the columns, &c., are the elements which compose buildings,
so buildings are the elements which compose cities.”9The city as above all else a human thing is constituted of its architecture and of all
those works that constitute the true means of transforming nature. Bronze Agemen adapted the landscape to social needs by constructing artificial islands ofbrick, by digging wells, drainage canals, and watercourses. The first houses
sheltered their inhabitants from the external environment and furnished a cli­mate th a t man could begin to control; the development of an urban nucleus ex­
panded this type of control to the creation and extension of a microclimate.
Neolithic villages already offered the first transformations of th e world accord­
ing to man’s needs. The “artificial homeland” is as old as man.

Typological Questions

19 Various types o f foundations.
From “Principj di Architettura
Civile,” Francesco Milizia, 1832.
_
A
20 Courtyard housing and wailedA.
marketplace. A) Plan of a Greek~ r f t t t I m ttT1
house. B) Plan of a Roman house.
”TT_L _j.il ' i 'C) Plan by Scipione Maffei showing
1
half of the marketplace of Verona.
r-i -i r ~ nt _ ii !. * •' .
D) View o f the shops o f the marketplace:==:t(marked “c” in the plan). E ) External
T I IrTI l I1 min*r* 1 1 *
4-—view o f the wall encircling the
. \
/ | |
marketplace. From “Principj diArchitettura Civile, ”Francesco
n i i i . n i i i i i i r p - " M i i i i i i N i i h HT
M ilizia , 1832.
rf
t
TT

em

1
20

t

21 The Doric order. From “Principj
di Architettura Civile, ” Francesco
Milizia, 1832.
22 Wooden armature fo r theconstruction o f vaults. From
“Principj di Architettura Civile, ”
Francesco Milizia, 1832.

** 4*

23 Corral ofValvanera, Seville,
Spain.
Corral ofValvanera, Seville,
Spain.
25 Calle Pais Vasco, parallel to them ain street o f the town ofV iana in
Spain.
26 “Alley o f the Washerwomen”
between Corso San Gottardo and the
Naviglio canal, Milan.

In precisely this sense of transformation the first forms and typ es of habitation,
as well as tem ples and more complex buildings, w ere constituted. The type de­veloped according to both needs and aspirations to beauty; a particular type wasassociated w ith a form and a way of life, although its specific shape varied widelyfrom society to society. The concept of typ e thus became the basis of architec­
ture, a fact attested to both by practice and by the treatises.
It therefore seem s clear that typological questions are important. They have al­w ays entered into the history of architecture, and arise naturally w heneverurban problems are confronted. Theoreticians such as Francesco Milizia neverdefined type as such, but statem ents like the following seem to be anticipatory:“The comfort of any building consists of three principal item s: its site, its form,
and the organization of its parts.”10 I would define the concept of type as som e­thing that is permanent and complex, a logical principle that is prior to form andthat constitutes it.
One of the major theoreticians of architecture, Quatremere de Quincy, under­stood the importance of th ese problems and gave a m asterly definition of typeand model:“The word ‘typ e’ represents not so much the im age of a thing to be copied or per­fectly imitated as the idea of an elem ent that m ust itself serve as a rule for them o d e l . . . . The model, understood in term s of the practical execution of art, isan object that m ust be repeated such as it is; type, on the contrary, is an object,according to which one can conceive works that do not resem ble one another atall. E verything is precise and given in the model; everything is more or lessvague in the type. Thus w e see that the imitation of typ es involves nothing thatfeelings or spirit cannot recognize. . . .
“W e also see that all inventions, notwithstanding subsequent changes, always
retain their elem entary principle in a way that is clear and m anifest to the senses
and to reason. It is similar to a kind of nucleus around which the developm entsand variations of forms to which the object was susceptible gather and mesh.
Therefore a thousand things of every kind have come down to us, and one of theprincipal tasks of science and philosophy is to seek their origins and primarycauses so as to grasp their purposes. H ere is what m ust be called ‘typ e’ in ar­chitecture, as in every other branch of human inventions and institutions. . . .
We have engaged in this discussion in order to render the value of the wordtype— taken metaphorically in a great number of works— clearly comprehensi­
ble, and to show the error of those who either disregard it because it is not amodel, or m isrepresent it by imposing on it the rigor of a model that would imply
the conditions of an identical copy.”11
In the first part of this passage, the author rejects the possibility of type as some­thing to be imitated or copied because in this case there would be, as he asserts inthe second part, no “creation of the model”— that is, there would be no making ofarchitecture. The second part states that in architecture (w hether model orform) there is an elem ent that plays its own role, not som ething to which the ar­chitectonic object conforms but som ething that is neverth eless present in themodel. This is the rule, the structuring principle of architecture.
In fact, it can be said that this principle is a constant. Such an argum ent presup­
poses that the architectural artifact is conceived as a structure and that thisstructure is revealed and can be recognized in the artifact itself. A s a constant,this principle, which w e can call the typical elem ent, or sim ply the type, is to be40

found in all architectural artifacts. It is also then a cultural elem ent and as suchcan be investigated in different architectural artifacts; typology becomes in thisw ay the analytical moment of architecture, and it becom es readily identifiable atthe level of urban artifacts.
Thus typology presents itself as the study of types of elem ents that cannot be
further reduced, elem ents of a city as well as of an architecture. The question of
monocentric cities or o f buildings that are or are not centralized, for example, isspecifically typological; no type can be identified with only one form, even if allarchitectural forms are reducible to types. The process of reduction is a neces­sary, logical operation, and it is impossible to talk about problems of form with­out this presupposition. In this sense all architectural theories are also theories
of typology, and in an actual design it is difficult to distinguish the two moments.
Type is thus a constant and m anifests itself with a character of necessity; buteven though it is predeterm ined, it reacts dialectically with technique, function,and style, as well as with both the collective character and the individual mo­m ent of the architectural artifact. It is clear, for example, that the central plan isa fixed and constant type in religious architecture; but even so, each time a cen­tral plan is chosen, dialectical them es are put into play with the architecture of
the church, with its functions, with its constructional technique, and with thecollective that participates in the life of that church. I tend to believe that hous­
ing typ es have not changed from antiquity up to today, but this is not to say thatthe actual w ay of living has not changed, nor that new w ays of living are not al­w ays possible. The house w ith a loggia is an old scheme; a corridor that gives ac­
cess to rooms is necessary in plan and present in any number of urban houses.
B ut there are a great many variations on this them e among individual houses atdifferent tim es.
U ltim ately, w e can say that type is the very idea of architecture, that which is
closest to its essence. In spite of changes, it has always imposed itself on the“feelings and reason” as the principle of architecture and of the city .
W hile the problem of typology has never been treated in a system atic way andwith the necessary breadth, today its study is beginning to em erge in architec­
ture schools and seem s quite promising. I am convinced that architects them­selves, if they wish to enlarge and establish their own work, m ust again be con­cerned with argum ents of this nature.12 Typology is an elem ent that plays its
own role in constituting form; it is a constant. The problem is to discern the mo­dalities within which it operates and, moreover, its effective value.
Certainly, of the many past studies in this field, w ith a few exceptions and savefor some honest attem pts to redress the omission, few have addressed this prob­
lem with much attention. They have always avoided or displaced it, suddenly
pursuing som ething else— nam ely function. Since this problem of function is ofabsolutely primary importance in the domain of our inquiry, I will try to see how
it em erges in studies of the city and urban artifacts in general and how it has
evolved. L et US say im m ediately that the problem can be addressed only whenw e have first considered the related problems of description and classification.
For the m ost part, existin g classifications have failed to go beyond the problem
of function.

41

OSS

3V O N /3130
27 Plan o f the House o f Aurighi,
above, and Serapide, below, Ostia
Antica, Rom e, as reconstructed by
Italo Gismondi, 191*0.
28 Insula with the Houses o f Aurighiand Serapide and bathhouse in the
middle, Ostia Antica, Rome.
Axonometric drawing by Italo
Gismondi.

29 The zone o f Ostia Antica, Rome,
including the Houses o f Aurighi andSerapide, as reconstructed by Italo
Gismondi, 191*0.
30 Internal courtyard o f House o f
Diana, Ostia Antica, Rome.
Rendering by Italo Gismondi.
31 House o f Diana, Ostia Antica,
Rome. Plan as reconstructed by Italo
Gismondi, 191*0.

32 Section and elevations fromvarious orientations ofHeiligenstddter Strasse Nos. 82—90,
Karl Marx-Hof Vienna, Karl Ehn.
33 Karl Marx-Hof Vienna, begun
1927.

Critique of Naive Functionalism

W e have indicated the principal questions that arise in relation to an urban ar­
tifact— among them , individuality, locus, memory, design itself. Function w as
not mentioned. I believe that any explanation of urban artifacts in term s of func­tion m ust be rejected if the issue is to elucidate their structure and formation.
W e will later give some examples of important urban artifacts w hose function
has changed over tim e or for which a specific function does not even exist. Thus,
one thesis of this study, in its effort to affirm the value of architecture in theanalysis of the city, is the denial of the explanation of urban artifacts in term s offunction. I maintain, on the contrary, that far from being illuminating, this ex ­planation is regressive because it impedes us from studying forms and knowing
the world of architecture according to its true laws.
We hasten to say that this does not entail the rejection of the concept of functionin its m ost proper sense, however, that is, as an algebra of values that can be
known as functions of one another, nor does it deny that betw een functions andform one may seek to establish more complex ties than the linear ones of cause
and effect (which are belied by reality itself). More specifically, w e reject thatconception of functionalism dictated by an ingenuous empiricism which holds
that functions bring fo rm together and in them selves constitute urban artifacts
and architecture.
So conceived, function, physiological in nature, can be likened to a bodily organ
whose function justifies its formation and developm ent and w hose alterations offunction imply an alteration of form. In this light, functionalism and organicism,
the two principal currents which have pervaded modern architecture, reveal
their common roots and the reason for their w eakness and fundamental am­
biguity. Through them form is divested of its m ost complex derivations: type isreduced to a simple scheme of organization, a diagram of circulation routes, andarchitecture is seen as possessing no autonomous value. Thus the aesthetic intentionality and necessity that characterize urban artifacts and establish theircomplex ties cannot be further analyzed.
Although the doctrine of functionalism has earlier origins, it w as enunciated andapplied clearly by Bronislaw Malinowski, who refers explicitly to that which is
man-made, to the object, the house: “Take the human habitation . . . here again
the integral function of the object must be taken into account when the various
phases of its technological construction and the elem ents of its structure arestudied. ”13 From a beginning of this sort one quickly descends to a consideration
solely of the purposes which man-made item s, the object and the house, serve.
The question “for what purpose?” ends up as a simple justification that preventsan analysis of what is real.
This concept of function comes to be assumed as a given in all architectural andurbanistic thinking and, particularly in the field of geography, leads to afunctionalist and organicist characterization of a large part of modern architec­
ture. In studies of the classification of cities, it overwhelm s and takes priority
over the urban landscape and form; and although many w riters express doubts
as to the validity and exactitude of this type of classification, th ey argue that
there is no other viable classification to offer as an alternative. Thus Georges
Chabot,14 after declaring the impossibility of giving the city a precise definition
because there is always a “residue” that is impossible to describe in a precise
w ay, then turns to function, even if he immediately admits its inadequacy.
In such formulations, the city as an agglomeration is explained precisely on the46

basis o f w hat functions its citizens seek to exercise; the function of a city becomesits raison d’etre, and in this form reveals itself. In many cases the study of mor­
phology is reduced to a simple study of function. Once the concept of function isestablished, in fact, one imm ediately arrives at obvious classifications: commer­
cial cities, cultural cities, industrial cities, m ilitary cities, etc.
Morever, even in the context of a som ewhat general critique of the concept offunction, it m ust be pointed out that there is already within this system of as­
signing functions a difficulty in establishing the role of the commercial function.
In fact, as proposed, the concept of classification according to function is far too
superficial; it assum es an identical value for all typ es of functions, which simply
is not the case. Actually, the fact that the commercial function is predominant isincreasingly evident.
This commercial function is the basis, in term s of production, of an “economic”
explanation of the city that, beginning w ith the classical formulation offered by
Max W eber,15 has undergone a specific developm ent, one to which w e shall haveto return later. Given a function-based classification of the city, it is only logicalthat the commercial function in both the city’s formation and its development
presents itself as the m ost convincing explanation for the multiplicity of urban
artifacts and is tied to economic theories o f the city.
Once w e attribute different values to different functions, w e deny the validity ofnaive functonalism; in fact, using this line of reasoning, w e see that naivefunctionalism ends up contradicting its own initial hypothesis. Furthermore, if
urban artifacts were constantly able to reform and renew them selves simply by
establishing new functions, the values of the urban structure, as revealed
through its architecture, would be continuous and easily available. The perma­
nence of buildings and forms would have no significance, and the very idea of thetransm ission of a culture, of which the city is an elem ent, would be questionable.
None of this corresponds to reality.
N aive functionalist theory is quite convenient for elem entary classifications,
how ever, and it is difficult to see what can substitute for it at this level. It serves,that is, to maintain a certain order, and to provide us w ith a simple instrumental
fact—ju st so long as it does not pretend that an explanation for more complex
facts can be extracted from this same order.
On the other hand, the definition of type that w e have tried to propose for urban
artifacts and architecture, a definition which w as first enunciated in the E n­lightenm ent, allows us to proceed to an accurate classification of urban artifacts,
and ultim ately also to a classification based on function w herever the latter con­stitu tes an aspect of the general definition. If, alternatively, w e begin with aclassification based on function, type would have to be treated in a very different
way; indeed, if w e insist on the primacy o f function w e m ust then understandtype as the organizing model of this function. B ut this understanding of type,and consequently urban artifacts and architecture, as the organizing principle ofcertain functions, almost totally denies us an adequate knowledge of reality.
Even if a classification of buildings and cities according to their function is per­missible as a generalization of certain kinds of data, it is inconceivable to reduce
the structure of urban artifacts to a problem o f organizing some more or less im­
portant function. Precisely this serious distortion has impeded and in large mea­
sure continues to impede any real progress in studies of the city.

47

F or if urban artifacts present nothing but a problem of organization and classifi­
cation, then they have neither continuity nor individuality. Monuments and ar­chitecture have no reason to exist; th ey do not “say” anything to us. Such posi­tions clearly take on an ideological character when th ey pretend to objectify andquantify urban artifacts; utilitarian in nature, th ese view s are adopted as if theyw ere products for consumption. Later w e will see the m ore specifically architec­
tural implications of this notion.
To conclude, w e are willing to accept functional classification as a practical andcontingent criterion, the equivalent of a number of other criteria—for example,
social make-up, constructional system , developm ent of the area, and so on—
since such classifications have a certain utility; nonetheless it is clear that they
are more useful for telling us som ething about the point of view adopted for clas­
sification than about an elem ent itself. W ith th ese provisos in mind, th ey can be
accepted.

P rob lem s o f C lassification

In my summary of functionalist theory I have deliberately emphasized those as­pects that have made it so predominant and w idely accepted. This is in part be­cause functionalism has had great success in the world of architecture, and those
who have been educated in this discipline over the past fifty years can detachthem selves from it only with difficulty. One ought to inquire into how it has actu­
ally determined m odem architecture, and still inhibits its progressive evolution
today; but this is not an issue I wish to pursue here.
Instead, I wish to concentrate on the importance o f other interpretations within
the domain of architecture and the city which constitute the foundations of theth esis that I am advancing. These include the social geography of Jean Tricart,
the theory of persistence of Marcel P oete, and E nlightenm ent theory, particu­
larly that of Milizia. All of these interest me primarily because they are based ona continuous reading of the city and its architecture and have implications for ageneral theory of urban artifacts.

For Tricart,16 the social content of the city is the basis for reading it; the study ofsocial content m ust precede the description of the geographical artifacts that ul­
tim ately give the urban landscape its meaning. Social facts, to the exten t thatthey present them selves as a specific content, precede forms and function and,one might say, embrace them.
The task of human geography is to study the structures of the city in connection
with the form o f the place where they appear; this n ecessitates a sociologicalstudy of place. But before proceeding to an analysis of place, it is necessary to es­
tablish a priori the limits within which place can be defined. Tricart thus estab­lishes three different orders or scales:
1. the scale of the street, including the built areas and em pty spaces that sur­round it;
2. the scale of the district, consisting of a group of blocks w ith common charac­
teristics;
3. the scale of the entire city, considered as a group of districts.
The principle that renders these quantities hom ogeneous and relates them is so­cial content.
48

On the basis of Tricart’s thesis, I will develop one particular type of urban
analysis which is consistent w ith his prem ises and takes a topographical point ofview that seem s quite important to me. But before doing so, I wish to register afundamental objection to the scale of his study, or the three parts into which hedivides the city. That urban artifacts should be studied solely in term s of placew e can certainly admit, but what w e cannot agree with is that places can som e­
how be explained on the basis of different scales. Moreover, even if w e admitthat the notion is useful either didactically or for practical research, it implies
som ething unacceptable. This has to do w ith the quality of urban artifacts.
Therefore while w e do not wholly deny that there are different scales of study,
w e believe that it is inconceivable to think that urban artifacts change in somew ay as a result of their size. The contrary thesis implies accepting, as do many,
the principle that the city is modified as it extends, or that urban artifacts inthem selves are different because of the size at which th ey are produced. A s wasstated by Richard Ratcliff, “To consider the problems of locational maldistribu­
tion only in the metropolitan context is to encourage the popular but false as­
sumption that th ese are the problems of size. W e shall see that the problems tobe view ed crop up in varying degrees of intensity in villages, towns, cities, andm etropolises, for the dynamic forces of urbanism are vital w herever men andthings are found compacted, and the urban organism is subject to the same
natural and social laws regardless of size. To ascribe the problems of the city tosize is to imply that solutions lie in reversing the growth process, that is, in de­concentration; both the assum ption and the implication are questionable.”17
A t the scale of the street, one o f the fundamental elem ents in the urban land­
scape is the inhabited real estate and thus the structure of urban real property. I
speak of inhabited real esta te and not the house because th e definition is far more
precise in the various European languages. R eal.estate has to do w ith the deedregistry o f land parcels in which the principal use of the ground is for construc­tion. The usage of inhabited land in large measure tends to be residential, but
one could also speak of specialized real estate and mixed real estate, although
this classification, while useful, is not sufficient.
To classify this land, w e can begin with some considerations that are apparent
from plans. Thus w e have the following:
1. a block of houses surrounded by open space;
2. a block of houses connected to each other and facing the street, constituting acontinuous wall parallel to the street itself;
3. a deep block of houses th at alm ost totally occupies the available space;
4. houses w ith closed courts and small interior structures.
A classification of this typ e can be considered descriptive, geom etric, or topo­
graphic. W e can carry it further and accumulate other classificatory data rela­tiv e to technical equipm ent, stylistic phenomena, the relationship betw een
green and occupied spaces, etc. The questions this information gives rise to canlead us back to the principal issu es which are, roughly speaking, those that deal
with
1. objective facts;
2. the influence o f the real-estate structure and economic data;
3. historical-social influences.
The real-estate structure and economic questions are of particular importanceand are intim ately bound up w ith what w e call historical-social influences. In
order to dem onstrate the advantages of an analysis o f this type, in the second49chapter of this book w e will examine the problems of housing and the residential
district. For now, w e will continue w ith the subject of real-estate structure andeconomic data, even if the second is given summary treatm ent.
The shape of the plots of land in a city, their formation and their evolution, repre­
sen ts a long history of urban property and of the classes intim ately associatedwith the city. Tricart has stated very clearly that an analysis of the contrasts inthe form of plots confirms the existence of a class struggle. Modifications o f thereal-estate structure, which w e can follow w ith absolute precision through his­
torical registry maps, indicate the em ergence of an urban bourgeoisie and thephenomenon o f the progressive concentration of capital.
A criterion of this type applied to a city w ith as extraordinary a life cycle as an­
cient Rome offers information of paradigmatic clarity. It allows us to trace theevolution from the agricultural city to the formation of the great public spaces of
the Imperial age and the subsequent transition from the courtyard houses of the
Republic to the formation of the great plebeian insulae. The enormous lots that
constituted the insulae, an extraordinary conception of the house-district, an­ticipate the concepts of the m odem capitalist city and its spatial divison. They
also help to explain its dysfunction and contradictions.
Real estate, which w e considered earlier from a topographic point of view , alsooffers other possibilities of classification when seen in a socio-economic context.
W e can distinguish the following:
1. the “pre-capitalist” house, which is established by a proprietor without
exploitative ends;
2. the “capitalist” house, which is meant for rental and in which everything issubordinated to the production of revenue. Initially it m ight be intended either
for the rich or the poor, but in the first case, following the usual evolution ofneeds, the house drops rapidly in class status in response to social changes.
These changes in status create blighted zones, one of the m ost typical problemsof the modern capitalist city and as such the object of particular study in the
United States, where th ey are more evident than in Italy;
3. the “para-capitalist” house, built for one family w ith one floor rented out;
4. the “socialist” house, which is a new type of construction appearing insocialist countries where there is no longer private land ownership and also inadvanced democratic countries. Am ong the earliest European exam ples are thehouses constructed by the city of Vienna after the F irst World War.
When this analysis of social content is applied with particular attention to urban
topography, it becomes capable of providing us with a fairly complete knowledgeof the city; such an analysis proceeds by means of successive syntheses, causing
certain elem entary facts to come to light which ultim ately encompass more gen­eral facts. In addition, through the analysis of social content, the formal aspect ofurban artifacts takes on a reasonably convincing interpretation, and a number ofthem es em erge that play an important role in the urban structure.

From the scientific point of view , the work of Marcel P oete18 is without doubt
one of the most m odem studies of the city. Poete concerns him self with urban ar­
tifacts to the exten t that they are indicative of the conditions of the urban or­
ganism; they provide precise information which is verifiable In the existin g city.
Their raison d’etre is their continuity: while geographic, economic, and statisti50

cal information m ust also be taken into consideration along with historical facts,
it is knowledge o f the past that constitutes the term s of the present and th e m easure of the future.
Such knowledge can be derived from a study o f city plans; these possess precise
formal characteristics: for example, the form o f a city’s streets can be straight,
sinuous, or curved. But the general form of the city also has a meaning of its own,
and its needs naturally tend to be expressed in its built works, which beyond cer­tain obvious differences present undeniable sim ilarities. Thus in urban architec­
ture a more or less clearly articulated bond is established betw een the shapes ofthings throughout history. A gainst a background of the differences betw een his­
torical periods and civilizations, it therefore becomes possible to verify a certain
constancy of them es, and this constancy assures a relative unity to the urban ex­pression. From this develop the relationships betw een the city and the geo­
graphic region, which can be analyzed effectively in term s of the role of thestreet. Thus in P oete’s analysis, the street acquires major significance; the city is
bom in a fixed place but the street gives it life. The association of the destiny of
the city with communication arteries becomes a fundamental principle of develop­
ment.
In his study of the relationship betw een the street and the city, Poete arrives atimportant conclusions. For any given city it should be possible to establish a clas­
sification of streets which should then be reflected in the map of the geographic
area. Streets, w hether cultural or commercial, should also be able to be charac­terized according to the nature of th e changes that are effected because of them .
Thus Po£te repeats the Greek geographer Strabo’s observation about the“shadow cities” along the Flaminian W ay, whose development is explained as oc­
curring “more because they w ere found situated along that road than for any
inherent importance.”19
From the street, P oete’s analysis passes to the urban land, which contains
natural artifacts as well as civic ones and becom es associated with the composi­tion of the city. In the urban composition, everything m ust express as faithfully
as possible the particular life of the collective organism. A t the basis of this or­ganism that is the city is the persistence o f the plan.
This concept of persistence is fundamental to the theory of Poete; it also informs
the analysis of Pierre Lavedan,20 one o f the m ost complete analyses available tous, w ith its interposing of elem ents drawn from geography and the history of ar­chitecture. In Lavedan, persistence is the generator of the plan, and thisgenerator becomes the principal object of urban research because through anunderstanding of it one can rediscover th e spatial formation of the city. The
generator embodies a concept of persistence which is reflected in a city’s physicalstructures, streets, and urban monuments.
The contributions of P oete and Lavedan, together with those of the geographers
Chabot and Tricart, are among the m ost significant offerings of the Frenchschool to urban theory.

The contribution of Enlightenm ent thought to a comprehensive theory of urban
artifacts would m erit a separate study. One objective of the treatise w riters of
the eighteenth century was to establish principles of architecture that could be51

3U Karl Marx-Hof, Vienna.

developed from logical bases, in a certainsenseindependently of design; thus thetreatise took shape as a series of propositions derived serially from one another.
Second, th ey conceived of the single elem ent alw ays as part of a system , the sys­
tem o f the city; therefore it w as the city that conferred criteria of necessity andreality on single buildings. Third, th ey distinguished form, as the final manifes­
tation of structure, from the analytical aspect of structure; thus form had a “clas­
sical” persistence of its own which could not be reduced to the logic of the mo­m ent.
One could discuss the second argum ent at length, but more substantial know­
ledge would certainly be necessary; clearly, while this argument applies to theexistin g city, it also postulates the future city and the inseparable relationshipbetw een the constitution of an artifact and its surroundings. Y et Voltaire had al­
ready indicated, in his analysis of the grand siecle, the limits of such architec­tures, how uninteresting a city would be if th e task of every constructed work
w as to establish a direct relationship with the city itself.21 The manifestation ofthese concepts is found in the Napoleonic plans and projects, which represent
one of the m oments of major equilibrium in urban history.
On the basis of th ese three argum ents developed in the Enlightenment, w e can
exam ine the theory of Milizia.22 The classification proposed by Milizia, an ar­chitectural essayist concerned with theories of urban artifacts, deals with bothindividual buildings and the city as a whole. H e classified urban buildings aseither private or public, the former m eaning housing and the latter referring tocertain “principal elem ents” which I will call prim ary. In addition, he presents
th ese groupings as classes, which perm its him to make distinctions within clas­ses, distinguishing each principal elem ent as a building type within a generalfunction, or better, a general idea of the city. For example, villas and houses arein the first class, while in the second are police buildings, public utilities, storage
facilities, etc. Buildings for public use are further distinguished as universities,
libraries, and so on.
Milizia’s analysis refers in the first place, then, to classes (public and private), in
the second to the location of elem ents in the city, and in the third to the form andorganization of individual buildings. “Greater public convenience demands thatth ese buildings [for public use] be situated near the center of the city and or­
ganized around a large community square.”23 The general system is the city; thedevelopm ent of its elem ents is then bound up with the development of thesystem adopted.
W hat kind of city does Milizia have in mind? It is a city that is conceived together
w ith its architecture. “E ven without extravagant buildings, cities can appear
beautiful and breathe desire. But to speak o f a beautiful city is also to speak ofgood architecture.”24 This assertion seem s definitive for all Enlightenment
treatises on architecture;^ beautiful city means good architecture, and vice versa.
It is unlikely that Enlightenm ent thinkers paused over this statem ent, so in­
grained w as it in their w ay o f thinking; w e know that their lack of understandingo f the Gothic city was a result o f their inability to accept the validity of single ele­m ents that constituted an urban landscape w ithout seeing these elem ents rela­tiv e to som e larger system^ If ip their failure to understand the meaning and thus
the beauty of the Gothic city th ey w ere shortsighted, this of course does notmake their own system incorrect. H ow ever, to u s today the beauty o f the Gothic
city appears precisely in that it is an extraordinary urban artifact whose unique-53

n ess is clearly recognizable in its components. Through our investigation of theparts of this city w e grasp its beauty: it too participates in a system . There isnothing more false than an organic or spontaneous definition of the Gothic city.
There is yet another aspect of modernity in Milizia’s position. A fter establishinghis concept of classes, he goes on to classify each building typ e within the overall
framework and to characterize it according to its function. This notion of func­tion, which is treated independently of general considerations of form, is under­stood more as the building’s purpose than as its function per se. Thus buildings
for practical uses and those that are constructed for functions that are notequally tangible or pragmatic are put in the sam e class; for example, buildings
for public health or safety are found in the sam e class as structures built for theirmagnificence or grandeur.
There are at least three arguments in favor o f this position. M ost important is
the recognition of the city as a complex structure in which parts can be found thatfunction as works of art. The second has to do with the value ascribed to a gen­eral typological discourse on urban artifacts or, in other words, the realizationthat one can give a technical explanation for those aspects of the city that by na­
ture demand a more complex explanation by reducing them to their typologicalessence. The third argument relates to the fact that this typological essence
plays “its own role” in the constitution of the model.
For example, in analyzing the monument, Milizia arrives at three criteria: “thatit is directed toward the public good; that it is appropriately located; and that it isconstituted according to laws of fitness. ”25 “W ith respect to the customs govern­
ing the construction of monuments, no more can be said here generally than thatth ey should be meaningful and expressive, of a sim ple structure, and with a clear
and short inscription, so that the briefest glance reveals the effect for which theyw ere constructed.”26 In other words, insofar as the nature of the monument isconcerned, even if w e cannot offer more than a tautology— a monument is amonument—w e can still establish conditions around it which illustrate its
typological and compositional characteristics, w hether th ese precisely elucidate
its nature or not. Again, these characteristics are for the m ost part of an urban
nature; but they are equally conditions of architecture, that is, of composition.
This is a basic issue to which w e will return later: nam ely, the way in which prin­ciples and classifications in the Enlightenm ent conception w ere a general aspectof architecture, but that in its realization and evaluation, architecture involved
primarily the individual work and the individual architect. Milizia him selfscorned the builders who mixed architectural and social orders as well as the
proponents of objective models of functional organization such as w ere later pro­
duced by Romanticism, asserting that “to derive functional organization frombeehives is to go insect-hunting . . . .”27 H ere again w e find within a single for­mulation the tw o them es which were to be fundamental in the subsequent de­velopm ent of architectural thought, and which already indicated in their dual as­
pects of organicism and functionalism their anticipation of the Romantic sensibil­
ity: the abstract order of organization and the reference to nature.
W ith respect to function itself, Milizia w rites, “. . . because of its enormous vari­
ety functional organization cannot always be regulated by fixed and constantlaw s, and as a result m ust always resist generalization. For the m ost part, them ost renowned architects, when they wish to concern them selves with func­
tional organization, mainly produced drawings and descriptions of their build-54

ings rather than rules that could then be learned.”28 This passage clearly shows
how function is understood here as a relationship and not a schem e o f organiza­
tion; in fact, as such it is rejected. But this attitude did not preclude a contem ­poraneous search for rules that m ight transm it principles of architecture.

I am now going to consider som e of the questions underlying the various theories
ju st outlined, emphasizing certain points which are crucial for the present study.
The first theory referred to was drawn from the French school of geographers; I
noted that although it provided a good descriptive system , it stopped short of ananalysis o f the structure o f the city. In particular I m entioned the work of
Chabot, for whom the city is a totality that constructs itse lf and in which all theelem ents participate in forming the dme de la cite. How is this latter perception
to be reconciled w ith Chabot’s study of function? The answer, already implicit insom e of what has been said so far, is partially suggested by Sorre’s critique of
Chabot’s book. Sorre w rote that for Chabot, in essence, “la vie seule explique lavie. ” This m eans that if the city explains itself, then a classification by functions
is not an explanation but rather a descriptive system . This can be rephrased in
the following manner: a description of function is easy to verify; like any study ofurban morphology, it is an instrum ent. Furthermore, since it does not posit any
elem ent of continuity betw een the genre de vie and the urban structure, as thenaive functionalists would like, it seem s to be as useful an elem ent of analysis as
any other. W e will retain from Chabot’s studies his concept of the city as a total­
ity and his approach to an understanding of this totality through the study of its
various m anifestations, its behavior.
In presenting the work of Tricart I tried to indicate the importance of a study ofthe city that takes social content as its point of departure; I believe that the
study of social content has the capacity to illuminate the meaning of urban evolu­tion in a concrete way. I especially emphasized the aspects of this research that
relate to urban topography and therefore the formation of boundaries and thevalue o f urban land as basic elem ents of the city; later w e will look at these as­pects from the standpoint of economic theory.
W ith respect to Lavedan’s work, w e can pose the following question: if the struc­ture Lavedan proposes is a real structure, formed of streets, monuments, andthe like, how does it relate to the present study? Structure, as Lavedan under­
stands it, m eans the structure of urban artifacts, and in this w ay it resem bles
Ponte’s concept of the persistence of the plan and the plan as a generator. A s thisgenerator is by nature both real and abstract, it cannot be catalogued like a func­
tion. Moreover, since every function can be articulated through a form, andforms in turn contain the potential to ex ist as urban artifacts, one can say that
forms tend to allow them selves to be articulated as urban elem ents; thus if aform is articulated at all, one can assum e that a specific urban artifact persists to­geth er with it, and that it is precisely a form that p ersists through a se t of trans­
formations which constitutes an urban artifact par excellence.
I have already m ade a critique of naive functionalist classifications; I repeat, at
tim es th ey are acceptable, so long as th ey remain within the handbooks of ar­chitecture to which th ey are appropriate. Such classifications presuppose that allurban artifacts are created t o serve particular functions in a static way and that
their structure precisely coincides w ith the function th ey perform at a certainm oment. I maintain, on the contrary, that the city is som ething that persists

55

The C om plexity o f U rban A rtifacts

through its transformations, and that the complex or simple transformations offunctions that it gradually undergoes are m om ents in the reality of its structure.
Function here is m eant only in the sen se o f complex relationships betw een manyorders of facts. I reject linear interpretations of cause and effect because they
are belied by reality itself. This interpretation certainly differs from that of“u se” or of “functional organization. ”
I also wish to emphasize my reservations about a certain language and reading of
the city and urban artifacts which presen t a serious obstacle to urban research.
In many w ays, this language is linked w ith naive functionalism on the one handand a form of architectural romanticism on the other. I refer to the tw o term s or­
ganic and rational, which have been borrowed by the architectural language
and which, although they possess an indubitable historical validity for making
distinctions betw een one style or typ e o f architecture and another, certainly do
not help us to clarify concepts or somehow to comprehend urban artifacts.
The term organic is derived from biology; I have elsew here noted that the basis
of Friedrich Ratzel’s functionalism w as a hypothesis that likened the city to anorganism, the form of which w as constituted by function itself.29 This physiologi­
cal hypothesis is as brilliant as it is inapplicable to the structure of urban artifacts
and to architectural design (although the application to the problem of design is asubject in itself and requires a separate treatm ent). Among the m ost prominentterm s of this organic language are organism, organic growth, urban fabric.
Similarly, in some of the more serious ecological studies, parallels betw een thecity and the human organism and the processes of the biological world have beensuggested, although quickly abandoned. The term inology, in fact, is so perva­
sive among those in the field that at first sight it seem s intim ately tied to thematerial under consideration, and only w ith some difficulty is it possible to avoid
the use of a term like architectural organism and substitute for it a more approp­
riate word like building. The sam e can be said for fabric. It even seem s thatsome authors define modern architecture tout court as organic, and by virtue of
its powerful appeal this term inology has passed rapidly from serious studies30 tothe profession and to journalism.
The terminology of the so-called rationalist variety is no less imprecise. To speakof rational urbanism is simply a tautology, since the rationalization of spatial
choices is by definition a condition of urbanism. “Rationalist” definitions have theundoubted m erit, how ever, of always referring to urbanism as a discipline (pre­cisely because of its character of rationality) and thus offer a term inology ofclearly superior usefulness. To say that the m edieval city is organic reveals an
absolute ignorance of the political, religious, and economic structures of themedieval city, not to mention its spatial structure. To say, on the other hand,that the plan of Miletus is rational is true even if it is so general as to be genericand fails to offer us any real idea of M iletus’s layout (beyond the am biguity ofconfounding rationality with what is a simple geom etric scheme).
Both of these aspects are aptly characterized in Milizia’s comment cited earlier
about functional organization and b eeh ives.31 Thus, even though this terminol­
ogy undoubtedly possesses a certain poetic expressiveness^ and as such m ight beof interest to us, it has nothing to do with a theory of urban artifacts. It is really avehicle of confusion, and it would be useful to drop it altogether.

56

Urban artifacts, as w e have said, are complex; this means that they have compo­
nents and that each component has a different value. Thus, in speaking of thetypological essence in architecture w e said that it “has its own role to play in themodel”; in other words, the typological essence is a component elem ent. How­ever, before attem pting a typological reading of the city based on a theory ofurban artifacts and their structure, it is necessary to proceed slowdy to some pre­cise definitions.
E xactly how are urban artifacts complex? A partial answer has already been
given with respect to the theories of Chabot and Poete. One can agree that theirstatem ents relative to th e soul of the city and the concept of permanence go
beyond naive functionalism and approach an understanding of the quality ofurban artifacts. On the other hand, little attention has really been given to thisproblem of quality, a problem which surfaces mainly in historical research, al­though there is already som e progress in the recognition that the nature of urban
artifacts is in many w ays like that of a work of art and, m ost important, that a
key elem ent for understanding urban artifacts is their collective character.
On the basis of these considerations it is possible to delineate a type of readingfor urban structures. B ut w e m ust begin by posing two general sets of questions:
F irst, from what points of view is it possible to read the city; how many w ays are
there for understanding its structure? Is it possible to say, and what does itmean to say, that a reading is interdisciplinary; do some disciplines take prece­dence over others? Obviously, th ese questions are closely linked. Second, what
are the possibilities for an autonomous urban science?
Of the tw o questions, the second is clearly decisive. In fact, if there is an urban
science, the first group o f questions ends up having little meaning; that whichtoday is often defined as interdisciplinary is nothing other than a problem of
specialization and occurs in any field of knowledge. But the response to this sec­
ond question depends on a recognition that the city is constructed in its totality,that all of its components participate in its constitution as an artifact. In otherwords, on the m ost general level, it m ust be understood that the city represents
the progress of human reason, is a human creation par excellence; and this state­m ent has meaning only when th e fundamental point is emphasized that the cityand every urban artifact are by nature collective. I am often asked why only his­
torians give us a complete picture of the city. I believe the answer is that histo­
rians are concerned with th e urban artifact in its totality.

Clearly, to think of urban science as a historical science is a m istake, for in thiscase w e would be obliged to speak only of urban history. W hat I mean to su ggest,
how ever, is that from the point o f view of urban structure, urban history seem smore useful than any other form of research on the city. Later I will address thecontribution of history to urban science in a more detailed w ay, but since thisproblem is particularly im portant it would be useful to make a few specific obser­
vations right away.
These concern the theory o f permanences as posited by both Poete and Lavedan. This theory is in som e resp ects related to m y initial hypothesis of the city asa man-made object. One m ust rem em ber that the difference betw een p ast andfuture, from the point of view of the theory of knowledge, in large m easure re­flects the fact that the past is partly being experienced now, and this may be the57

Monuments and theTheory of Permanences

35 The Mezquita or Arab mosqueMedjid-al-Djamia, eighth to tenthcentury, Cordoba, Spain, and its
transformation into a cathedral,
1599. Above: Plan during Arabperiod. Below: Plan o f cathedral.
36 Section o f cathedral, form erly
Arab mosque, Cordoba, Spain.
37 Aerial view o f cathedral, form erly
Arab mosque, Cordoba, Spain.
38 Plan o f the Alhambra, Granada,
Spain.

meaning to give permanences: they are a past that w e are still experiencing.
P oete’s theory is not very explicit on this point, but I will try to summarize it
briefly. Although he presents a number of hypotheses among which areeconomic considerations that relate to the evolution of the city, it is in substancea historical theory centered on the phenomenon of “persisten ces.” These persis­
tences are revealed through monuments, the physical signs of the past, as wellas through the persistence of a city’s basic layout and plans. This last point is
P oete’s m ost important discovery. Cities tend to remain on their axes of de­velopm ent, maintaining the position of their original layout and growing accord­
ing to the direction and meaning of their older artifacts, which often appear
rem ote from present-day ones. Som etimes th ese artifacts persist virtually un­changed, endowed with a continuous vitality; other tim es they exhaust them ­selves, and then only the permanence of their form, their physical sign, theirlocus remains. The m ost meaningful permanences are those provided by thestreet and the plan. The plan persists at different levels; it becomes differen­
tiated in its attributes, often deformed, but in substance it is not displaced. Thisis the m ost valid part of P oete’s theory; even if it cannot be said to be completely
a historical theory, it is essentially born from the study of history.
A t first sight it may seem that permanences absorb all of the continuity of urban
artifacts, but in reality this is not so, because not all things in the city survive, orif they do, their modalities are so diverse as often to resist comparison. In thissense, according to the theory of permanences, in order to explain an urban ar­
tifact, one is forced to look beyond it to the present-day actions that modify it. In
substance, the historical method is one that isolates. It tends not only to dif­ferentiate permanences but to focus entirely on them , since they alone can showwhat a city once was by indicating the way its past differs from its present. Thus
permanences may appear with respect to the city as isolated and aberrant ar­
tifacts which characterize a system only as the form of a past that w e are still ex­periencing.
In this respect, permanences present two aspects: on the one hand, they can beconsidered as propelling elements; on the other, as pathological elem ents. Ar­
tifacts either enable us to understand the city in its totality, or they appear as aseries of isolated elem ents that w e can link only tenuously to an urban system .
To illustrate the distinction betw een permanent elem ents that are vital andthose that are pathological, w e can again take the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua
as an example. I remarked on its permanent character before, but now by per­manence I mean not only that one can still experience the form of the past in thismonument but that the physical form of the past has assumed different functions
and has continued to function, conditioning the urban area in which it stands andcontinuing to constitute an important urban focus. In part this building is still inuse; even if everyone is convinced that it is a work of art, it still functions quite
readily at ground level as a retail market. This proves its vitality.
An example of a pathological permanence can be seen in the Alhambra in
Granada. It no longer houses either Moorish or Castilian kings, and if w e ac­
cepted functionalist classifications, w e would have to say that this building once
represented the major function of Granada. It is evident that at Granada w e ex­perience the form of the past in a way that is quite different from at Padua. In thefirst instance, the form of the past has assumed a different function but it is still
intim ately tied to the city; it has been modified and w e can imagine future modifi­
cations. In the second, it stands virtually isolated in the city; nothing can be59added. It constitutes, in fact, an experience so essential that it cannot be mod­ified (in this sense, the palace of Charles V in Granada m ust be counted an excep­
tion, since precisely because it lacked this quality it could so easily be de­stroyed). But in both cases the urban artifacts are a part of the city that cannot
be suppressed because th ey constitute it.
In choosing th ese two exam ples, I have defined a p ersisten t urban artifact as
som ething very similar to a monument. I could in fact have spoken of the D oge’s
Palace in Venice or the Theater at N im es or the Mezquita of Cordoba, and the ar­gum ent would not change. In fact, I am inclined to believe that persistence in an
urban artifact often causes it to become identified as a monument, and that amonument persists in the city both symbolically and physically. A monument’s
persistence or permanence is a result of its capacity to constitute the city, its his­
tory and art, its being and memory.
We have ju st distinguished betw een a historical or propelling permanence as aform of a past that w e still experience and a pathological permanence as some­thing that is isolated and aberrant. In large m easure the pathological form isidentifiable because of a particular context, since context itself can be seen either
as the persistence of a function over tim e or as som ething isolated from the urban
structure, that is, as som ething which stands outside o f technological and social
evolution. Context is commonly understood as referring primarily to residential
sections of the city, and in this sense, its preservation is counter to the real
dynamic of the city; so-called contextual preservation is related to the city in
tim e like the embalmed corpse of a saint to the image of his historical personal­
ity. In contextual preservation there is a sort of urban naturalism at work which
adm ittedly can give rise to suggestive im ages— for exam ple, a visit to a dead city
is always a memorable experience— but in such cases w e are w ell outside therealm of a past that w e still experience. Naturally, then, I am referring mainly toliving cities which have an uninterrupted span of developm ent. The problems ofdead cities only tangentially concern urban science; th ey are m atters for the his­
torian and the archaeologist. It is at best an abstraction to seek to reduce urban
artifacts to archaeological ones.
So far w e have spoken only of monuments, inasmuch as th ey are fixed elem entsof the urban structure, as having a true aesthetic intentionality, but this can be asimplification. The hypothesis of the city as a man-made object and a work of art
attributes as much legitim acy of expression to a house or any other minor work
as to a monument. But perhaps this carries us too far afield; I mainly want to es­
tablish at this point that the dynamic process of the city tends more to evolution
than preservation, and that in evolution m onuments are not only preserved but
continuously presented as propelling elem ents of developm ent. This is a factthat can be verified.
Moreover, I have already attem pted to dem onstrate how function alone is in­
sufficient to explain the continuity of urban artifacts; if the origin of the typologyof urban artifacts is simply function, this hardly accounts for the phenomenon ofsurvival. A function m ust always be defined in tim e and in society: that whichclosely depends on it is always bound up with its developm ent. An urban artifact
determ ined by one function only cannot be seen as anything other than an expli­
cation of that function. In reality, w e frequently continue to appreciate elem ents
whose function has been lost over time; the value of th ese artifacts often resides
solely in their form, which is integral to the general form of the city; it is, so to
speak, an invariant of it. Often, too, th ese artifacts are closely bound up with the60constitutive elem ents, with the origins o f the city, and are included among its
monuments. Thus w e see the importance o f the param eter of tim e in the study ofurban artifacts; to think of a p ersisten t urban artifact as som ething tied to asingle period of history constitutes one o f the greatest fallacies of urban science.
The form of the city is always the form of a particular tim e of the city; but there
are many tim es in the formation of the city, and a city may change its face even in
the course of one man’s life, its original references ceasing to exist. A s
Baudelaire w rote, “The old Paris is no more; the form of a city changes more
quickly, alas, than the heart of a mortal. ”32 We look upon the houses of our child­hood as unbelievably old, and often the city erases our m emories as it changes.

The various considerations w e have put forward in this chapter now permit us toattem pt a specific reading of the city. The city will be seen as an architecture ofdifferent parts or components, th ese being principally the dwelling and prim ary
elements. It is this reading that I will develop in the following pages, beginningwith the concept of the study area. Since dw ellings cover the major portion of
the urban surface and rarely have a character of permanence, their evolution
should be studied together w ith the area upon which they are found; thus I will
speak of the dwelling area.
I will also consider the decisive role played by primary elem ents in the formationand constitution of the city. This role tends to be revealed through their charac­
ter of permanence in the case of the m onum ents, which, as w e will see, have avery particular relationship to primary elem ents. Farther on w e will investigate
what effective role primary elem ents have in the structure of urban artifacts,and for w hat reasons urban artifacts can be said to be works of art or, at least,
how the overall structure of the city is similar to a work of art. Our previous
analysis should enable us to recognize this overall composition of the city and thereasons for its architecture.
There is nothing new in all of this. Y et in attem pting to formulate a theory ofurban artifacts that is consistent w ith reality, I have benefited from highly di­verse sources. From th ese I consider som e of the them es I have discussed—
function, permanence, classification, and typology—to be particularly significant.

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I will now concern myself specifically with the place in which urban artifacts are
manifested, that is, the area in which they can be seen, the physical ground theyoccupy. This area is to some extent determined by natural factors, but it is also apublic object and a substantial part of the architecture of the city. We can con­sider this area as a whole, as the projection of the city’s form on a horizontal
plane, or else we can look at individual parts. Geographers call this the site—thearea on 'which a city rises, the surface that it actually occupies. From this geo­
graphical perspective it is essential for describing the city and, along with loca­
tion and situation, an important element for classifying different cities.
This brings us to the concept of the study area. Since we assume that between

any urban element and any urban artifact there exists an interrelationshipwhose particularity is related to a specific city, it is necessary to elaborate thenature of the immediate urban context. Such a minimum urban context consti­
tutes the study area, by which we mean a portion of the urban area that can be
defined or described by comparison to other larger elements of the overall urban
area, for example, the street system.
with respect to the space of the city, andThe study area, tb < - ni abstra'ients more clearly. For example, in orderas such, it serves t
1 e specificiesoface i plot of land and its influence on a housing
to define the chanlie t h e cot
us ±ots, those elements which demarcate
type, it is useful t<
1 is entirely anomalous or whether theya particular contt
condition: i r w city. But the study area can also be dearise from more g^' its -which , 1 oincide with a particular urban artifact.
fined by histories„o recognize that there are both specific
Just to consider t - - >f , in itself i-.a •- > he more general urban whole. This asand disparate qiwi
pect of urban art- - ixtremel; r , ■Gant; the recognition of their specificity. ■- etter.
ii
allows us to und<Several other as
is a relationship 1 ^one of “natural
Another aspect
the city. In all twith which we itions that are s---oald be mentioned. For example, therei - of the study area and the sociologicalth isf the concept of the residential district,aracter as a recinto or vertical slice of!y ai
to define the limits of the urban whole, it is ned; t m <est defense against the serious distorwhere the growth of the city and thein the-,63
est
nehapter 2

himary Elements and them cept o f Areae Study A rea

89 Plan of the street system ofChicago, Daniel Burnham, 1909

evolution of urban artifacts are taken to be continuous natural processes andwhere the real differences within them disappear. The reality of the structure ofurban artifacts is such that cities are distinct in time and space, per genus et differentia m. Each modification of an urban artifact presupposes a qualitative as
well as a quantitative change.
We will attempt to show that between the two facts of building typology andurban morphology a revealing binary relationship exists; and further, that the
study of this relationship is extremely useful for understanding the structure ofurban artifacts. Even though this structure is not part of that relationship, it canfor the most part be clarified by a knowledge of it.
The a priori importance that I attach to the study area implies my conviction of
the following:
1. With respect to urban intervention today one should operate on a limited partof the city, although this does not preclude an abstract plan of the city’s develop­
ment and the possibility of an altogether different point of view. Such a self-im­
posed limitation is a more realistic approach from the standpoint of both know­
ledge and program.
2. The city is not by nature a creation that can be reduced to a single basic idea.
This is true both for the modern metropolis and for the concept of the city as thesum of many parts, of quarters and districts that are highly diverse and differen­
tiated in their sociological and formal characteristics. In fact, this differentiation
constitutes one of the typical characteristics of the city. To reduce these diverse
aspects to one kind of explanation, and thus to one formal law, is a mistake. The
city in its totality and beauty is made up of numerous different moments of for­mation; the unity of these moments is the urban unity as a whole. The possibility
for reading the city with any continuity resides in its dominant formal and spatial
characteristics.1
The form of the study area, seen as a constituent part of the city, is thus usefulfor analyzing the form of the city itself. This type of analysis does not involve a
communitarian idea of the area nor any of the implications in the idea of commun­
ity which relate to neighborhood; these questions are largely sociological in na­
ture. In the present context the study area always involves a notion of the unity
both of the urban whole as it has emerged through a process of diverse growthand differentiation, and of those individual areas or parts of the city that have ac­quired their own characteristics. The city comes to be seen as a “masterpiece,”something that is substantiated in form and space but understood in time, in its
different moments (which cannot be predicted with certainty). The unity ofthese parts is fundamentally supplied by history, by the city’s memory of itself.
These areas, these parts, are defined essentially by their location, their imprint
on the ground, their topographical limits, and their physical presence; and in thisway they can be distinguished within the urban whole. Thus, we arrive at a moregeneral and conceptual development of the problem: the study area can be de­fined as a concept that takes in a series of spatial and social factors which act asdetermining influences on the inhabitants of a sufficiently circumscribed culturaland geographical area.
From the standpoint of urban morphology the definition is simpler. Here thestudy area would include all of those urban areas that have a physical and social
homogeneity. (Even if defining what constitutes homogeneity in things is not64

*:easy, especially from a formal point of view, it is still possible to define a typologi;eal homogeneity: that is, all those areas where consistent modes and types of liv­ing are realized in similar buildings; thus the homogeneity of residential dis­
tricts, Siedlungen, etc.) The study of these characteristics ends up by becoming
Specific to social morphology or social geography (and in this sense homogeneity(can also be defined sociologically), so that the activities of social groups are!analyzed with respect to how they are continuously manifested in fixed territo: rial characteristics.
The study area thus becomes a particular moment in the study of the city and as.such gives rise to a true and proper urban ecology, which is a necesary pre­requisite for studies of the city. The two distinctive features that take shape in■this relationship are mass and density, and these are manifested in thehomogeneity of the occupation of space in both plan and section. The study area
is a surface that relates to the specific mass and density of a part of the city andalso becomes a dynamic moment within the life of the city itself.

The concept of area just developed is closely bound up with that of the residential
district. I have already introduced this notion in speaking of Tricart’s theory,
but at this point I think it would be appropriate to return to the idea of the part ore ment of the city, and to view the city as a spatial system formed of parts, eachwith its own characteristics. Fritz Schumacher has also developed a theory ofthis type and it seems to have much validity. As we have suggested, the study ofthe urban residential district is simply an extension of the concept of the study
a a. *e residential district is thus a moment, a piece of the city’s form. It is inti­
mately bound up with the city’s evolution and nature, and is itself constituted ofparts, which in turn summarize the city’s image. We actually experience theseparts. In social terms, it is a morphological and structural unit characterized by ae ,\in urban landscape, a certain social content, and its function; thus a change
in any one of these elements is enough to define its limits. We should also bear inmind that an analysis of the residential district as a social artifact based on the di­vision of social or economic classes as well as on economic functions correspondsin an essential way to the process «rf formation of the modern metropolis; thisprocess is the same for ancient Rome as for the large cities of today. Moreover, I
would maintain that these reside, r Ld districts are not so much subordinated to
one another as relatively autonomous parts; their relationships cannot be
explained as a simple function of dependence but seemingly respond to the entire
urban structure.
To state that a part of the largi >" ■' ; constitutes a smaller city within it is to chal­lenge another aspect of functionalist theory. This aspect is zoning. I am refer­ring here not to zoning as a technical practice, which is somewhat acceptable andhas another meaning, but rather to the theory of zoning as it was first advanced
scientifically in 1923 by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess with respect to the cityof Chicago. In Burgess’s study of Chicago,2 zoning came to be defined as the ten­dency of the city to be disposed in concentric residential districts around either acentral business district or a governmental core. In his description of that city,
Burgess indicated a series of concentric zones which corresponded to well-de­fined functions: the business and governmental zones which absorbed the com­
mercial, social, administrative, and transportation life; the transitional zones
65

Residential D istricts as Study Areas*The Italian qucntiere, the equivalent of
the French quartier, has been translated
here and throughout as “district,” but thisdoes not do full justice to the original. The
intended meaning of the word is more orless retained in an expression like“working class quarters,” where itsuggests a residential area which has
evolved in the city rather than beensuperimposed upon it (by zoning, forexample).—Ed.

k.0 Plan dividing Chicago by use andethnic zones. 1) Principal parks andaiteries. 2) Industrial and railroad
land. 3) German zone. !+) Swedishzone. 5) Czechoslavakian zone.
6) Polish and Lithuanian zone.
7) Italian zone. 8) Jewish zone.
9) Black zone. 10) Mixed-population.

which encircled the center and represented a kind of aureole of decay, formed ofpoor residences where blacks and recent immigrants lived and where small offi­
ces were found; the working-class residential zone for workers who wanted tolive near their factories; the zone of wealthier residences, including single-familydwellings and multi-story houses; and finally an external zone where the daily
commuters were clustered at the intersections of roads which converged on thecities.
Among the critiques made of this theory , which seemed overly schematic even
as applied to Chicago, that of Homer Hoyt3 gained a certain, acceptance. It at­
tempted to establish, if also In an overly schematic way, a principle of growth ac­
cording to certain axes of traffic or transportation, in this way superimposing on
the concentric sectors radial vectors, which, emanated out from the center of thecity. Such a theory is related to that of Schumacher, especially to his proposals'for the plan of Hamburg.
..............
It is appropriate to note that although the term zoning appeared in the form of atheory with Burgess, it had made its first appearance in Reinhard Baumeister’sstudies in 18704 and also was applied to the plan of 1925 for the city of Berlin. But
in Berlin it was used in an entirely different way; it indicated five zones: in the city
(residential, parkland, commercial, industrial, mixed), but the disposition ofthese zones was not radiocentric. Although the business center coincided with•he historical center, there was an alternation of industrial, residential, and open
land zones which contradicted Burgess’s formulation.0
I do not wish to contest Burgess’s theory; this has already been done by many. I
only mention it here to emphasize the fundamental weakness of considering thevarious parts of the city merely as embodiments of functions, and so narrowly as
to describe the entire city as if no other considerations existed. This theory islimiting in that it conceives of the city as a series of moments which can be com­pared in a simple way and which can be resolved on the basis of a simple rule offunctional differentiation; such a theory results in suppressing the most impor­tant values implicit in the structure of urban artifacts. In contrast to this ap­
proach is the possibility we "have suggested of considering urban artifacts intheir entirety, of resolving one part of the city completely, determining all of therelationships that can be established within it.
In this context Baumeister’s formulation is as useful as any, for beyond a doubt,
specialized zones do exist. We may say these zones are characteristic: that is,they have a particular physiognomy and are autonomous parts. Their distribu­
tion in the city does not depend—at least not only—on the various interdepen­
dent functions which the city requires, but rather relies mainly on the entire his­
torical process of the city through which they come to be exactly as they are, ac­cording to their particular make-up. Thus, in studying Vienna, Hugo Hassinger
described the city in 1910 as comprised of the Altstadt which w'as encircled by
the Ring, which was in turn surrounded by the (1Uriel, with the Grossstddtischer Vorstadtgiirtel,the section of highest density, between the Ring and theGiirtel. In addition to these zones, he distinguished the Grossstadtkern, the nuc­leus of the city, and spoke of the Grossstadtischer Weichbild, the zone consti­
tuted partly by the city proper and partly by the countryside which American
scholars later defined as the urban fringes. Despite his rigid plans and parcelingof lots in a checkerboard plan superimposed on the city, Hassinger grasped abasic characteristic that is still valid today and is intimately part of the form ofVienna. Here already the issue is not one of the merely functional division of the
66

V V,

4,1 Plan of Frankfurt am, Main, West
Germany. 1) Old center. 2) Fifteenthcentury city. 3) Modern districts,k) Railroad lines. 5) Parks.
6) Woods.
1*2 Plan of Vienna,. Schematic plan at
upper right indicates ike different
phases of urban development.
1} Vienna in 1683. 2) Old districts ofthe eighteenth aml beginning of thenineteenth century within the walls of1703. 3) The Ring. !*) Districts of1860. 5) Development from the end of
the nineteenth and, beginning of thetwentieth century.

*i y, but rather of a definition by parts and by forms, by characteristics; thesecharacteristics are a synthesis of functions and values,6In general, every city possesses a center. This center is either more or less com­plex and has different characteristics, and it plays a particular role in the urban
life. Tertiary activities are in part concentrated in this center, mostly along theaxes of external communications, and in part within large residential complexes.
What characterizes the city from a general standpoint of the relationships be­
tween zones is the existence of a complex and polynuclear tertiary network. But
its center as wrell as other subcenters can only be studied in terms of primaryurban artifacts. Only by knowing their structure and location can we know their
particular role.

As we have said, the city is distinguished by its various parts, and these, fromthe formal and historical standpoint, constitute complex urban artifacts. As isconsistent with a theory of urban artifacts that emphasizes the structures of ar­
tifacts rather than their functions, we can say that individual parts of the city are
distinguishable as characteristic; they are characteristic parts. Since the resi­
dential district is predominant and undergoes noticeable environmental changes
over time which characterize its site far more than its buildings, I propose to use
the term residential or dwelling area (the term area once again being derived
from sociological literature).
It is universally acknowledged that residential districts in ancient cities, with
their centers, their monuments, and their way of life, were well demarcatedfrom one another; this is verifiable in urban history as much as in the physical re­ality of the architecture itself. These characteristics are no less apparent in themodern city, above all in the great European cities, whether there has been aneffort to subsume the city in a grand overall design, as in Paris, or there is an ab­
solutely emerging urban form that is typically shaped by different places andsituations, as in London.
This latter phenomenon is also predominant in American cities, and its many
components develop, often dramatically, as a major urban problem. Withouteven touching here on the social aspects of the problem, vre find in the very for­mation and evolution of the American city a confirmation of the “city of parts.”
Kevin Lynch writes, “Many persons interviewed took care to point out that Bos­
ton, while confusing in its path pattern even to the experienced inhabitant, has,in the number and vividness of its differentiated districts, a quality that quite
makes up for it. As one person put it: ‘Each part of Boston is different from theother. You can tell pretty much what area you’re in . .. ’ [New York] was cited. . .
because it has a number of well-defined characteristic districts set in an orderedframe of rivers and streets.”7 In his constant concern with the residential dis­
trict, Lynch speaks of “areas of reference" as having “little perceptual content,
but they are useful as organizing concepts . . . ” and distinguishes between intro­
verted districts “turned in upon themselves with little reference to the sur­rounding area” and isolated districts that arise independently of their zone.8
This aspect of Lynch’s work supports the thesis of the city as constituted of dif­ferentiated parts.
Along with Lynch’s psychological analyses it should also be possible to carry outI89linguistic research that would produce evidence of the deepest layers of theurban structure. One thinks of the Viennese expression Heimatbezirk, which
identifies the residential district with both one’s homeland and one’s living
space. Willy Hellpach rightly spoke of the metropolis as the “homeland” of mod­ern man. He!matbezirk especially expresses the riow^ological and historicalstructure <• '• ;c " :a, a civ-- t b : . is b ' :"‘ematioiu • ' «l the same time th«only real place :r the mor.wthv.- convex'* ’’ of the H a'.''"", v state. In Mils - :take "another example, the division oi the areas outside f ,r~ inanishwru- un.
hinyhi can oe understood only by ck wc'*phological-;'i w i - =r- ‘y h — phenomenon of persistence has so much remained alive in the language that the
principal zone of San Gottardo is still called el burg by the Milanese.
This type of linguistic research, like psychological research, is capable of produc­
ing useful information concerning the formation of cities. Toponymy, for exam­
ple, frequently provides important contributions to the study of urban develop­
ment; it is apparent that all cities contain numerous examples of significant phys­
ical modifications of the land which are recorded in the names of their older
streets and roads. In Milan, streets named Bottonuto, Poslaghetto, Pantano,and San Giovanni in Conca, instantly recall a zone of swamps and ancient hyd­raulic works. A similar phenomenon can be found in the Marais quarter in Paris.
Such studies confirm what we know about how a city is structured according tocharacteristic parts.

The Individual D w elling

To take the dwelling as a category in itself does not mean to adopt a functional
criterion of urban land-use division but simply to treat an urban artifact in such a
way that it is in itself primary in the composition of the city. To this end, the useof the term dwelling area in the sense illustrated in the preceding pages canbring the study of the individual dwelling within the general theory of urban ar­
tifacts.
The city has always been characterized largely by the individual dwelling. It canbe said that cities in which the residential aspect was not present do not exist or
have not existed; and where the residential function was initially subordinatedto other urban artifacts (the castle, the military encampment), a modification of
the city’s structure soon occurred to confer importance on the individual dwelling.
One cannot argue either by historical analysis or by description of actual sitesthat a dwelling is something amorphous or easily and quickly transformable. The
form in which residential building types are realized, the typological aspect thatcharacterizes them, is closely bound up with the urban form, and the house,
which materially represents a people’s way of life, the precise manifestation of aculture, is modified very slowly. Viollet-le-Duc, in the great panorama of Frencharchitecture contained in his Dictionnaire misonne de l'architecture frangaise
du XI'" au X V I' siecle, says, “In the art of architecture, the house is certainlythat which best characterizes the customs, tastes, and usages of a people; its
order, like its organization, changes only over very long periods of time.”9
In ancient Rome individual dwellings were classified quite rigidly into theclonvus type and the insula type; these two types characterized the city and thefourteen regions of Augustus. In its own divisions and evolution, the insula wasvirtually a microcosm of the city. There was more social mixing in it than is com­monly thought, and as with houses built in Paris after 1850, social differentiation70

was signified by changes in height. Of extremely poor and temporary construc­tion, these insulae constantly renewed themselves; they constituted the urban
substratum, the material out of which the city was molded. Already in the in ­sula, as in any other form of mass housing, one of the most important forces ofurban growth could be felt: speculation. The mechanism of speculation as applied
to the residential landscape 'was responsible for the most characteristic momentsof growth in the Imperial city. Without acknowledging this fact, we cannot un­derstand the system of public buildings, their dislocation, and the logic of city
growth. An analogous situation, even if not characterized by such high density,
existed in the ancient Greek cities.
The form of Vienna also is derived from the problem of housing. The applicationof the Hofquartierspflicht10 greatly increased the density of the center, specifi­
cally influenced the building typology' of multi-story housing, and decisively
stimulated the development of the suburbs. An effort to reinstate the dwellingas a determining influence on the form of the city and as a typical urban artifact isseen in the conception of the workers’ Siedlungen in the years following theFirst World War. The program of the city of Vienna was intended above all to
realize typical complexes whose form would be intimately linked to the form of
the city. On this point Peter Behrens wrote, “To criticize their construction on
the basis of principles contrived at the drawing table is to take the w'rong path,because nothing appears so changeable and heterogenous as the needs, habits,
and multiplicity of situations of a population that resides in a particular re­gion.”11 The relationship between the dwelling and its area thus became prim­ary.

k 'S Reconstruction of thirteenthcentury house, Burgundy, France,
Viollet-le-Duc. Above: Facade.
Below: Plan of ground floor.

i

I

In America, the vast surface areas of cities cannot be explained without
acknowledging the tendency toward a type of sparse, single-family housing.
Jean Gottman’s study of “megalopolis” is very precise in this respect.12

The location of the individual dwelling depends upon many factors: geographic,morphological, historical, economic. Once again, the geographic factors seem tobe determined by the economic ones. The alternation of residential zones, as wellas their specialized structure from a typological standpoint, seems largely de­pendent on economic patterns, and the mechanisms of speculation encourage
this alternation. This is also true in the most contemporary examples, appar­
ently even in the socialist city, which, owing to difficulties that are hard to iden­tify, at the present time does not seem to offer a basic alternative to thiseconomic-based process of urban growth. Evidently, even where the mechanismof speculation does not exist, there always tends to be an expression of prefer­ences which are difficult to resolve in the choice of where one lives. Such prob­
lems are played out within the overall framework of choices in the urban
dynamic.
It is logical and important to understand that the success of residential com­
plexes is also related to the existence of public services and collective facilities.
These make for the dispersal of ijjjvellmg areas; certainly residential concen­
tration in the ancient cities and in Imperial Rome can be plausibly explained by
the almost total absence of public tSfarfpportation and the uncommonness of pri­vate transportation. But there are some exceptions to this—for example, the an­
cient Greek city and the morphology of some northern cities.

jYet it is difficult to prove that this relationship is the determining factor. This is
to say that the form of a city has not yet been determined by a particular systemof public transportation; nor in general can such a system be expected to produce
a certain urban form or to follow it. In other words, I do not believe that the sub­way of any large city can be an object of controversy except with respect to its
technical efficiency, but the same can hardly be said of residential settlements,
which are the object of constant controversy in terms of their structure as urban
artifacts. Thus there exists a specific aspect of the housing issue that is inti­
mately bound up with the problem of the city, its way of life, its physical form
and image—that is, with its structure. This specific element has nothing to dowith any kind of technical services, for the latter do not constitute urban artifacts.
The result is that the study of the individual dwelling offers one of the bestmeans of studying the city and vice versa. Perhaps nothing so illustrates the
structural differences between a Mediterranean city such as Taranto and anorthern one such as Zurich as the different aspects of their housing; I refer par­ticularly to the morphological and structural aspects. Considerations of this typealso obtain with respect to Alpine villages and all those aggregations where theresidential artifact is in itself dominant, if not unique. Each of these examples il­lustrates Viollet-le-Duc’s assertion that the house—its order and its organiza­
tion—is not modified except over long periods of time.
Naturally one must remember that among the typological issues of housing are
included many elements that do not concern only the spatial aspects of the prob­
lem. At this point, however, I do not wish to discuss them; it is only necessary torecognize that they exist. Thus it is clear that a good amount of interesting infor­
mation can be obtained by relating the preceding discussion to certain sociologi­
cal positions and, better, political ones concerning the significance of housing as a
moment in the life of the city. It w7ould be possible, for example, to extract much
useful data from a study of the relationship that exists between information ofthis kind and specific solutions by architects.
I will now attempt to explore the relationship between the individual dwelling
and architects by taking the example of Berlin, where much documentation
exists not only on housing, as is the case for many other cities, but also on themodern districts. Since housing is one of the most important issues in the thematics of modern architecture in Germany on the level of both theory and practice,
it will be useful to see what relationships actually exist between the theoreticalformulations and what has been realized. Many outstanding contributions weremade during the interwar period relative to this problem in Germany, among
them those of Werner Hegemann, Walter Gropius, Alexander Klein, and Henryvan de Velde.

The Typological Problem of
Housing in Berlin

Since housing, like many other urban issues, concerns cities and, for better orworse, cities are something we can describe, it is useful to approach this issue inthe context of a specific city. In speaking of housing in a specific city, then, it isnecessary to try to make as few generalizations as possible. Clearly all cities will
always have something in common relative to this issue, and by inquiring how
much one artifact has in common with others, we will come closer to elaboratinga general theory.
The problem of housing typology in Berlin is extremely interesting, especially72<»

m m im*k f V.

\ r ' _«•* •*m
Ub Rural community of Appenzell
am-Rhein, Switzerland, in 181b,
Drawing by J. Jakob Mock vonHerisau.

m

m
t
“ m“

1 ji'N A A . 1

45 Plan of Berlin. 1) Gardens andparks. 2) Forests.
Inset plan, lower right, showing
phases of urban development:
1) The old center. Z) Dorotheenstadt.
3) Eighteenth-century walls.

d I v att-m ot to indicate the natterns that enwith respect to other cit'-/ 01 c tinuity in this - ’ • nBe-........ ’riable us to recognize a cei . . lifor
esidential moci - ast a: yew—
mately showing the cap- * : a fe'pient, to shed light on a ser:°=.'’’ juestw- ct e’ ring housing which in turn relateheon ■f urbn
The i a: ticular into. .the urban-condition a.
s appi hit 0s'of the cry 'V a n .13
terest of Berlin housing be
In 1936, the geographer Louis Herbert distinguished four major types of struc­tures in Berlin; these distinctions related to four zones defined by their distancefrom the historical center:i L a zone of uniform and continuous structures, such as buildings of the “largecity” type, possessing at least four stories;; 2. a zone of diversified urban structures, which could be divided into two class! es: in the center of the city, new buildings mixed with very old and low buildingsof no more than three floors; and along the edges of the center, a continuous interspersion of high and low housing, open spaces, fields, and parceled land;! 3. large areas for industry;
j 4. residential areas open at the outer edges of the city, comprised of villas andi single-family dwellings principally constructed after 1918.
Between the fourth zone and the periphery there was a continuous blending ofindustrial zones, residential zones, and villages in transformation. These exter­
nal zones differed greatly from one another, and ranged from the working-classand industrial districts of Henningsdorf and Pankow to the upper-class districtof Griinewald. On the basis of this already existing organization of Berlin,
Reinhard Baumeister in 1870 formulated the concept of zoning which later wasincorporated in the Prussian building code.
In Grt afor Berlin the morphology of the residential complexes was thus quite
varied1tlv different complexes not directly linked to one another were charac­terized by precise building types: multi-story housing, speculative housing, andsingle-family housing. This typological variety represents a very modern type ofurban structure also produced subsequently in other European cities, eventhough it never achieved such definitive articulation as in Berlin. Considered inits dual aspect of urban structure and typological structure, it is one of the princi­
pal characteristics of the German metropolis. The Siedlwiyen are a product ofthese conditions and must be so judged.
: The structure of the residential complexes can be classified according to the fol: lowing fundamental types:
j 1. residential blocks;/ 2. semi-detached houses;
3. single-family houses.
These different types present themselves in Berlin with greater frequency thanin any other European city for historical-cultural and geographical reasons. The
Gothic building, preserved for a long time in other German cities where it consti­
tuted the primary image up until the devastations of the last war, in Berlin had
disappeared almost completely by the end of the nineteenth century.
Block struct tires, derived from the police regulations of 1851, constitute one of
the most integral forms of exploitation of the urban land; these were normallydesigned around a series of courtyards facing the interior facades of the blocks.
Buildings of this type were also characteristic of such cities as Hamburg andVienna. The very large presence in Berlin of this type of housing, known as Mietkasemen or “rental barracks,” led to its characterization as a “barracks city.”"74.............................
..

46 Plan o f“Mietkaserne.,” Berlin,
dramngs by Rud Eberstadt. Above:
Example with two transverse interiorwings, 1805. Below: Later example
with one transverse wing.
It?Berlin residential and zoning
typology, after Werner Hegemann.
Above: Plan and section of a typical
Berlin house (with street facade of 20
meters and 8 courtyards 5..;; by 5.34.
meters) constructed according to thePrussian building code o f 1853-188?.
On seven residential floors, with anaverage of 1.5 to 3 people per room,and rooms from 15 to 30 square
meters, lived as many as 325 to 650
people. The two lateral walls, 56
meters long, had no windows. Center:
View and. plan o f two blocks
constructed according to the police
building code of 1887. They represent
an undoubted improvement over thecode of 1853; the blocks were in
general larger and had larger internal
courtyards. Drawings by the building
assessor Grobler. Below: Typical
blocks of three and five stories
constructed according to the buildingcode o f1925.

Courtyard housing represents one typical solution in central Europe, and assuch was adopted by many modern architects, in Vienna as in Berlin. The court­
yards were transformed into large gardens, which came to include nurseryschools and vendors’ kiosks. Some of the best examples of housing in the German
Rationalist period are associated with this form.
The Siedhmgen of the Rationalists are characterized by detached structures,and these represent a highly polemical and scientific position; their layout, which
demands a totally free division of the land, depends on solar orientation rather
than on the general form of the district. The structure of these detached build­ings is completely disengaged from the street, and precisely for this reason to­tally alters the nineteenth-century type of urban development. In these exam­
ples, public green spaces are particularly important.
The study of the cell, of the individual habitable unit, is fundamental with re­spect to the Siedlungen. All the architects who worked on shaping these resi­
dential districts and engaged in the formulation of economical building types
sought to find the exact form of Existenzrmmrrmm, the optimum dimensional
unit from the point of view of organization and economy. This is one of the mostimportant aspects of the work of the Rationalists on the problem of housing.
We can only suggest that the formulation of Existenzmininiu ni presupposed astatic relationship between a certain style of life—hypothetical even if statis­
tically verifiable—and a certain type of lodging, and this resulted in the rapid ob­solescence of the Shilla tig. It revealed itself to be a spatial conception that was
too particular, too tied to specific solutions to function as a general element avail­able for wide use in housing. ExiM enzminimum is only one aspect of a far more
complex problem in which many variables participate.
There is a strong tradition of the single-family house in Berlin residential typol­ogy. Although this is one of the most interesting aspects of Rationalist residen­tial typology, I will only mention it briefly since it demands a type of study that isparallel to but outside the bounds of our present task. In this context, Schinkel’s
projects for the Babelsberg castle for Wilhelm I and the castle and Romische
Beider of Charlottenhof take on particular importance. The plan of the Babels­
berg castle presents an ordered structure, almost rigid in the organization of its
rooms, while its external form is an attempt to relate to the surrounding context,
especially the landscape. In this project one can see how the concept of the villa
was borrowed and used as a typological model suitable for a city like Berlin. In
this sense, Schinkel’s work, constituting the transition from neoclassical models
to romantic ones, mainly by way of the English country house, offers the basis
for the early twentieth-century type of bourgeois villa.
With the spread of the villa as an urban element in the nineteenth century andthe disappearance of Gothic and seventeenth-century houses, with the substitu­
tion of ministries at the center and Mietkasemen in the peripheral zones, theurban morphology of Berlin was profoundly modified. The changing image of
Unter den Linden over the centuries is a typical ease. The seventeenth-century
street is truly a “promenade” under the lime trees: although of different heights,
the wall of houses has a total architectural unity. They are bourgeois houses,
characteristic of central Europe, constructed on narrow and deep lots and re­vealing formal elements from Gothic building. Houses of this type were charac­
teristic of Vienna, Prague, Zurich, and many other cities; their origins, often
mercantile, were linked to the earliest form of the modern city. With the trans76

formation of the cities in the second half of the nineteenth century, these houses
jp ;aced fairly rapidly, either because of building renewal or because of alt­erations in the use of areas. With their replacement came a profound modifica­tion of the urban landscape, often a rigid monumentalization, as in the case of;e? .ien Linden. For the older type of house was substituted rental housingt l ' villa.
To Schumacher, the separation between villas and rental barrack zones in thesecond half of the nineteenth century represented the crisis of urban unity in thex i " European city. The villa was sited to provide a closer relationship to na­ture, to further both social representation and social division. It refused to be, or
ir ap f"inserted intc
' nous urban image. Rental housing,.he tl'' Miming spec-' - ' - >using, was degraded and never reci ;er 'I t 'n v mu- ■,f 0 vie architect s e■.■Nonetheless, w. u i if S- hum achervw m n - correct, it must b° ^Unowle'rtedthat the villa played a large role in the typological transformations Fiat led to themodern house. The Berlin rental barracks have little to do with the single-family
Engh-a house. -.Those definition is chat of a particular urban type am1a continu­
ously de\ eloping residential type. The villa "was initially "a reduction of thepalate , (as in the case of Schinkel's Babelsberg castle), and it became inertasii "c -Taborated in its internal organization and the rationalization and distribu­
tion of its T’-culation. The work of Hermann Muthesius is Important for Berlin;’rr 1"sing on the function and the freedom of internal spaces , he developed theprinciples ot the English country house in a rational way and in the context offl­
it is significant that these typological innovations did not also lead to sensitive-architectural modifications, and that the greater internal freedom—a responseto the bourgeois way of life—was only accompanied by a more monumental
image of building and an ossification of the Schinkelesque models, wherein the
difference between residential architecture and public buildings becamemarked. In this sense the buildings of Muthesius, one of the most typical build­er? of urban Berlin around 1900, are illustrative. His preoccupations with themurtrr. house, as also expressed in his theoretical writings, concerned its
typological structure independent of its formal aspects. For the latter he ac­
cepted a sort of Germanic neoclassicism with the addition of typical elementsfrom the local traditions. This -was in direct contrast to Schinkel’s models, inwhich the house was less dependent on representational elements and classicaltypological schemes were not in conflict with the architecture.
But the introduction of representational elements into residential architecturein the late nineteenth century is typical of all the architecture of the period; itprobably corresponds to changed social conditions and the desire to endow thehouse with an emblematic significance. Certainly it corresponds to the crisps ofurban unity of which Schumacher spoke, and thus to the need for differentiation
within a structure where increasingly diverse and antagonistic social classes
lived. The villas built by the most famous architects ofthe Modern MoTCment inBerlin—Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, Hugo Haring, etc.—developed thesetypological models in a fairly orthodox way; there was clearly no sense of rupture
with their previous eclectic housing mof els, evenifthaim age of these villas wastransformed profoundly. Sociologists will have to establish the way in which thisrepresentational or emblematic element was transformed, but it is obviously aquestion of different aspects of the same phenomenon. These modern houses
79

a.
the premises of the eclectic villa to its ultimate consequences, and fromthis standpoint one can understand why architects like Muthesius and Van de
Velde were looked upon as masters: precisely because they established a general■■model, even if only by translating English or Flemish experiences.

:.All these themes of the single-family house are represented in the Siedhmg,
hfhieh by virtue of its composite character seems to have been suited best to ac­
cepting them and to giving certain tendencies a new definition. Without Hnger;ing too long on the housing problem as interpreted by the Rationalist architects,
1 would like to illustrate some examples realized in Berlin during the 1920s.
"'These are prototypical, although one could look to the equally famous examples
in Frankfurt and Stuttgart.
Clearly Rationalist urban theory is epitomized, at least with respect to the resi­
dential aspect of the problem, in the Siedlung, which is probably a sociologicalmodel even before it is a spatial one; certainly when we speak of Rationalist ur­
banism we are thinking of the urbanism of the residential district. This attitude,
however, particularly in view of its methodological implications, immediately
reveals its insufficiency. To see the urbanism of Rationalism only as the ur­
banism of the residential district means to limit the magnitude of this experienceto German urbanism of the 1920s. In fact, there are so many and such varied so­lutions that the definition is not even valid for the history of German urbanism.
Moreover, the term residential district, which as a translation of the German
Siedlung is as imprecise as it is useful, means so many different things that it ispreferable not to use it until we have first examined it carefully.14
It is therefore necessary to study actual conditions and artifacts; and given themorphology of Berlin, its richness and the particularity of its urban landscape,the importance of its villas, and so on, it is possible to conclude that here theSiedlung has its own special coherence. The close similarity between such Siedlungen as Tempelhofer Felde and Britz, or anywhere that the transformationfrom the English model is evident, renders our primary reference to the urbansite more apparent. While such examples as the Friedrich Ebert are closely
linked to Rationalist theoretical formulations, in all cases it .is difficult to go backfrom these actual images to an ideology of the Siedhmg.
Thus, while we have so far con-nR. ed the Siedlung in itself without referring to,indeed ignoring, the context in v, hich it was produced, an analysis of the ur­
banism of the Siedlung, which essentially means the housing problem in Berlin
during the 1920s, can only be undertaken with reference to the 1920 plan of
Gi ter Berlin. What was the basis of this plan? It is far closer to certain recent
models than one might imagine n general, the choice of housing was more orless independent of location; it 1 - nifests itself as a moment in an urban system
which depended on the evolution- of a transportation system that in itself em­
bodied the pulse of the city. Through zoning, it encouraged the self-formation of
the center as a governmental and administrative district, while the centers forleisure activities, sports facilities, aafi the like were pushed to outlying areas.
This model is a basic reference even today, especially where the residential dis­
trict is a more or less defined zone. Thus in the plan for Greater Berlin we find thefollowing:
1. that the Siedlungen were not planned as autonomous districts within a citv............i..................................
81■50Site plan of Kiefhoek district,
Rotterdam, J . ,/. P. Oml, 1925.
51 Gross-Siedhmg Siemensstadt,
Berlin, 1929-1981. Above: Generalplan. Below: Typical apartment planby Otto Bartning for no. 4,
Goebelstrasse, left, and by Walter
Gropius fo r no. 6, Jungfernheideweg,
right.
52 Gross-Siedhmg Britz, Berlin,
1925-1921. Above: General plan.
Below: Typical apartment plans forthe curvilinear and the rectilinear
buildings on Fritz Reuter Allee, both,by Bruno Taut.

made up of different sectcr— Q '■w ■t • ''■is tyi'*-' To VI have ■'ct- ~^,-9
revolutionary than was th- eel? /,2, that the German R a t i o n w Vef - c "■c;irVe'i the n + i " of the !^’t c r~yand its metropolitan image - ■ \ - . ‘' oftl- j o jex theFriedrichstrasse, in partic bar those >: 'dies va~- ler Feme a ~.d Bruno Taut;F chat the solution to thei •><'-V ” V Berlin ws- w enterdy - ifferent
the fundamental mode’s 't '-Pi,et1(r;]>itime u 1_ resented as well-ynthesi- '"th e new and the ~v ” d ■‘"nlya~ m V ' n- ft zt.

Garden City and V ille Radieuse

When I speak of fundamental models I am referrring to the English Garden City
and Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. Steen Eiler Rasmussen made this distinction
when he said that the “Garden City and the Ville Radieuse represent the two
great contemporary styles of modern architecture.”15 Even though this state­ment refers to all of modern architecture, it will be used here to refer to two
specific formulations of the housing problem. It is interesting that Rasmussen
indicates in his statement that the typological question is clearer and more
explicit than the ideological one, even if the former has sometimes been seen as
unvarying. His statement not only has a historiographic meaning, but it also con­cerns the value of housing within the urban structure—something which is still ageneral problem today. The two models of the Garden City and the Ville
Radieuse are seemingly the most explicit in this regard, and they are also theclearest in terms of the image of the city.
With this in mind, one could say that the Berlin Siedlungen in general—and thisis equally true for other contemporary examples like those of Frankfurt—rep­resented an attempt to set the problem of housing within the larger urban sys­tem, which was itself a product of the actual structure of the existing city and an
ideal vision of the new city. This ideal vision was based upon remembered mod­els; that is, the Siedlung which we are able to recognize and describe in the Ber­lin examples did not represent an original model; however, this does not negate
the fact that it had its own particular significance among housing models. Thus,in an urban situation such as that of Berlin and other European cities, the Sied­lung represents an attempt to mediate, more or less consciously, between two
different spatial conceptions of the city. We cannot appreciate the Siedlung as anautonomous element in the city without also concerning ourselves with the re­lationships that existed between it and the city.
With respect to the Garden City and the Ville Radieuse, it is necessary to inves­tigate the relationship between these two fundamental housing models and cer­tain polit ical and social theories. One work of this type is Carlo Doglio’s essay on
the Garden City.15Without trying to summarize Doglio’s essay—one of the mostbeautifully written works on urbanism in Italy—I would like to quote from theopening paragraphs where he outlines his precise subject as well as the difficulty
and complexity of the problem:“The sit uation is part icularly complex in the case under study because of the con­formist and substantially reactionary overlay of positivistic opinions, because ofan ambiguity that undermines not only the formal aspect of the problem but ex­
tends to its most hidden roots. When Osborn, to mention the most noted
Howardian activist, proposed the Garden City with his pioneering examples of atruly modern and human reconstruction of centers of habit ation (and thus of soci­ety, let us add), and disdainfully condemned the low-income quarters of Vienna
and Stockholm, he was pitting them against the greater validity, both aesthetic

58 Berlin, scheme of the unbuilt
areas within the city limits and thesurrounding zone, 1929, after WernerHegemann. In black, general unbuilt
areas; vertical stripes, fields;
horizontal stripes, agricultural
territory of other communities; dotted
line, territorial limits of Berlin.

I___ _____'

W^

l
_^
^
, « l C o lf a x /if

I! .~z j*— —r j -y ' ' i f

HL’JL^' ‘w5""T- 6.
\_ J ^ . * s Z L i .

i« -s“i '- j%_r- *<x__ J£-j» n

9

1

cw”

r — r - ~ j - - .J~ ^ j ^ i— - H z ~pj_=ia..f'JC?.

5Jf General plan of Hampstead
Garden Suburb, London, RaymondUnwin and Barry Parker, 1906,
Central zone in collaboration with
Edwin Lutyens,and social, that those quarters had historically . . . but when such solutions as
Leiehworth and Welwyn are dismissed with Marxist formulas not only becauseof their form (and the practically immovable content that derived from it) but
also because of the type of structural proposal they implied (city and country, de­centralization, etc.), then one can only say that in spite of everything, those solu­
tions were more alive, more loaded with ferment and future than so many others
that have been offered ever since.”1'
Since this subject would take us too far afield, I only note in passing how the
study of the relationship between housing and family, with all of its cultural andpolitical implications, found interesting application in so-called communitarianideology. Here, the relationship between the local community and a form of
democracy, between the spatial dimension as a moment in the social life of thecommunity and its political life, is well illustrated. The problem of housing obvi­
ously emerges as a central theme in a relationship of this type.
On the other hand, where the city as a whole seems to be of primary importance,
where density and size are predominant, the housing problem seems to be of lessimportance, or at least becomes less focused with respect to the other functionsof urban life. For example, the great works of beautification and enlargement
undertaken in the nineteenth-century city, although often arising out of wide­
spread speculation, could be enjoyed by all of the population and were a positiveelement in their way of life. Few definitions so clearly recognize this “urban ef­
fect” as that of Hellpach, who, in contrast to his times, affirmed the validity of
1re in the great metropolis: “For the generation shaped by the large cities, itleans not only existential space, place for living, market; but it can also become
biologically and sociologically that which most profoundly represents the scene
where one’s life unfolds: one’s native land.”1*
T re is a parallel between these theories and the residential districts built inthe last sixty years. Sometimes, as in the case of the German Siedlungen and the
Italian and English examples, the translations have been quite clear. We canthink of many Italian residential districts where communities that were nonui n, detached, almost untouched by the city, turning imvard on themselves
and their neighbors, were proposed again and again, only to be superseded byones where a strongly plastic architectural image which was intended to change
the urban image violently was preferred. We could also cite the low-density
schemes, later repudiated, of the first new towns; and finally, the experimentswith new kinds of residential complexes, such as those proposed by Alison andPeter Smithson and Denys Lasdun and exemplified by the blocks of Sheffield.
The English architects rediscovered a constant theme in residential typologicalinod-L whmi they realized that the breaking up of slums brought with it a simulcw- breakup of eommunitk- which had traditionally lived in high-density’ -a - w "inch, without
ling substantial changes, were unable to estab-■ r -w loots automatically r le low-density, suburban areas to which they
- ■- .^..'rigned. The Sm kiw .' - rediscovered the concept of the street, and in
tL ' J 1An Lane project or p ~ed horizontal passageways on three levels, consthw’Lg pedestrian accesw "f.med th each individual dwelling.
Formulations of this type a: e caj ressed clearly in the Sheffield residential Com­dex, where giant slabs a . .... 1in an elevated position over the city, thereby
bliging any future development to relate to them. The very genesis of this work
sstifies to its relationship with social theory, for example the necessity of recovI85

ering the street as a stage set for the community; “The street [is a] rectangular
stage set where encounters, gossip, games, fights, jealousies, courtship, anddisplays of pride occur. ”19At the same time, the large blocks at Sheffield recall ina new way the great Corbusian image of the Unite d’Habitation in Marseille.

P r im a r y E l e m e n t s

The concept of the study area and the dwelling area proposed in the preceding;';
pages is insufficient by itself to characterize the formation and evolution of the 1city; to the concept of area must be added the totality of specific urban elementsthat have functioned as nuclei of aggregation. We have called these urban ele­ments, which are of a dominant nature, primary elements because they partici­
pate in the evolution of the city over time in a permanent way, often becoming
identified with the major artifacts constituting the city. The union of these prim­ary elements with an area, in terms of location and construction, permanence ofplan and permanence of building, natural artifacts and constructed artifacts,
constitutes a whole which is the physical structure of the city.
To define primary elements is by no means easy. When we study a city, we findthat the urban whole tends to be divided according to three principal functions:
housing, fixed activities, and circulation. “Fixed activities” include stobes, pub­lic and commercial buildings, universities, hospitals, and schools. In addition,
the urban literature also speaks of urban equipment, urban standards, services,
and infrastructures. Some of these terms are defined or definable, others less so,but for the most part each author uses them in a particular context to provide thenecessary clarity. To simplify matters I will consider fixed activities as included
within primary elements; I would say that the relationship of the house to theresidential area is like that of fixed activities to primary elements.
I use the term fixed activities because this notion is generally accepted. But even
if in speaking of fixed activities and primary elements we partly refer to the samething, the two terms presuppose entirely different ways of conceptualizing theurban structure. What they have in common is that both refer to the public, col­lective character of urban elements, to the characteristic fact of public things
that they are made by the collective for the collective and are by nature essen­tially urban. Whatever reduction of urban reality we make, we always arrive at
the collective aspect; it seems to constitute the beginning and end point of thecity.
On the other hand, the relationship between primary elements and residential
areas corresponds, in the architectural sense, to the operative distinction madeby sociologists between the public sphere and the private sphere as characteris­tic elements of the formation of the city. The definition given by Hans Paul
Bahrdt in his Die rnoderne Grossstadt best illustrates the meaning of primaryelements; “Our thesis goes like this: a city is a system in which all life, including
daily life, reveals a tendency to polarize, to unfold in terms of social aggregations
which are either public or private. The public sphere and the private sphere de­velop in a dose relationship without losing their polarization , while sectors of lifethat cannot be characterized either as ‘public’ or ‘private’ lose their meaning.
The more strongly the polarization is exerted and the closer the interchange be­
tween the public and private spheres, the more ‘urban’the life of an urban aggre­
gate is from the sociological viewpoint. In the opposite case, an aggregate willdevelop the character of a city to a lesser degree.”20
86

’WTtcrve. isiderthes,v.'iw
fprima ~T= em c'in < " ■'*- i A ~ -iendHite of tl eir function, u ^'esi-Zi-vow closely F vy ai t: Ae> fi- * - ■1 . >v ore.sercein -e city. They p ^ s t^ - ? Tab e “in the- w ebe- " w- - ■' I’^ '- s e n den: on ’eir place in :V city. In this sense a q stones' wfiA.... - . ^ * <erjccorl as a primary unban artita” ; it may ne w-ionnecw t>-. ■ *1, » nnctutc, or ver * ire :J-:_ on fun- ■'on-' clif ' - -om-r f ' - v t
defiwiw, ut>‘ s an urban ar fa<
ner■reira i ii <■nsU
T "s sense, mom ne- ’way” 1 111 primary elements are not only 'nonuni^nt.-, ’ust a s . it, ^ . 0 , 0
1 n ' -d act, rriet, in c general sen-t - ey a i- th ?nts <v'<]>''<) y:s-H01 urbanizations 0 city, ana thee also characttrtzeri ~ p ■j
- Miisl transformation in ?n area iarg“"th'jn " n e-ry . O t t e r . w - - - 3 - 1i;” i their presence car. he identmed one b, eir inrc*^ ' r *< 1 - > vw
-icy coincide with nxed act.vtie-i bvttbee apidh ta r t - >a rm\plie. Frequently they are not even physical, constructed, measurable artr acts; for example, sometimes the importance of an event itself “gives place” to
1 1 -:.1 ial .ransformations of a site. I will take up this problem later in terms of the! heme of locus,

I bus primary elements play an effective role in the dynamic of the city, and as aresult of them and the way they are ordered, the urban artifact acquires its own
quality, which is principally a function of its placement, its unfolding of a precise
action, and its individuality. Architecture is the ultimate moment in this process
ind also what emerges from this complex structure.
In this way, the urban artifact and its architecture are one and the same, to­gether constituting a work of art. “To speak of a beautiful city is to speak of goodarchitecture”21 because it is the latter which makes real the aesthetic intention­
ally of urban artifacts. But the analysis of what is real in this context can only be
carried out by examining specific artifacts. To reach an understanding of urban
artifacts that is verifiable in a historical context, it will now be instructive to lookat two examples drawn from urban history.

The Roman or Gallo-Roman cit ies of the West developed according to a continu­
ous dynamic that exists in urban elements. This dynamic is still present today intheir form. When at the end of the Pax Romana the cities marked their bound­aries by erecting walls, they enclosed a smaller surface area than the Roman
cities had. Monuments and even well-populated areas were abandoned outsideof these walls; the city enclosed only its nucleus. At Nimes the Visigoths trans­
formed an amphitheater into a fortress, which became “a little- city of two
thousand inhabitants; four gates corresponding to the four cardinal directions
gave access to ftee ity , and inside therelwere two churches^ Subsequently thecity began to develop again ardond this monument. A similar phenomenon oc­
curred in the city of Arles.
The vicissitudes of these cities are extraordinary. They immediately lead us toconsiderations about scale and suggest that the quality of artifacts is indepen­
dent of their dimensions. The amphitheater at Nimes bad a precise and un­
equivocal form as well as function It was not thought of as an indifferent con­tainer, but rather was highly precise in its structure, its architecture, and its
form. But a succession.of external events at a dramatic moment in history re1
87

The Dynamic of Urban Elements

versed its function, and a theater became a city. This theater-city functioned likea fortress and was adapted to enclose and defend its inhabitants.
In another example, that of Vila Vicosa in Portugal, a city developed between
the walls of a castle. These walls comprised its exact boundaries as well as its
landscape. The presence of this city—its meaning, its architecture, and the ac­tual way it came to be defined—is a record of its transformations. Only thepreexisting condition of a closed and stable form permitted continuity and the
production of successive actions and forms. In this way, form, the architecture ofurban artifacts, emerges in the dynamic of the city.
It is in this sense that I speak of the Roman cities and the forms left by them: forexample, the aqueduct at Segovia that crosses the city like a geographic artifact ,the Merida bridge in Estremadura, the Pantheon, the Forum, the theaters.
Over time these elements of the Roman city became transformed and their func­
tions altered, and when looked at from the point of view of urban artifacts, theysuggest many typological considerations. Another outstanding example is Six­
tus V’s project for the transformation of the Coliseum into a wool mill; here too
the extraordinary form of the amphitheater is involved. On the ground floor
laboratories were planned, and on the upper levels there was to have been hous­
ing for the workers; the Coliseum would have become a huge workers’ quarterand a rationally organized building. Domenico Fontana had this to say about it:“Already they have begun to remove the earth surrounding it, & to level thestreet that comes from Torre dei Conti & goes to the Coliseum, so that it would
all be flat, as today one can still see the vestiges of this removal; & they worked
there with sixty horse carriages, & a hundred men, so that [if] the Pope had lived
one [more] year, the Coliseum would have been reduced to housing.”22

How does the city grow? The original nucleus, enclosed within the walls, ex­tends itself according to its own specific nature: and to this formal individuation
corresponds a political individuation. On the outskirts of the city develop theborghi of the Italian city, the faubourgs of the French city.
Milan, whose monocentric structure is wrongly attributed to a kind of spreadingout of the historical center, was defined clearly throughout the medieval periodby the continued presence of the Gallo-Roman center as well as by convents andreligious buildings. The persistence of the borghi is so strong that the principal
one, San Gottardo, came to be called in dialect simply el burg, and still is, with noother name.
In Paris, outside the Cite, monasteries, mercantile centers, and the university
grew up on the two banks of the Seine. Around these elements, centers of urbanlife took form; within the abbatial districts the bourgs formed. The abbacy of St.
Germain-des-Pres, of Merovingian origin, dates to the sixth century, although it
appears in documents only around the twelfth century. This bourg represents
such a strong urban artifact within the city that it is still recognizable today inthe plan of Paris. It sits at the convergence of five streets looking toward the in­tersection of the Croix-Rouge; there the entrance to the bourg of St. Germaindes-Pres was located, and the place was called le chef de la b ile or le bout de lavilleP

88

57a, 57b Two registry maps of theamphitheater. Mimes, France, 1782,
above, and 1809, below, indicating
proprietors and trades.

59

58 Prajf'-i for thi tra nsfoniiation of
the C o l 01 it< R ook OPo o thrum
forcKo >■fK'if) -t, 5 , „to d < ju<11to Carlo
Fontana, 1707.
59 Pantheon, Rome. Left: Sectional
rendering. Right: Plan. Bothengravings from the early eighteenth
century.
60 Pope Sixtus V’s project for thetransformation of the Coliseum inRome into a wool factory, withworkers’ apartments (marked “D ”),
1590.
|

A monument stands at a center. It is usually surrounded by buildings and be­comes a place of attraction. We have said that it is a primary element , but of a
special type: that is, it is typical in that it summarizes all of the questions posedby the city, but it is special because by virtue of its form its value goes beyond
economics and function.
Thus, even if all the monumental structures of the city have a meta-economic
character, they are also outstanding works of art, and they are characterized
above all by this aspect. They constitute a value that is stronger than environ­ment and stronger than memory. It is significant a city has never intentionallydestroyed its own greatest works of architecture; the Pazzi Chapel or St. Peter’s
has never needed defending.
It is also significant that this value is the predominant characteristic of the cityand the unique instance where the entire structure of the urban artifact is sum­
marized in its form. The monument has permanence because it already exists ina dialectical position within urban development; it is understood in the city as
something that arises either at a single point in the city or in an area of the city.
In the first case , that of primary elements, the ultimate form is most important;in the second, that of the residential district, the nature of the land seems to be
most important. We must remember that a theory of this type takes into accountnot only a knowledge of the city in terms of its parts but also its growth, andwhile it attributes maximum value to the precise empirical experience of pri­mary elements and their urban surroundings, it increasingly diminishes the im­portance of the plan and the overall pattern of the city, which must be studied
from other points of view.

As we have just seen, the significance of primary elements in the evolution of theancient city demonstrates the importance of the form of urban artifacts, that is
to say, of the architecture of the city. The permanence of this form or its value asa reference is entirely independent of both the specific function for which it was
designed and its coincidence with the continuity of urban institutions. For thisreason, I am deliberately emphasizing the form and the architecture of the cityrather than its institutions. It is a distortion of history to imagine that institu­
tions are maintained and transmitted without interruption or alteration; a posi­tion of this sort ends up glossing over the real trauma of the city’s moments oftransformation.
The enormous contribution that Henri Pirenne24 made to the study of the cityand in particular the relationships between the city and civic institutions attests
to the value that comes to be attributed to monuments and places, to the physicalreality of the city as a permanent moment of political and institutional coming
into being. Monuments and all urban constructions are reference signs which
over time acquire different meanings. “Large towns and boroughs . . . haveplayed an essential role in the history of cities. They have been, so to speak,stones of anticipation. It was around their walls that cities took shape, from theearliest appearance of the economic renaissance, the first symptoms of which
could be detected at the beginning of the tenth century.”2’5Even if the city did
not exist in a social, economic, or legal sense, it is a significant fact that its re­birth began around the walls of the boroughs and the ancient Roman cities.
Pirenne demonstrates how the classical city knew nothing analogous to the local
and particularistic bourgeois city of the Middle Ages. In the classical world.
92

urban life was the same as national life; the municipal system in antiquity thus
.was identical to the constitutional one. Rome, extending her domination to theMediterranean world, made her colonized cities outposts of the Imperial system;
this system survived the Germanic and Arab invasions, but over time the cities
completely changed their function. This change is essential for comprehending
their subsequent evolution.

At first the Church established its dioceses according to the existing districts of
the Roman cities; the city in this way became the bishop’s seat, and thereby
caused the exodus of merchants, the decrease of commerce, and the end of interurban relationships which, having no influence on the ecclesiastical organiza­
tion, also had no impact on the urban structure. Cities identified themselves withthe prestige of the Church and were enriched by donations while maintaining
their alignment with the Carolingians in matters of administration; so that on
the one hand their wealth increased and on the other their moral prestige grew.
With the fall of the Carolingiaii empire, feudal princes continued to respect theauthority of the Church, and even during the anarchy of the tenth and eleventh
centuries, the dominance of the bishops was so absolute that it extended natur­
ally to the residential districts as well, that is, to the ancient Roman cities.
Pirenne indicates how this transfer of power actually saved the cities from ruineven when tenth-century economic conditions gave them no reason to exist,
since with the disappearance of the merchants they no longer had any value tolay society. Around them the great agricultural domains existed autonomously,
and the State, constituted on a purely agricultural basis, was not interested intheir survival. Thus, although the castles of the princes and counts were in the
countryside, the bishops were tied to the city precisely through the immobile na­
ture of the ecclesiastical office, and this ultimately saved the city from ruin. In
this way the city survived—as the physical place of the bishop’s seat, not as amatter of the continuity of urban institutions.
. Pirenne’s analysis, the example of Rome becomes extraordinarily revealing:“The imperial city became the pontifical city. Its historic prestige enhanced thatof St. Peter’s successor. Isolated, he appeared larger and at once became more
powerful. One saw only him . . . and continuing to live in Rome, one made it his
Rome, as each bishop also made the city in which he lived his city.”2*’i c ’( A j w t it ' u v
the origin of the modern city? For- •!!-- r d» _ f x.
- formation of the medieval city to the' me" «i ime al«btc. the <a-t t, m the market. The cities along with theirij'wc-tpw
w w 'n ir i int nf }ip p , momic and industrial reawakening
oi E 1 Lrd 1- l ' v u * 1’. 1, so to speak, in the old Romanciti-*-'^ i”<" ernes, were not artificial creations;on t l <- • i ■"m +<A'i d1' ' us of geographic order without
whici i iai_
i - d isper. Situated at the interseclon o r - ” “ 1- * —xnturies the roads of mankind,my w
d—n d * 11t , . m i i ‘d life again. “The cities which
im tinj i, -- cti »<ii ardly more than the center of
1 ge ee 1 < w J’ •* ^> „o\apid and inevitable transforn Aon, r ’ 1 „ u
j ti <_i -cter. “ " 1 a transformation could not
h e occm ivf -wtept c nfi n or around the a went cities, since these rep­resented a man-made complex, a halfway point between artifice and nature,
1 '93

81 Schematic plan of the City of
Loudon.
The City, business district
Upper-income district
Middle-income district
Working-class district
Low-density zone
Limits of the County of London
Principal roods
Principal railroad lines

r ich, as Pirenne affirms in reference to the Roman cities, man could not easily
II regard in the course of his development. In the utilization of the bodies of theold cities, there is at once an economic and a psychological rationale. They be­come both a positive value and a point of reference.
This subject of the transformation of the ancient cities is also relevant with re-peot to the modern question of the evolution from the bourgeois city to themedalist one; here too it already seems certain that moments of institutionalchange cannot necessarily be related to the evolution of form. Thus to postulate a
simple relationship between the two, as some would like, is an abstraction that isn. responsive to the reality of urban processes. What is clear is that primaryelements and monuments, because they directly represent the public sphere, acouire an increasingly necessary and complex character which is not so easily
modified. The residential quarter, being an area, has a more dynamic character,but it nevertheless depends on the life of these primary elements and monu­
ments and participates in the system constituted by the city as a whole.

The relationship between the dwelling areas and the primary elements of a city
is responsible for configurating that city in a specific way. If this can be de­monstrated in cities in which historical events have always acted to unify dispa­
rate elements, it is even more apparent in the case of cities that have never man­aged to integrate in an overall form the urban artifacts that constitute them:thus London, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Bari, and many other cities.
In Bari,28 for example, the ancient city and the walled city constitute two ex­tremely different, almost unrelated artifacts. The ancient city has never beenenlarged; its nucleus is completely defined as a form. Only its principal street,
which served to link it to the surrounding region, emerges intact and permanentin the texture of the walled city. In cases of this type there is always a close con­nection between primary elements and the area; often this connection becomesan urban artifact so absolutely predominant that it constitutes a characteristic of
the city, for the city is invariably the sum of its artifacts.
Morphological analysis, one of the most important instruments for studying thecity, brings these aspects into full view. Amorphous zones do not exist in thecity, or where they do, they are moments of a process of transformation; they
represent inconclusive times in the urban dynamic. Where phenomena of thistype appear very frequently, as in the suburbs of the American city, the pro­
cesses of transformation have usually been accelerated, since high density puts
greater pressure on land usage. T-’.-se transformations are realized through thedefinition of a precise area, and thi- is when the process of redevelopment occurs.
Th’- > ^ oday characterizes a tre a t city like London: “The idea of the precing ’ ipetei Hall, “Hst be on instinctively applied by builders and architev
ies, mxfoi md Cambridge Colleges, in London’s Inns
vfCou’’ i V w- or " riomsbury where through-traffic was kept
it by gc - ~‘ vps instituted the basis for Patrick Abercrom- ’sfamoU' - . ~i lin e r and Bloomsbury; the road system was toe been rc 1 M 1 > “ - pf1 dipal streets would encircle the blocks andpi - rent throi ri -J on^ et rating.

95

Processes of Transformation

A distinctive characteristic of all cities, and thus also of the urban aesthetic, isthe tension that has been, and still is, created between areas and primary ele­ments and between one sector of the city and another. This tension arises fromthe differences between urban artifacts existing in the same place and must be
measured not only in terms of space but also of time. By time I mean both the his­
torical process, in which phenomena of a permanent kind are present with all
their implications, and a purely chronological process, in which such phenomena
can be measured against urban artifacts of successive periods.
In this way, formerly peripheral parts of large cities in transformation often ap­
pear beautiful: London, Berlin, Milan, and Moscow reveal entirely unexpected
perspectives, aspects, and images. The different times more than the immense
spaces of the Moscow periphery, by virtue of an aesthetic pleasure that resides
in the very nature of the artifacts, give us the real image of a culture in transfor­
mation, of a modification taking place in the social structure itself.
Of course, we cannot so easily entrust the values of today’s cities to the natural
succession of artifacts. Nothing guarantees an effective continuity. It is impor­tant to know the mechanism of transformation and above all to establish how we
can act in this situation—not, I believe, through the total control of this processof change in urban artifacts, but through the control of the principal artifacts
emerging in a certain period. Here the question of scale, and of the scale of inter­
vention, comes to the fore.
The transformation of particular part s <,t the city ever tim° is very H m i, linked
to the objective phenomenon of the dcv«/ of certain ~ nes. This phenomenon,
generallyyeferred to in the English pH American hw-m-n ^ as “ob-nk>cence,”
is increasingly evident in large modern cities, and it has soecial characteristics inthe large American cities, where it has been closely studied. For our purposes,
we will define this phenomenon as characterized by a group of buildings—which
may be in the neighborhood of a certain street or may constitute an entire dis­
trict—that has outlived the dynamics of land use in the surrounding area (thisdefinition has a much broader scope than some others). Such areas of the city do
not follow life; often they remain islands for a long time with respect to the gen­eral development, bearing 'witness to different periods in the city and at thesame time configurating large areas of “reserve.” This phenomenon of obsoles­
cence illustrates the validity of studying areas of the city as urban artifacts; we
can then relate the transformations of such areas to the study of specific events,
as we will see later in the theories of Halbwachs.
The hypothesis of the city as an entity constituted of many parts which are com­plete in themselves is, it seems to me, one which truly permits freedom o f choice;and freedom of choice becomes a fundamental issue because of its implications.
For example, we do not believe that questions concerning values can be decided
in terms of abstract architectural and typological formulations—for example,
high-rise or low-rise housing. Such questions can only be resolved at the con­crete level of urban architecture. We are fully convinced that in a society wherechoices are free, the real freedom of the citizen rests in being able to choose one
solution rather than another.
j-96

Geography or history
according to what we seeor ivhen we think.
Carlos Barral30
In the preceding pages we have been primarily'concerned with two issues: first,
the dwelling area and primary elements, and second the city as a structure ofparts. I have also dealt with monuments, with the various uses of urban ele­ments, and with ways of reading the city. Many of these concerns were
methodological in that they were aimed at defining a system of classification.
Perhaps I have not always chosen the most direct approach; but I have tried toremain faithful to the studies I consider most valid and, in part, to order them. I
have already remarked that there is nothing new in any of this. What is impor­tant is that behind these considerations are real artifacts which testify to the re­lationship of man to the city.
I have also put forward the hypothesis of the city as a man-made object and awork of art; we can observe and describe this man-made object and seek to un­derstand its structural values. The history of the city is always inseparable fromits geography; without both we cannot understand the architecture that is thephysical sign of this “human thing.” “The art of architecture,” wrote Viollet-leDuc, “is a human creation,” and again, “Architecture, this h uman creation, is, infact, only an application of principles born outside us and which we appropriate
to ourselves by observation. ”31 These principles are in the city; the stone land­
scape of building—of “brick and mortar,” in C.B, Fawcett’s expression—sym­
bolizes the continuity of a community.32 Sociologists have studied collective
knowledge and urban psychology; geography and ecology have opened broad
vistas. But is not architecture essential for understanding the city as a work ofart?
More precise studies of specific important moments in urban history are needed
to clarify the question of the architecture of the city as a total work of art. As
Bernard Berenson recognized, even without developing the idea, Venetian art is
explained completely by the city itself: “There was nothing the Venetians would
not do to add to its [the State’s] greatness, glory, and splendor. It was this which
led them to make of the city itself that wondrous monument to the love and awe
they felt for their Republic, which still rouses more admiration and gives more
pleasure than any other one achievement of the art-impulse in man. They were
not content to make their city the most beautiful in the world; they performed
ceremonies in its honor partaking of all the solemnity of religious rites.”33 Suchan observation is true for all cities; it refers to artifacts, and while these are man­ifested in different ways and wi h different consequences, they can still be com­pared. No city ever lacked a sense of its own individuality.

■n disting”1'bum^~T ’"'ncipal artifacts *’ and in the city, the n-” 1!. j area and t o em am eu n- -w we have stiorw denied that hour- c is
' miething amm-phous and iwanmwry. Thus, instead >” focusing on the finafehin whi^ p*'0 dm w-*w ; " necessary aecewi lodation to differ-"f mcial' Msses andg Pfo s-ro fr-fi^ally observabw over time, we ha”' j mstitmwd the tw cerv rt' “Vw cbamct ru b e area. Entii ° ■arts of the city mm nest
conaete signs n+' their w«;. ol lite. >hen- own form, and their memory, and theseareas may be distinguished xrom one another for the purpose of investigating;
97

Geography and History;
the Human Creation

62 Plans of two Roman fortified
settlements which became a type ofurban formation. Above: Daganiya,
Jordan. Below: El-Leggun, Jordan.

their characteristics morphologically and possibly also historically and linguisti­cally, In this context, the study of areas in the city raises the issues of locus andscale.
In contrast to the area, the primary element evolves and should be studied as ane 3i e w' •• - . - ecelerates the process of the urban dynamic. Such anelement can be interpreted solely from a functional point of view as a fixed activ­
ity of the collective and for the collective, but more importantly it can be seen as
an actual urban artifact, identifiable with an event or an architecture that is cap­able of “summariziiig” the city. As such it is already the history and the idea ofthe city in the process of constructing itself—a “state of mind,” according toPark’s definition.
As the core of the hypothesis of the city as a man-made object, primary elements
have an absolute clarity; they are distinguishable on the basis of their form and ina certain sense their exceptional nature within the urban fabric: they are charac­
teristic, or better, that which characterizes a city. If one looks at the plan of any
city, these immediately identifiable forms leap out as black spots. The same istrue from a volumetric point of view7.
Although I stated earlier that monuments are not the only primary elements, I
seem always to end up using them as examples. For instance, I spoke of the thea­
ter at Arles, the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, and so on. I am not sure that I
can fully clarify this point but let me introduce a different argument. We know7that many geographical or urbanistic texts classify cities into tw7o large families:
planned and unplanned. “In urban studies it is usual toemphasize as primary thedifference between planned and unplanned towns. The former have been con­ceived and founded as towns, whereas the latter have emerged without con­scious planning. They are settlements that have grown and been adapted to dis­charge urban functions. Their urban character has appeared in the course of
their growth, and their layout is essentially the product of accretion of buildings
about some pre-urban nucleus.”'34 Thus writes Arthur E. Smailes in his text on
urban geography, as have many others.
Prbounded in this statement is securely
m 4g"c.„ rh ->t it has a relative concreteness; it inh
7 i j —vfv 7+lr ” and can be debated from many points
T
1,5= 1 the genesis of urban artifacts that in
ildings around some pre-urban nuci7u" f- " * 4 ! - Thu , i ’v - -epresents a beginning of the process
0 , ’ a /oi ( ’ 7 >n_,i*r i- ji <instituted together wdth all of its val­
ues.
1

_
r'fd, ' j .; i i jm7

C o’unary element, the equal of a monum ei 7 17 - 3 v " i’ ^ 7 7' i' 1 >’s of a planned city is itself also a prinar ' m v 1 5 - - i > 17 u r
t1 • t initiates an urban process or charac1eiiz- „— _ - ,- aid. xHe notion that the existence of a planlakt 1
gidq Tuned spatial solution of a city from an overall perspective isvery much debatable; the plan is always but one moment of the city in the same
way that any other primary element as.
Whether the city grows around an ordered or disordered nucleus or around asingle artifact, then, does not make much difference (although it surely raises
different morphological issues); both these conditions tend to constitute charac1
99

teristie artifacts. This is what happened in Leningrad, and this is what is hap­pening in Brasilia, two examples which merit further study.
Scholars like Chabot and Poete never attempted to draw' any distinction be­
tween the plan and single artifacts, although Chabot rightly considered the plan
to be the theoretical foundation of ali urban operations. However, Lavedan at­tached greater importance to such a distinction, as was only logical after his longwork on the architecture of the city and on the urban structure of French cities.
If the enormous efforts of the French school had been accompanied more often
by attempts at a synthesis like Lavedan’s, we would today have marvelous
material at our disposal; however, that Albert Demangeon’s studies on the cityand its housing did not take into account the material gathered by Viollet-le-Duc
is a problem that goes beyond the lack of an interdisciplinary relationship—it has
to do with an attitude toward reality.
However, Lavedan should not be reproached for insisting on the architecturala sp e c t since this is precisely the greatest merit of his work, and I do not think I

am distorting his thinking in saying that when he speaks •<fthe “plan” of a city, hemeans the architecture. In discussing the origins of the city, he wrote, “whether
it is a matter of a spontaneous city or a planned city, the trace of its plan, the de­sign of its streets , is not due to chance. There is an obedience to rules, whether
unconscious in the first case or conscious and open in the .second. .There always
exists the generating element of the plan.”'"’ With this formulation Lavedan re­stores .to the phm its value as an wiginating element or component.
It might appear that in attempting to explain the difference between a primaryelement and a monument I have introduced another argument concerning theplan, which rather than making my thesis more precise has ultimately enlarged
it. In fact, this enlargement permits us to return to our opening hypothesis,
which we have analyzed from different viewpoints: the city is not by its nature acreation that can be reduced to a single basic idea; its processes of formation are
many and varied.
The city is constituted of parts, and each one of these parts is characteristic; italso possesses primary elements around which buildings aggregate. Monuments
are fixed points in the urban dynamic, and as such are stronger than economic
laws. However, primary elements, in their immediate form, are not necessarily
so. In this sense, the essence of monuments is their destiny, although it is obvi­
ously hard to say at what point, this destiny can be predicted. In other words, it isnecessary to consider both permanent urban artifacts and primary elements
which may as yet have less permanence as essential to the constitution of thecity, and this has to do with both architecture and politics. Thus, when primaryelements assume the value of monuments either because of their intrinsic value
or because of their particular historical situation, it is possible to relate this fact
precisely to the history and the life of the city.

Once again, all these considerations are important only because behind them are
artifacts that show their direct connection to man. For the elements constituting
the city—these urban artifacts which are by nature characteristic and charac­terizing and as much a product of human activity as a collective artifact—are
among the most authentic human testimonies. Naturally when we speak of these
artifacts we are speaking of their architecture, their meaning as a human crea­tion in itself. A F rench scholar recently wrote of the crisis of the French univer100

sity that It seemed to him that nothing could more tangibly express this crisis
than the absence of a building that “was” the French university. That Paris, al­though the cradle of the great European universities, never managed to “con­struct” such a place, signaled an internal weakness of the system. “The confron­tation with this prodigious architectural phenomenon shocked me. A dis­quietude was born, as well as a suspicion which had to be confirmed, when I sub­sequently visited Coimbra, Salamanca, Gottingen, and Padua again. . . . It is
the architectural nothingness of the French university which made me under­
stand its intellectual and spiritual nothingness.”30
Could one not say that the cathedrals and churches scattered throughout theworld together with St. Peter’s constitute the universality of the Catholic
Church? I am not speaking of the monumental character of these works of ar­chitecture, nor of their stylistic aspects: I refer to their presence, their construc­tion, their history, in other words, to the nature of urban artifacts. Urban ar­
tifacts have their own life, their own destiny. When one goes to a charitable in­stitution, the sadness is almost something concrete. It is in the walls, the court­
yards, the rooms. When the Parisians destroyed the Bastille, they were erasing
the centuries of abuse and sadness of which the Bastille was the physical form.
At the beginning of this chapter,I spoke of the quality of urban artifacts. Of theauthors who have proposed this type of study, Levi-Strauss has gone further
than anyone in defining the idea of quality and in stating that however rebellious
our Euclidean spirit has become to a qualitative conception of space, its exist­
ence does not depend on us. “Space has values peculiar to itself, just as sounds
and scents have their colors and feelings their weight. The search for correspon­
dences of this sort is not a poet’s game or an act of mystification . . . These cor­
respondences offer the scholar an entirely new terrain, and one which may still
have rich yields.”37 This concept of quality in urban artifacts has alreadyemerged from actual research, from the concreteness of the real. The quality ofarchitecture—the quality of the human creation—is the meaning of the city.
Thus, after investigating a number of possible modes of understanding the city,
we must return to the most intimate, the most private characteristics of urban
artifacts; and with these aspects, those most closely bound up with architecture,
I will begin the next chapter.
To conclude, I wish to emphasize that it is quality and destiny which distinguishmonuments, in the geographical sense, from primary elements. With these two'parameters as guides, studies on both thebehavior of human groups and the in­dividual in the city can be much enriched. I have mentioned the efforts of theAmerican Lynch, although along different lines; it is to be hoped that such ex­perimental research will be taken further and will yield important material for
all aspects of urban psychology.
7 d< ',‘ntifPt <t <>ffinality can also cast light on the concepts of area and boundaries,■i i iLucai ten wi'.iy aw. frontier—concents for which neither the myth of race
Wt commuritv <r languages or i ‘-her’-ms sufficiently accounts. I am only
su y t-'t’rg
aw” ’line for *•*—-arch; many contributions are boundto emerge from pyeboFgy, sociology, and urban ecology. However, I am con­vinced urn ’ he- vvi'l uK>-,)onoy mekning <<nce they pay more attention to physi­
cal realities and to die architect'll rof oui cities. We can no longer concern our­selves with the architecture of ' city—in other words, architecture Itself—
without a general framework in wirch to relate urban artifacts. It is in this sensethat I have spoken of the need for a new treatment.
101

I have already used the term locus several times in this book. The locus is a re­lationship between a certain specific location and the buildings that are in it. It isat once singular and universal.

Chapter 3
The Individuality of Urban
Artifacts; Architecture

The selection of the location for any building, as also for any city, was of primary
importance in the classical world. The “situation”—the site—was governed by
the genius loci, the local divinity, an intermediary who presided over all thatwas to unfold in it. The concept of locus was also present at all times for thetheoretician of the Renaissance, even if by the time of Palladio and later Milizia
its treatment took on an increasingly topographical and functional aspect. In thewritings of Palladio, one can still sense the living presence of the classical world,
the vital secret of a relationship between old and new. More than just a functionof a specific architectural culture, this relationship is manifest in works like theVilla Malcontenta and the Villa Rotonda, in which it is precisely their “situation”
which conditions our understanding. Viollet-le-Duc, too, in his efforts to inter­
pret architecture as a series of logical operations based on a few rational princi­
ples, admitted the difficulty of transposing a work of architecture from one place
to another. In his general theory of architecture, the locus participates as aunique and physical place.

The Locus

More recently, a geographer like Sorre could suggest the possibility of a theoryof spatial division1 and, based on this, postulate the existence of “singularpoints.” The locus, so conceived, emphasizes the conditions and qualities within
undifferentiated space which are necessary for understanding an urban artifact.
Along similar lines, Halbwachs, in the last years of his life, concerned himself
with the topography of legendary places. He argued that during different
periods holy places have presented different physiognomies, and in these can befound the images of the various Christian groups who constructed and situatedthem according to their aspirations and their needs.
Let us consider for a moment the space of the Catholic religion. Since the Church
is indivisible this space covers the whole earth. In such a universe the concept of
the individual location becomes secondary, as does that of the boundary or fron­tier. Space is determined with respect to a single center, the seat of the Pope;but this same earthly space is nothing but a moment, a small part of the universal
space which is the place of the communion of saints. (This idea is similar to that of
the transcendence of space as it is understood by the mystics.) Even in this total
and undifferentiated framework, where the idea of space itself is nullified andtranscended, “singular points” exist; these are the places of pilgrimage, thesanctuaries where the faithful enter into more direct communication with God.
In this way the sacraments become signs of grace in the Christian doctrine.
Through their visible parts they signify or indicate the invisible grace which
they confer; and because in signifying it they actually confer it, they are potent
signs.
It is possible to identify such a singular point by a particular event that occurred
there at some time or an infinite variety of other causes, both rational and irra­
tional. Even within the universal space of the Church, there is still an inter­mediate value that is recognized and sanctioned, the possibility of a real—if ex­
traordinary—idea of space. To bring this idea into the domain of urban artifacts,
we must return to the value of images, to the physical analysis of artifacts andtheir surroundings; and perhaps this will lead us to a pure and simple under­
standing of the value of the locus. Foil such an idea of place and time is seemingly
capable of being expressed rationally, even if it embraces a series of values that1

103

63 One of the chapels of the Sacro
Monte at Orta, Italy, circa 1600.

6Ji Chapels of the Sacro Monte at
Orta, circa 1600.
65 View of the Sacro Monte at Varese,
Italy, showing the chapels flanking
the street to the Holy Sepulcher.
Engraving by L. andP. Giarre.
66 Baveno, Italy, Renaissanceportico built over Via, Crucis.

are outside and beyond what we experience.
I realize the delicacy of this argument; but it is latent in every empirical study; itis part of experience. Henri Paul Eydoux,2in his studies on Gallic France, spoke
specifically of places that have always been considered unique, and he suggest'dfurther analysis of such places, which seem to have been predestined by histoi
These places are real signs of space; and as such they have a relationship bothchance and to tradition.
I often think of the piazzas depicted by the Renaissance painters, where theplace of architecture, the human construction, takes on a general value of placeand of memory because it is so strongly fixed in a single moment. This moment
becomes the primary and most profound idea that we have of the piazzas of Italy,
and is therefore linked with our spatial idea of the Italian cities themselves.
Ideas of this type are bound up with our historical culture, with our existence inbuilt landscapes, with references that carry over from one context to another,and thus also with the rediscovery of singular points, which are virtually theclosest approximation to a spatial idea that we have imagined. Henri Focillon
speaks of psychological places, places wit hout which the spirit of an environment
would be opaque or elusive. Thus, to describe a particular artistic landscape, heoffers the notion of “art as place.” “The landscape of Gothic art, or rather, Gothic
art as a landscape, created a France and a French humanity that no one could
foresee: of outlines of the horizon, silhouettes of cities—a poetry, in short, that
arose from Gothic art, and not from geology or from Capetian institutions. But is
not the essential attribute of any environment that of producing, of shaping thepast according to its own needs?”8
As is evident, the substitution of Gothic m i as place for Gothic landscape is ofenormous importance. In this sense, the building, the monument, and the city
become human things par excellence; and as such, they are profoundly linked toan original occurrence, to a first sign, to composition, permanence, and evolu­tion, and to both chance and tradition. As the first inhabitants fashioned an envi­
ronment for themselves, they also formed a place and established its unique­ness.
The comments of the theoreticians on the framing of the landscape in painting,the sureness with which the Romans repeated certain elements in their buildingof new cities, acknowledging in the locus the potential for transformation—these and many other facts cause us to intuit the importance of certain artifacts;
and when we consider information of this type, we realize why architecture wasso important in the ancient world and in the Renaissance. It shaped a context.
Its forms changed together with the larger changes of a site, participating in theconstitution of a whole and serving an overall event, while at the same time con­stituting an event in itself. Only in this way can we understand the importance ofan obelisk, a column, a tombstone. Who can distinguish anymore between an
event and the sign that marks it?
I have asked many times in the course of this book, where does tl" - ',/y»;" - r ,•yj'
an urban artifact begin? In its form, its function, its memory, or in somethingelse again? We can now answer that it begins in the event and it *1, ij wl. t has
marked the event. This notion has traversed the history"Sf architecture Artists
have always attempted to make something original, to make an artifact which
precedes style. Burckhardt understood this process when he wrote, “There, inthe sanctuary, they [the artists] took their first steps toward the sublime; they106

learned to eliminate the contingent from form. Types came into being; ulti­
mately, the first ideals.”4 Thus, the close relationship that once was present be­
tween forms and elements proposes itself again as a necessary origin; and sowhile on the one hand architecture addresses its own circumscribed domain, its
elements and its ideals, on the other it tends to become identified with an ar­
tifact, and the separation which occurred at its origin and which permitted it todevelop autonomously no longer is recognizable. It is in this sense that we can in­
terpret a comment by Adolf Loos: “If we find a mound six feet long and three feetwide in the forest, formed into a pyramid, shaped by a shovel, we become serious
and something in us says, ‘someone lies buried here.’ That is architecture.”5 The
mound six feet long and three feet wide is an extremely intense and pure ar­chitecture precisely because it is identifiable in the artifact. It is only in the his­
tory of architecture that a separation between the original element and its vari­
ous forms occurred. From this separation, which the ancient world seemingly
resolved forever, derives the universally acknowledged character of perma­
nence of those first forms.
All of the great eras of architecture have reproposed the architecture of an­tiquity anew, as if it were a paradigm established forever; but each time it has
been reproposed differently. Because this same idea of architecture has been
manifested in different places, we can understand our own cities by measuring
this standard against the actuality of the individual experience of each particularplace. What I said at the beginning about the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua isperhaps subsumed in this idea, which goes beyond a building’s functions and its
history, but not beyond the particularity of the place in which it exists.
Perhaps we can better understand the concept of locus, which at times seems
rather opaque, by approaching it from another perspective, by penetrating it ina more familiar, more visible—even if no longer rational—way. Otherwise, we
continue to grasp at outlines which only evaporate and disappear. These outlines
delineate the singularity of monuments, of the city, and of buildings, and thus
the concept of singularity itself and its limits, where it begins and ends. They
trace the relation of architecture to its location—the place of art—and thereby
its connections to, and the precise articulation of, the locus itself as a singular ar­
tifact determined by its space and time, by its topographical dimensions and its
form, by its being the seat of a succession of ancient and recent events, by its
memory. All these problems are in large measure of a collective nature; they
force us to pause for a moment on the relationship between place and man, andhence to look at the relationship between ecology and psychology.

“The greatest products of architecture are not so much individual as they are so­cial works; rather the children of nations in labor than the inspired efforts ofmen of genius; the legacy of a race; the accumulated wealth of centuries, the re­siduum of the successi ve evaporations \of human soc iety—in a word,, a species offormation
Victor Hugo6
In his work of 1816 on the monuments of France, Alexandre de Laborde, like
Quatremere de Quincy, praised the artists of the late eighteenth and earlynineteenth century for going to Rome ta study and master the immutable princi­
ples of knowledge, retraveling the great roads of antiquity. The architects ofthis
new school presented themselves as scholars of the physical artifact s of their sci107

Architecture as Science67 Project for the stables of Count
Sangusko in southern France, Adolf
Loos, 192b.

e ce: architecture. Thus they were traversing a familiar route, since their mas­ters too had devoted themselves to establishing a logic of architecture based on
essential principles. “They are at once artists and scholars; they have mastered
the habit of observation and of criticism . . . ”7
But Laborde and his contemporaries failed to note the fundamental character ofthese studies: the fact that they provided an introduction to urban problems andto the human sciences, an introduction that tipped the balance in favor of thescholar rather than the architect. Only a history of architecture based on ar­
tifacts gives us a comprehensive picture of this delicate balance and allows us awell-articulated knowledge of the artifacts themselves.
We know that the basic subject of the theoreticians and their teachings was thee boration of a general principle of architecture, of architecture as a science, of
the formulation and applications of buildings. Ledoux8established his principles
of architecture on the basis of the classical conception, but he was also concernedwith places and events, situations and society. Thus, he studied the various
b-hidings that society demanded with respect to their precise contexts.
i .r Viollet-le-Duc, too, the issue of architecture as science was unambiguous;
him there was only one solution to a problem. But, and here he expanded thethesis, since the problems addressed by architecture changed continually,
therefore solutions had to be modified. According to the definition given by this
1 ■mch master, it was the principles of architecture together with the modifica­
tions of the real world that constituted the structure of the human creation. Thusin his Dietionnaire he set the great panorama of Gothic architecture in France
before us with unparalleled power.
t

I know of few descriptions of architectural works which are as complete and per­suasive as that of the Gaillard castle, Richard the Lionhearted’s fortress.9 In
Yioilet-le-Duc’s prose, it acquires the force of a permanent image of how an ar­chitectural work is structured. Both the structure and the uniqueness of the cas­tle are revealed by way of an analysis of the building relative to the geography of
the Seine, a study of military art, and a topographical knowledge of antiquity, inthe end investing the two rival condottieri, the Norman and the French, with thesame psychology. Not only does the history of France lie behind this, but the cas­tle becomes a place about which we acquire a personal knowledge and experi­
ence.
Likewise, the study of the house begins with geographical classifications andsociological considerations and by way of architecture goes on to the structure of
the city and the country, the human creation. Viollet-le-Duc discovered that of
all architecture the house offers the best characterization of the customs, us­ages, and tastes of a population; its structure, like its functional organization,changes only over long periods of time. From a study of the plans of houses, hereconstructed the formation of urban nuclei and was able to point the direction
for a comparative study of the typology of the French house.
Using the same principle, he described the cities constructed ex novo by the
French kings. Montpazier, for example, not only had a regular grid, but all thehouses were of an equal size and had the same plan. The people who came to live
in a special city like this found themselves on a plane of absolute equality. Thus, astudy of the lots and the urban block allowed Viollet-le-Duc a glimpse of the his­
tory of social classes in France that was based on reality; in this respect he anticiI
109

pates the social geographers and the conclusions of Tricart.
One must read the best texts of the French school of geography written in thefirst years of this century to find an equally scientific attitude, yet even the mostsuperficial reading of Demangeon10 on the rural house in France recalls theworks of the great theoreticians of the past. Starting with a description of the
man-made landscape of the countryside, Demangeon recognized in the housepersistent elements that were modified only over long periods of time and whose
evolution was longer and more complex than those of the rural economy to which
they did not always or easily correspond; thus he proposed the existence oftypological constants in housing and concerned himself with discovering the ele­mental types of housing.
Ultimately, the house, once extracted from its context, revealed that it derived
not only from this local context, but manifested also external relationships, dis­tant kinships, and general influences. Thus, by studying the geographical dis­tribution of one type of house Demangeon avoided reducing many of his observa­
tions to the determinism of place, whether in terms of materials, economic struc­tures, or functions; thereby he was able to delineate historical relations and cul­tural currents. Such an analysis necessarily falls short of a broad conception of
the structure of the city and the region, something which the earlier theoreti­
cians were able to recognize in overall form; but by comparison with Viollet-leDuc’s studies, it possesses in precision and methodological rigor what it lacks ingeneral comprehensiveness.
It is as significant as-it is surprising that it took an architect who was considereda revolutionary to take up and to synthesize themes which were seemingly re­mote from his analysis; thus, in his definition of the house as a machine and ar­chitecture as a tool (so scandalous at the time to the cultured academicians ofart), Le Corbusier11 did no less than combine all the practical teachings of thisFrench school which, as we have said, were based on the study of reality. It wasin the same years, in fact, that Demangeon spoke (in the work just referred to) of.he rui m house as a tool forged for the work of the farmer. The human creationand the forged tool seem, once again, to bracket this discourse and thrust it into avision of architecture based on the real, a totalistic vision of which perhaps only
artists are capable.
B'•• a conclusion < f 1 — the discourse without having accomplishedanything if it presumes 1 -> onship between analysis and design to be a
problem of the individu
rather than of the progress of architecture as
science. It denies the 1 ’nr uned in Laborde’s remark, that he saw in the
new generation of men i cri <-■ i culture those who had taken up the habit ofcriticism and observat >r—m m ner words, who saw the possibility of a more
profound understandii t •>> U e -cructure of the city. I believe that this kind of
study of the object of ae as it is here understood, as a human creation,must precede analysis * ) 'UR.
Such study must neceake i to- full structure of the relationship be­
tween individual and t o •> ual wots, the accumulated history of centuries, thewqlution and the pm' t e o f di-ornate cultures. Thus this section begins
ith a passage from \ - Hugo12v 1 h can serve as a program of study. In his: en zealous passion- great rational architecture of the past, Hugo, like■many other artists >• d vientists sought to understand the structure of this’ scene of human events; and when he referred to architecture and the city in
I
111

68 Gaillard Castle, Norrrmndy,
France, plan by Viollet-le-Duc.
A) Moat dug in the rock and main
tower. B) Secondary towers.
C) Principal towers. DjSecondary
towers. E) First enclosure o f thecastle, surrounding the lower court.
F) Well. G) Cellars leading tooutside. H) Chapel. K) Castle
entrance. L) Moat. M) Keep.
N) Apartments of the commander.
P) Emergency exit. R) Surveillanceroute. T) Towers and wall dug in therock. V) Tower. X) Rampart.
Y) River*barricade. Z) Primarymoat.
69 Castle o f Coney on the lie deFrance, thirteenth to fourteenth
century. Plan of ground floor by
Viollet-le-Duc. A) Already existing
chapels. B) Keep. C), D) Towers.
E) Access bridge. K) Courtyard.
L) Service buildings. M) Typicalapartments. N) Storeroom on groundfloor and large salon on upper floors.
S), T) Towers.

their collective aspect as “a species of formation,” he enriched our work with areference as authoritative as it is suggestive.

Urban Ecology and Psychology

In the preceding section, I tried to emphasize the fact that through architecture,
perhaps more than any other point of view, one can arrive at a comprehensive vi­
sion of the city and an understanding of its structure. In this sense, I under­scored the studies of the house by Viollet-le-Duc and Demangeon, and suggested
the usefulness of a comparative analysis of their findings. Moreover, I suggested
that in Le Corbusier’s work such a synthesis has already been accomplished.
I now wish to introduce into this discourse some observations on ecology' andpsychology, the latter in its application to urban science. Ecology' as the know­
ledge of the relationships bet'ween a living being and his environment cannot be
discussed here. This is a problem which has belonged to sociology' and naturalphilosophy ever since Montesquieu, and despite its enormous interest, it would
take us too far afield.
Let us consider only this question: how does the locus iirbis, once it has been de­termined, influence the individual and the collective? This question interests mehere in the ecological sense of Sorre: that is, how does the environment influence
the individual and the collective? For Sorre, this question w'as far more interest­
ing than the opposite one of how man influences his environment.13With the lat­ter question, the idea of human ecology changes meaning abruptly and involves
the whole history of civilization. We already responded to this question, or to thesystem that the two questions form, when at the beginning of this study we de­fined the city as a human thing par excellence.
But as we have said, even for ecology and the urban ecology to which we refer,
this study has meaning only when the city is seen in the entirety of its parts, as acomplex structure. The historically determined relationships and influences be­
tween man and the city cannot be studied by reducing them to a schematic modelof the city as in the urban ecology models of the American school from Park to
Hoyt. These theories can offer some answers, as far as I can see, relative tourban technics, but they have little to contribute to the development of an urban
science founded on artifacts and not on models.
That the study of collective psychology has an essential part in the study of thecity seems undeniable. Many of the authors to whom I feel closest in this workbase their studies on collective psychology, which in turn is linked to sociology.
This linkage has been amply documented. Collective psychology has bearing
upon all the sciences where the city as an object of study is of primary impor­tance.

*The dictionary defines “technics” (Italian
tecnica) as “the study of principles of anart or of the arts in general, especiallypractical arts” (Webster’s New TwentiethCentury Dictionary, Unabridged, 2d ed.).
This is the meaning intended here and inwhat follows.—Ed.

Valuable information also may be obtained from the experiments conductedunder the banner of Gestalt psychology, as undertaken by the Bauhaus in the do­main of form and as proposed by the American school of Lynch.14 In this book, I
have particularly made use of some of Lynch’s conclusions with respect to the re­sidential district, as confirmation of the distinctive character of different dis­
tricts within the city. There have been, however, some inappropriate extensionsof the methods of experimental psychology; but before addressing these I should
touch briefly on the relationship between the city and architecture as technics.*
112

In speaking of the constitution of an artifact and of its memory, I am thinking ofthese problems largely in terms of their collective nature; they pertain to thecity, and thus to its collective citizenry. I maintain that in an art or a science theprinciples and means of action are elaborated collectively or transmitted
thi’ough a tradition in which all the sciences and arts are operating as collective
phenomena. But at the same time they are not collective in all their essential
parts; individuals carry them out. This relationship between a collective artifact,which is necessarily an urban artifact, and the individual who proposes andsingle-handedly realizes it can only be understood through a study of thetechnics by which the artifact is manifested. There are many different technics;
one of them is architecture, and since this is the object of our study, we musthere be concerned with it above all, and with economics and history only to theextent that they are manifested in the architecture of the city.

The relationship in architecture between the collective urban artifact and the in­dividual is unique with respect to the other technics and arts. In fact, architec­
ture presents itself as a vast cultural movement: it is discussed and criticizedwell beyond the narrow circle of its specialists; it needs to be realized, to become
part of the city, to become “the city.” In a certain sense, there is no such thing as
buildings that are politically “opposed,” since the ones that are realized are al­ways those of the dominant class, or at least those which express a possibility ofreconciling certain new needs with a specific urban condition. Thus there is a di­rect relationship between the formulation of certain proposals and the buildingsthat arise in the city.
But it is equally obvious that this relationship can also be considered in its sepa­
rate terms. The world of architecture can be seen to unfold and be studied as alogical succession of principles and forms more or less autonomous from the real­
ity of locus and history. Thus, architecture implies the city; but this city may be
an ideal city, of perfect and harmonious relationships, where the architecturedevelops and constructs its own terms of reference. At the same time, the actualarchitecture of this city is unique; from the very first it has a characteristic—andambiguous—relationship that no other art or science possesses. In these terms
we can understand the constant polemical urge of architects to design systems inwhich the spatial order becomes the order of society and attempts to transformsociety.
Yet outside of design, even outside of architecture itself, exist urban artifacts,
the city, monuments; monographs on single works in particular periods and en­
vironments demonstrate this. In his study of Florence in the Age of Humanism,
Andre Chastel15 demonstrates clearly all the links between civilization and art,
history, and politics which info’"' ed the new vision of Florence (as also Athens,Rome, and New York) and the v s and Drocesses that were shaping it.
If we consider Palladio and tlm *:, Atermined cities of the Yeneto inwhich we find his work, and bow rhc -mm nf these cities actually transcends Pal­
ladio the architect, we find that the -oncept «f incus from which we began thesearguments acquires its full r’"" - the urban context, and is iden­
tifiable as a single artifact. Again ^ c? ~a-k where does the singularity reside?
It resides in the single artifact, in it <material, the succession of events that un­
folds around it, and the minds of its makers: but also in the place that determines
it—both in a physical sense and above all m the sense of the choice of this place113and the indivisible unity that is established between it and the work.
The history of the city is also the history of architecture. But we must rememberthat the history of architecture is at most one point of view from which to look at
the city. The failure to understand this has led to much time spent in studying
the city and its architecture in terms of its images, or else an attempt to ti Ij
the city from the standpoint of other sciences, for example psychology. Bur w- at
can psychology tell us if not that a certain individual sees the city in one wi"r f idthat other individuals see it in another? And how can this private and uwu. ivated vision be related to the laws and principles from which the city firstemerged and through which its images were formed? If we are concernei w h
the city architecturally from more than a stylistic point of view, it does not la .esense to abandon architecture and occupy ourselves with something else. In­
deed, no one would entertain the idea that when the theoreticians tell us thatbuildings must respond to criteria of firmness, commodity, and delight, theymust explain the psychological motives behind this principle.
When Bernini speaks disdainfully of Paris because he finds its Gothic landscapebarbarous,16we are hardly interested in Bernini’s psychology; instead we are in­terested in the judgment of an architect wTho on the basis of the total and specificculture of one city judges the structure of another city. Similarly, that Mies vander Rohe had a certain vision of architecture is important not for ascertaining
the “taste” or the “attitude” of the German middle class relative to the city, but
for allowing us to appreciate the theoretical basis, the cultural patrimony of
Schinkelesque classicism, and other ideas with which this is connected in theGerman city.
The critic who discusses why a poet has used a particular meter in a certain placein his poetry is considering what compositional problem has presented itself tothe poet on a specific occasion. And thus in studying this relationship he is con­cerned with literature, and possesses all the means necessary for grappling withthis problem.

How Urban Elements Become
DefinedTo take this analysis further, we must address ourselves to artifacts themselves,both typical and atypical, to try to understand how certain problems arise andbecome clarified in and through them. I often think, from this point of view, of
the meaning of symbolism in architecture—and among the symbolists, of the“revolutionary architects” of the eighteenth century and of the Constructivists(who also were revolutionary architects). The present theory probably permits
the most sensible explanation of symbolism, for to think of symbolism solely interms of how a particular symbol actually served an event is simply afunctionalist position. Rather, it is as if precisely at the decisive moments of his­
tory architecture reproposed its own necessity to be “sign” and “event” in orderto establish and shape a new era.1‘
Boullee writes, “A sphere, at all times, is equal only to itself; it is the perfectsymbol of equality. No body possesses, as it does, this exceptional quality: thateach of its facets is equal to all the others.” The symbol of the sphere thus can
sum up an architecture and its principles; at the same tiittft, it can be the very
condition for its being constructed, its motive. The sphere not only represents—
or rather, does not represent, in itself is—the idea of equality; its presence as asphere, and thus as a monument, is the constituting of equality.
114

To hir >o n this _ion of « dis<
; ;; t f lofof tinu plan i*hi
11 - il r: 1} am ^ Iding ' ~ i ~>le; it re t’, t , ’( n e plf ’ . facuk i ' *■ I by this r ves
t- .jt’ a 3 aur.fie;jeetator:hetute. m act
adora~
aat atta - a rebeauty.’-^)ns

icn wer.

v a dpid: ‘‘Hieion o-Tectively - ossib _'herapeu
liritua
1 lily of th-k cor i - throng!
*' abso T

The disputes over the central plan, while they accompanied tendencies to reform j
or simplify religious practice within the church, led to the rediscovery of a type hof plan that was one of the typical forms of early antiquity before it became thecanonical church type of the Byzantine empire. It is as if a continuity of urban ar­
tifacts which had been lost had to be rediscovered amid new conditions, whichthen became new foundations. Chastel summarizes all of this when he states,“Three series of considerations come into play in the choice of the central plan:
the symbolic value attributed to the circular form, the great number of geomet­
ric speculations prompted by studies of volumes in which the sphere and cube )were combined, and the prestige of historical examples.”19
The centrally planned church of San Lorenzo in Milan is a good example.20 The
scheme of San Lorenzo immediately reappears in the Renaissance; Leonardo
continually, almost obsessively, analyzes it in his notebooks. The scheme be­comes in Borromini’s notebooks a unique artifact whose form is strongly influ­
enced by two great Milanese monuments: not just San Lorenzo but also the
Duomo. Borromini mediates between these two buildings in all of his architec­
ture and, coupling the Gothic vertiealism of the Duomo with the central plan of
San Lorenzo, introduces into them strange, almost biographical characteristics.
i tl - San L ,renzn we see today, the various types of additions to it, from thee<i -a! i -* Ch -1 of St. 4quilinus) to the Renaissance (Martino Bassi’s
onv , a n -Til api^j ent, whik im entire structure occupies the place of the an;oman Milan. WT ure clearly m the pre■■vheartc~ it F’'-man IniJ5is, in■
sneakof it and its urban context purely•went;o,rw
it
possibleicemo;
ipropriate.tolook for its meaning. ;ts' s far moi
t e r - of fij. ? It,tappearedtothe artists of the Renaislaso 1is st;
its l'1 y. This is huld be eformulated in aone; ' ud ho*, t beer a - an idea of ordty wit tout understandnew - gn. 1 *ne cv - leak of the they co
ing ' i artii
th- *onstantly d-u ai id "further ir >tigatic
i of s> mtut- r, prini science. A <‘ lot , tions of an ■”a i associa i
11architect i•ms can infi
3' i - fare-a the ^ -nt an 1its sign.
a worn - •vhich articipate a - ■enduri; and 1 • me jr raeteristico a time, transforming or denying their orig­
inal i unction, o d fir b ’y constituti ^ a fragment of the city—so much so that werely urban viewpoint than from an artend to cons - • the >_ more frqn
e constitution of something new and are achitectural one. Other works sign:■»e are mostly bound up with revolutionsign of a new epoch in urban histcr-e historical course of the city. Thus theary periods, with decisive event,'
zment arises more or less necessarily durneed to establish a new standard •..
ing certain periods of architecturei115

I have tried to differentiate between an urban artifact and architecture in itself,
but with respect to urban architecture, the most important and concretely verifi­
able facts occur through the coincidence of these two aspects, and through the in­fluence that one exerts over the other. Although this book is about the architec­
ture of the city, and considers the problems of architecture in itself and those ofurban architecture taken as a whole to be intimately connected, there are certain
problems of architecture which cannot be taken up here; I refer specifically tocompositional, problems. These decidedly have have their own autonomy. They
concern architecture as a composition, and this means that they also concern
style.
Architecture, along with composition, is both contingent upon and determinai tive of the constitution of urban artifacts , especially at those times when it is cap­able of synthesizing the whole civil and political scope of an epoch, when it is|highly "rational, comprehensive, and transmissible—in other words, when it can
jbe seen "as a style. It is at these times that the possibility of transmission is imiplicit, a transmission that is capable of rendering a style universal.
The identification of particular urban artifacts and cities with a style of architec­
ture is so automatic in. certain contexts of space and time that we can speak withdiscrete precision of the Gothic city, the baroque city, the neoclassical city.
These stylistic definitions immediately become morphological definitions; they
precisely define the nature of urban artifacts. In these terms it is possible tospeak of civic design. For this to occur, it is necessary that a moment of decisive
historical and political importance coincide with an architecture that is rationaland definite in its forms. It is then possible for the community to resolve its prob­
lems of choice, to desire collectively one kind of city and to reject another. I will
come back to this in the last chapter of this book in discussing the issue of choicein the context of the political problem of the city. For now it is enough to statethat no choices can be made without this historical coincidence, that the con­stituting of an urban artifact is not possible otherwise.

The principles of architecture are unique and immutable; but the responses todifferent questions as they occur in actual situations, human situations, con­stantly vary. On the one hand, therefore, is the rationality of architecture; on theother, the life of the works themselves. When an architecture at a particular mo­ment begins to constitute new urban artifacts which are not responsive to the ac­tual situation of the city, it necessarily does so on the level of aesthetics; and its
results inevitably tend to correspond historically to reformist or revolutionary
movements.
The assumption that urban artifacts are the founding principle of the constitu­
tion of the city denies and refutes the notion of urba n design. This latter notion iscommonly understood with respect to context; it has to do with configurating
and consti tiding a homogeneous, coordinated, continuous environment that
pit-ei w ;T-wit v n r the "''‘mrencv ofaland-mp>- ■* me ”Uav ~ reasons, and or­der ^ « Inch a jsp ii*»t ii mu ,• city'- actual hi-toricaj eordr mm, hut from a plan, age- <>,u 1 1 ^ qi ,, - f,T h fittings -h' rid m. such t m u-tic..- „n acceptable andrealistic onfiv when they address one “piece of city" 'in the sense we spoke of thecity oi pai t> -file first cnapter c nr wiien they refer to tim totality of buildings;
but tbm have nothing useful to contribute relative t »the formation of the city.
Urban artifacts <ften coexist like lacerations within a certain order; above all,116

th e y constitute form s r a th e r th a n continue them , A conception wh >h .ec at es
th e form of u rb a n artifa c ts to an im age and to th e ta s te whicl receive h i & :t
is u ltim ate ly too lim ited fo r an u n d e rsta n d in g of th e s tru c tu re of u rb i a *J iric s.
In c o n tra st is th e p o ssibility to in te rp re t u rb an a rtifa c ts in all of th e i’ r ill e,- g ~ore so lv e a p a r t of th e city in a com plete w ay by d e term in in g all th e . -U ti n; li s
th a t can be estab lish ed as ex istin g w ith re sp e c t to an y artifa ct.
In a stu d y on th e form ation of th e m odern city, C arlo A ym onino ’ ’- 'r a j d 10 yth e ta s k of m odern a rc h ite c tu re is “to pinpoint a series of concep = - drAa o ships w hich, if th e y have som e fu n d am en tal law s in com m on fror <- . rhn .loc icAand o rganizational standpoint, becom e verified in p a rtia l mod
nd u-c li
fe re n tia te d p recisely through th e ir reso lu tio n in a finished a ■f . ’to r • f ri
w hich is specific and reco g n izab le.” H e goes on to s ta te th a t w n.e er o.
sy ste m of horizontal u sag e [zoning provisions], and w ith j i r volu le: Aq u a n tita tiv e building utilization [sta n d a rd s and regulations
rchi ct >’a
section . . . becom es one of th e g o v ern in g im ages, th e g e n e iu u u g :.ucler.s of th ee n tire com position.”21

It seem s to me that to formulate a building in the/most concrete way possible,
especially a t th e design sta g e , is to give a new im pulse to a rc h ite c tu re itself, tore c o n stitu te that to ta l vision of analysis and design on w hich w e have so u rg e n tly
in sisted . A conception of th is ty p e , in w hich th e arc h ite c tu ra l dynam ic p re v a il' nth e form powerfully and fu n d am en tally , resp o n d s to th e n a tu re of u rb a n •tlfac ts as th e y really are. T he co n stitu tio n of new u rb a n a rtifa c ts — in o th e r
w o rd s, th e growth of th e city — h as always o ccurred th ro u g h such a p recise d e­
finition of elem en ts. T his e x tre m e d eg ree of definition has a t tim es provokednon-spontaneous fo rm ulations, b u t even if th e ir re a l m odes of actu alizatio n could
n o t be an ticip ated , th e s e have serv ed as a g en e ral fram ew o rk . In th is sen se th ed ev elopm ental plan for a city can b e significant.
T his th e o ry arise s from an an aly sis of th e u rb a n re ality ; and th is re a lity con­tra d ic ts th e notion th a t p re o rd a in e d functions by th em selv es g o v ern a rtifa c ts
an d th a t th e problem is sim ply to give form to ce rtain functions. In actu ality ,form s in th e v ery a c t of b ein g co n stitu te d go beyond th e functions w hich th e y
m u st serv e; th e y a rise like th e city itself. In th is sense, too, th e building is one
w ith th e u rb a n re ality , and th e u rb a n c h a ra c te r o f a rc h ite c tu ra l a rtifa c ts tak es
on g r e a te r m ean in g w ith re s p e c t to th e design p ro ject. To co n sid er city andbuildings se p a ra te ly , to in te rp re t p u rely organizational functions in te rm s ofrepresentation, is to return the discourse to a narrow fu n ctio n alist vision of thecity. This is a n eg a tiv e vision becau se it conceives of buildings m ere ly as scaffold­ings for functional v aria tio n s, a b s tra c t co n tain ers th a t em body w h a te v e r func­
tions successively fill them .
T he a lte rn a tiv e to th e fun ctio n alist conception is n e ith e r sim ple nor easy , and ifon th e one hand w e re je c t naive functionalism , on th e o th e r w e m u st still come tog rip s w ith th e w hole o f fu n ctio n alist th eo ry . T hus w e m u st m a rk o u t th e lim its
w ith in w hich this th e o ry is continuously formulated and th e am biguities which it
contains, ev en in th e m o st re c e n t p roposals, w hich a re so m etim es self-contradic­
to ry . I believe that w e will no t tra n sc e n d functionalist th e o ry u n til we recognizeth e im p o rtan ce of both form, and the rational processes of architecture, seein g inform itself the capacity to embrace m any different values, ■ffaeanings, and uses.
E a r lie r I spoke of th e th e a te r in A rles, th e Coliseum , and m o n u m en ts in g en e ral
as ex am ples of th is a rg u m e n t.
118

Once again, it is the sum of these values, including memory itself, which consti­
tutes the structure of urban artifacts. These values have nothing to do witheither organization or function taken by itself. I am inclined to believe that theway a particular function operates does not change, or changes only by neces­sity, and that the mediation between functional and organizational demands canoccur only through form. Each time we find ourselves in the presence of real
urban artifacts we realize their complexity, and this structural complexity over­comes any narrow interpretation based on function. Zoning and general organi­zational schemes can only be references, however useful, for an analysis of thecity as a man-made object.

I now wish to return to the relationship between architecture and locus, first to
propose some other aspects of this problem and then to consider the value of themonument in the city. We will take the Roman Forum as an example because it isa monument of fundamental importance for a comprehensive understanding ofurban artifacts.22
The Roman Forum, center of the Roman Empire, reference point for the con­struction and transformation of so many cities of the classical world, and founda­tion of classical architecture and the science of the city practiced by the Romans,is actually anomalous with respect to the origins of Rome itself. The city’s origins
were at once geographical and historical. The site consisted of a low and marshy
zone between steep hills. In its center, among willows and cane fields that wereentirely flooded during the rains, was stagnant water; on the hills were woods
and pastures. Aeneas described the sight in this way: . . and they saw herds ofcattle lowing here and there in the Roman forum and in the elegant Carinae
quarter.”23
The Latins and Sabines settled on the Esquiline, the Viminale, and theQuirinale. These places were favorable for meetings of the peoples of Campania
and Etruria as well as for settlement. Archaeologists have established that as■wly as the ninth century the Latins descended from the hills to dispose of their.lead in the valley of the Forum, just one of the valleys of the Roman coun­tryside. and thus the place entered into history. The necropolis discovered by
Giacomo Roni in 1902-1905 at the foot of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina
constitutes the most ancient testament man has left there. First a necropolis,
then the place of battles or more probably religious rites, the Forum increas­
ingly came to be the site of a new' form of life, the principle of a city being formedby tribes scattered throughout the hills who converged there and founded it.
Geographical formations indicated the way for paths, then for the roads thatclimbed up the valleys along the lines that were least steep (Via Sacra, Via Argiletus, Vicus Patricius), thereby charting the course of the extra-urban map. It
was based not on a clear idea of urban design but instead on a structure indebted
to the terrain. This link between the terrain and the conditions of the city’s de­velopment subsequently persists throughout the whole history of the Forum; itis present in its very form, rendering it different from that of a city that is estab­lished by plan. The Forum’s irregularity was criticized by Livy—“this is thereason that the ancient sewers, which formerly led through the public areas,
now run here and there under private buildings, and the form of the city more re­sembles an occupied zone than onb properly divided”24—who blamed it on the
speed of reconstruction after the sack of the city by the Gauls and the impossibil119

The Roman Forum72 The Forum o f T r a ja n , R o m e , b u ilt
at the beginning of the se c o n d c e n tu r y
A.D.
73 The Forum of T r a ja n , cross-ity of applying the limitatio; but in fact this kind of irregularity is characteristicof the type of growth Rome underwent and is quite similar to that of modern
cities.

se c tio n .
74 T h e Forum of Trajan, axonometric

Around the fifth century the Fcram ceased its activities as a marketplace 1 <sii ya function that had been fundamental to it) and became a true square, almost
cording to the dictum of Aristotle. who was writhig at about this time, “The pub­lic square . .. win never be sullied R- merchandise and artisans will be forbidden
entrance . . . Far awa;. and well separated from it will be the place destined as
the market . . . ’’2,J Precisely during this period the Forum was being covered
with statues, temples, monuments. Thus the valley that once had been full of
local springs, sacred places, markets, and taverns now became rich withbasilicas, temples, and arches, and furrowed by two great streets, the Aha Sacra
and the Via Nova, which were accessible from small alleys.

drawing.

Even after Augustus’s systematization and the enlargement of the central zoneof Rome by the Forum of Augustus and the marketplace of Trajan, after Ha­
drian’s works and until the fall of the Empire, the Forum did not lose its essential
character as a meeting place, as the center of Rome; Forum Rd'hidhmh or
Forum Mngn uin, it became a specific artifact within the very heart of the city, apart that epitomized the whole. Thus Pietro Romanelli wrote. “On Via Sacra andthe adjacent streets crowded with luxury stores, the people passed curiously
without wanting anything in particular, without doing anything, only awaiting
the arrival of the hour of the spectacles and the opening of the baths; we recall
the episode of the “bore” who was so brilliantly described by Horace in his satire,‘ibam forte via S a c r a . . . ’ The episode was repeated thousands of times a day,every day of the year, except w7hen some dramatic event up in the Imperial
palaces on the Palatine or among the Praetorian Guards succeeded in stirring up
the torpid soul of the Romans again. The Forum during the Empire w'as still on
occasion the theater of bloody events, but they were events that almost always
finished and exhausted themselves in the place where they unfolded, and one
could say the same for the city itself: their consequences were stronger
elsewhere than here.”26
People passed by without having any specific purpose, without doing anything:
it was like the modern city, where the man in the crowd, the idler, participates in
the mechanism of the city without knowing it, sharing only in its image. The
Roman Forum thus was an urban artifact of extraordinary modernity; in it was
everything that is inexpressible in the modem city. It recalls a remark of Poete’s
about Paris, derived from his unique knowledge of the ancient and modern his­
tory of that French city: “A breath of modernity seems to waft to us from thisdistant world: we have the impression that we are not much out of our own envi­
ronment in cities like Alexandria or Antioch, as in certain moments we feelcloser to Imperial Rome than to some medieval city.”27
What tied the idler to the Forum, why did he intimately participate in this w7orld,
why did he become identified in the city through the city itself? This is the mys­
tery that urban artifacts arouse in us. The Roman Forum constitutes one of themost illustrative urban artifacts that we can know: bound up as it is with the ori­
gins of the city; extremely, almost unbelievably, transformed over time but al­ways growing upon itself; parallel to the history of Rome as'jt is documented inevery historical stone and legend, from the Lapis Niger to the Dioscuri; ulti­
mately reaching us today through its strikingly clear and splendid signs.
120

75 The Ma rket of Trajan,
76 The Market of Trajan, plan of thecovered street with shops on bothsides,
77 A pan o f third-century Rome,
including the Stadium o f Domitian,
Theater of Domitian, Baths ofAgrippa, and Flaminian Circus.

The Fomm epitomizes Rome and is part, of Rome and is the sum of its monu­
ments; at the same time its uniqueness is stronger than its single monuments. It
is the expression of a specific design or at least of a specific vision of the world offorms, the classical one; yet its design is also more ancient, as persistent andpreexistent as the valley where the shepherds of the primitive hills gathered. I
would not know how better than this to define an urban artifact. It is history and
it is invention. It is also, then—and in this sense it particularly approaches thetheory presented here—one of the foremost lessons of architecture that exists.
At this point it is appropriate to distinguish between locus and context as the lat­ter is commonly understood in architectural and urban design discourse. The
present analysis approaches the problem of the locus by attempting to set out an
extremely rational definition of an artifact, approaching it as something which isby nature complex but which it is nonetheless necessary to attempt to clarify as
the scientist does when he develops hypotheses in order to elucidate the impre­
cise world of matter and its laws. Locus in this sense is not unrelated to context;
but context seems strangely bound up with illusion, with illusionism. As such it
has nothing to do with the architecture of the city, but rather with the making ofa scene, and as a scene it demands to be sustained directly in relation to its func­
tions. That is, it depends on the necessary permanence of functions whose very
presence serves to preserve forms as they are and to immobilize life, saddening
us like would-be tourists of a vanished world.

iiiinanmuimuilinmiiiiBlIjijil

It is hardly surprising that this concept of context is espoused and applied bythose who pretend to preserve the historical cities by retaining their ancientfacades or reconstructing them in such a way as to maintain their silhouettes andcolors and other such things; but what do we find after these operations when
they are actually realized? An empty, often repugnant stage. One of the ugliest
things I have seen is the reconstruction of a small part of Frankfurt on the princi­ple of maintaining Gothic volumes alongside pseudo-modem or pseudo-antiquearchitecture. What became of the suggestiveness and illusion that seemed somuch to inform the initial proposal I do not know.
//

Of course, when we speak of “monuments” we might equally well mean a street,a zone, even a country; but if one of these is to be preserved everything must bepreserved, as the Germans did in Quedlinburg. If life in Quedlinburg has taken
on a kind of obsessive quality, it is justifiable because this little city is a valuable
museum of Gothic history (and an extraordinary museum of much German his­tory); otherwise there is no justification. A typical case which relates to this sub­ject is that of Venice, but this city merits a special treatment, and I do not wish to
linger now on it. It has been much debated elsewhere and requires the support ofvery specific examples. I will therefore return to the Roman Forum once more asa point of departure.

In July of 1811, Count De Tourncn. prefect "Rome during Napoleon I’s occupa­tion of Italy, expounded his program for toe Roman Forum to Count De Montalivet, Minister of the Interior:“Restoration ■work on the ancient vu <>m< >ts. As soon as one addresses thisissue, the first thing that comp-' <- m d is me Forum, the celebrated place inwhich such monuments havese and associated -with the greatest
memories. The restoration o: F it-e m<wm .ents consists above all in freeing
them from the earth that co j\ r parts, connecting them to one
123another, and finally, rendering access to them easy and pleasurable, . . .
“The second part of the project envisions the connection of the monuments to one
another through an irregularly organized passageway. I have proposed a plan,
drawn up under my direction, for one type of connection, to which I must referyou. . . . I will only add that the Palatine hill, an immense museum entirely co­vered with the magnificent remains of the palaces of the Caesars, must necessar­
ily be comprised partly of a planted garden, a garden to enclose the monuments,
for it is full of memories and will certainly be unique in the world.’’28
De Tournon’s idea was not realized. It would probably have sacrificed most of
the monuments to the design of the garden, depriving us of one of the purest of
all architectural experiences; but as a consequence of his idea, and with the ad­vent of scientific archaeology , the problem of the Forum became a major urban
problem related to the very continuity of the modern city. It became necessary
to conceive of the study of the Forum no longer as a study of its single monu­
ments but as an integrated research into the entire complex, to consider theForum not as the sum of its architecture but as a total urban artifact, as a perma­
nence like that of Rome itself. It is significant that De Tournon’s idea found sup­port and was developed during the Roman Republic of 1849. Here too it was theevent of a revolution that caused antiquity to be read in a modern way; in thissense, it is closely related to the experience of the revolutionary Parisian ar­chitects. However, the idea of the Forum proved to be even stronger than politi­
cal events, and it persisted with various vicissitudes even under the Papal resto­
ration.
When we consider this problem today from an architectural standpoint, many is­sues come to mind which demonstrate the value of the archaeological considera­
tions of the last century relative to the reconstruction of the Forum and its
reunification with the Forums of Augustus and of Trajan, and we can see the ar­gument for actually reusing this enormous complex. But for present purposes it
is sufficient to show how this great monument is still today a part of Rome whichsummarizes the ancient city, a moment in the life of the modern city, and a his­
torically incomparable urban artifact. It makes us reflect that if the Piazza San
Marco in Venice were standing with the Doge’s Palace in a completely different
city, as the Venice of the future might be, and if we found ourselves in the middleof this extraordinary urban artifact, we would not feel less emotion and would be
no less participants in the history of Venice. I remember in the postwar years
the sight of Cologne Cathedral in that destroyed city; nothing can conjure up thepower that this work, standing intact among the ruins, had on the imagination.
Certainly the pallid and brutal reconstruction of the surrounding city is unfortu­
nate, but it cannot touch the monument, just as the vulgar arrangements inmany modern museums can annoy but still do not deform or alter the value ofwhat is exhibited.
This recollection of Cologne naturally must be understood only in an analogicalsense. The analogy of the value of monuments in destroyed cities serves mainly
to clarify two points: first, that it is not the context or some illusionistic qualitythat enables us to understand a monument; and second, that only by com­prehending the monument as a singular urban artifact, or by contrasting it withother urban artifacts, can we attain a sense of the architecture of the city.
•*'**

The significance of all this is epitomized, in my opinion, in Sixtus V’s plan ofRome. Here the basilicas become the authentic places of the city; together they
constitute a structure that derives its complexity from their value as primary ar124

tifacts, from the streets that join them, and from the residential spaces that arepresent within the system. Domenico Fontana begins his description of the prin­cipal characteristics of the plan in this way: “Our Lord now wishing to ease theway for those prompted by devotion or by vows who are accustomed to visit fre­quently the most holy places in the City of Rome, & in particular the seven
Churches so celebrated for their great indulgences and relics, has opened anumber of very spacious and straight streets in many places. Thus by foot, byhorse, or in a carriage, one can start from any place in Rome one likes and con­tinue virtually in a straight line to the most famous devotions. ”a9
Sigfried Giedion, perhaps the first to understand the extreme importance of thisplan, described it as follows: “His was no paper plan. Sixtus V had Rome, as it
were, in his bones. He himself trudged the streets the pilgrims had to follow, andexperienced the distances between points, and when, in March 1588, he opened
the new road from the Coliseum to the Lateran, he walked with his cardinals all
the way to the Lateran Palace then under construction. Sixtus spread out his
streets organically, wherever they were demanded by the topographical struc­ture of Rome. He was also wise enough to incorporate with great care whatever
he could of the work of his predecessors.”30
Giedion continues, “In front of his own buildings—the Lateran and the Quirinal-T-and wherever his streets came together, Sixtus V made provision for
ample open space, sufficient for much later development. . . . By clearing
around the Antonine Column and tracing the outline of the Piazza Colonna(1588), he created the present-day center of the city. Trajan’s Column near the
Coliseum with its enlarged surrounding square was a link between the old cityand the new. . . . The instinct for civic design of the Pope and his architect is de­monstrated again in their selection of a new site for the obelisk at just the right
distance from the unfinished cathedral. . . .
“The last of the four obelisks that Sixtus R was able to set up was given perhaps
the most subtle position of ail. Placed at the northern entrance to the city, itmarked the confluence of three main streets (as well as the often projected but
never executed final extension of the Strada Felice). Two centuries later the
Piazza del Popolo crystallized around this spot. The only other obelisk to occupy<ueh a dominating position is that in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, set up in
1836. ”31
I believe that in this passage Giedion, whose personal contribution to the worldof architecture has always been extraordinary, says many things about the cityin general that go well beyond the plan under consideration. His comment thatthe first plan was not a paper plan but rather a plan derived from immediate, em­
pirical experience is significant. Significant also are his remarks that the plan
was, although fairly rigid, still attentive to the topographical structure of thecity, and above all, that even in its revolutionary character, or by virtue of it, theplan incorporated aw a' e vsR&to all of ri­■' ’ "eceding initiatives that had validity, that were in the <vle] on on
and their locations, those signs
Added to this is hture of the city, even in the elasaround which the r f < - al >d. Th
sical world, probr • „ e* °r again ac^w
- :h a unity of creation and comprehension. An entire urban system was conceived and realized along the linesof both practical and ideal forces, "tine it was thoroughly marked by points ofunion and future aggregation. The forms of its monuments and its topographicalform remained stable within a changing system (recall the proposed transforma­tion of the Coliseum into a wool factory), as if with the placement of the obelisks125

in their particular places the city was being conceived in both the past and the fu­
ture.
It might be objected that in presenting the exampleT•.>m onlv concernedwith an ancient city. Such a criticism can be answe.
a n •ments: first, that a rigorously observed premise of 'ist xtion can be made between the ancient city and the n ' ■ • - - be* n >and an after, because the city is considered as a nw
-eeriethat there exist few instances of cities which d i s p l c. cm-u .
m ba.
artifacts—or at least such cities are by no means typical, since an inherent
characteristic of the city is its permanence in time.
To conceive of a city as founded on primary elements is to my mind the only ra­
tional principle possible, the only law of logic that can be extracted from the city
to explain its continuation. As such it was embraced during the Enlightenment,
and as such it was rejected by the destructive progressivist theories of the city.
One thinks of Fichte’s critique of Western cities, where the defense of the com­munitarian (Volk) character of the Gothic city already contains the reactionary
critique of subsequent years (Spengler) and the conception of the city as a matterof destiny. Although I have not dealt with these theories or visions of the city
here, it is clear how they have been translated into an idea of city without formalreferences, and how they contrast, more or less consciously on the part of theirmodern imitators, with the Enlightenment emphasis on plan. From this point ofview one can also make a critique of the Romantic Socialists, the Phalansterists,and others who proposed various concepts of self-sufficient community. These
maintained that society could no longer express any transcendent values, oreven any common representative ones, since the utilitarian and functional re­duction of the city (to dwellings and services) had become the “modern” alterna­
tive to earlier formulations.
I believe instead that precisely because the city is preeminently a collective fact
it is defined by and exists in those works that are of an essentially collective na­ture. Although such works arise as a means of constituting the city, they soon
become an end, and this is their being and their beauty. The beauty resides bothin the laws of architecture which they embody and in the collective’s reasons fordesiring them.

Monuments; Summary of the
Critique of the Concept of Context

So far in this chapter we have principally considered the idea of locus in the senseof a singular place and event, the relationship of architecture to the constitutingof the city, and the relationship between context and monument. As we have
said, the concept of locus must be the object of specific research involving thewhole history of architecture. .The relationship between locus and design mustalso be analyzed in order to clarify the apparently unresolvable conflict between
design as a rational element and an imposition, and the local and specific natureof place. This relationship takes in the concept of uniqueness.
As for the term context, we find that it is mostly an impediment to research. To
context is opposed the idea of the monument. Beyond its historically determinedexistence, the monument has a reality that can be subjected to analysis;
moreover, we can design a “monument.” However, to do so requires an architec­
ture, that is to say, a style. Only the existence of an architectural style permits
fundamental choices, and from these choices the city develops.
126

I have also spoken of architecture as technics. The question of technics should
not be underestimated by anyone addressing the problem of the city; clearly adiscourse about images is fruitless if it is not concretized in the architecture that
forms these images. Architecture becomes by extension the city. More than any
other art, it has its basis in the shaping and subjection of material to a formal con­ception. The city presents itself as a great architectural, man-made object.

78 Plan of Brasilia, Lucio Costa,
1957,

We have tried to show that, a correspondence exists in the city between sign andevent; but this is insufficient unless we extend our analysis to the problem of thegenesis of architectural form. The architectural form of the city is exemplified in
its various monuments, each of which has its own individuality. They are likedates: first one, then the other; without them we could not understand the pas­sage of time. Although the present study is not concerned with architecture in it­
self but with archit- <iponent of the urban artifact, we must notehati i i , i i the problem of architecture can be resolved
oieg
joint or newly revealed through a context or aurpc
parameters. These notions are senseless beause ' ' - 'I - - - • ti > - 1 n that it is constructed through architecture,'’hesinm -<v , >* m. >> ’ &• s together with its locus and its history, -which’ erase1, - - ., u>;r,*nce of the architectural artifact.
m itheref.
i - .m - /e that the principal moment of an architecturalifact is in w
m rtistic formation, that is, in the autonomous prini iesaccordin * •- founded and transmitted. In more general terms, it* the actual sc’ r t a each architect gives to his encounter with reality, aion that is vei u >-ie precisely because it relies on certain technics (which
also necessarily constitute a limitation). Within technics, by which is meant’ - wans and principles of architecture, is the capacity to be transmitted and toeasure: “We are far from thinking that architecture cannot please; we say
intrary that it is impossible for it not to please, so long as it is treated ac*.
m its true principles. an art such as architecture, an art which imnediately s< n - - ^ Luge number of our needs . . . how could it fail toplease us?”32
From the initial constitution of any architectural artifact a series of other ar­
tifacts begins; and in this sense architecture is extended to the design of a newcity like Palmanova or Brasilia. We cannot judge the designs of these cities
strictly as architectural designs. Their formation is independent, autonomous:they are specific designs with their own history. But this history also belongs toarchitecture as a whole because they are conceived according to an architectural
technic or style, according to principles and a general architectural idea.
Without such principles we have no way to judge these cities. Thus we can ap­
proach Palmanova and Brasilia as two notable and extraordinary urban ar­
tifacts, each with its own individuality and its own historical development. How­ever, the architectural artifact hot only embodies the structure of this individu­
ality, but it is precisely this structure that affirms the autonomous logic of thecompositional process and its importance. In architecture lies one of the funda­
mental principles of the city.

The study of history seems to offer the best verification of certain hypotheses
about the city, for the city is in itself a repository of history. In this book we have

The City as History

made use of the historical method from two different points of view. In the first,
the city was seen as a material artifact, a man-made object built over time andretaining the traces of time, even if in a discontinuous way. Studied from thispoint of view—archaeology, the history of architecture, and the histories of indi­vidual cities—the city yields very important information and documentation.
Cities become historical texts; in fact, to study urban phenomena without theuse of history is unimaginable, and perhaps this is the only practical method
available for understanding specific urban artifacts whose historical aspect ispredominant. We have illustrated this thesis, in part the foundation of thisstudy, in the context of the theories of Poete and Lavedan as well as in relation to
the concept of permanence.
The second point of view sees history as the study of the actual formation andstructure of urban artifacts. It is complementary to the first and directly con­cerns not only the real structure of the city but also the idea that the city is asynthesis of a series of values. Thus it concerns the collective imagination.
Clearly the first and second approaches are intimately linked, so much so thatthe facts they uncover may at times be confounded with each other. Athens,Rome, Constantinople, and Paris represent ideas of the city that extend beyond
their physical form, beyond their permanence; thus we can also speak in this wayof cities like Babylon which have all but physically disappeared.

I would now like to consider the second point of view further. The idea of history
as the structure of urban artifact s is affirmed by the continuities that exist in the
deepest layers of the urban structure, where certain fundamental characteris­tics that are common to the entire urban dynamic can be seen. It is significant
that Carlo Cattaneo, with his positivist background, in his study of the civic
evolution of cities which is considered the foundation of Italian urban histories,
discovered a principle that could be articulated only in terms of the actual historyof those cities.'33 He found in the cities the “unchanging terms of a geography
prior to the Romans which remained attached to the walls of the cities(■municipi).”34
In his description of the development of the city of Milan in the period after the
Empire, he speaks of the city’s predominance with respect to other Lombard
centers, a predominance justified neither by its size, greater wealth or popula­tion, nor by other apparent facts. It was more something intrinsic to the natureof the city, almost a typological characteristic, of an undefinable order: “This
predominance was innate to the city; it was the tradition of a greatness prior to
the Ambrosian church, prior to the papacy, the Empire, the Roman conquest:
Mediolanum Gallorum Caput.”'3'3 But this quasi-mystical principle of orderthen became the principle of urban history, resolving itself into the perm anent of civilization: “The permanence of the municipio is another fundamental fact
and is common to almost all Italian histories.”36
Even in the times of greatest decadence, as in the late Empire when the cities
appeared as sernirutarum urbium cadavera (the cadavers of half-ruined
cities),3' they were not in reality dead bodies, said Cattaneo, but only in a str'.eof shock. The relationship between the city and its region ■'Has a characteristic
sign of the municipio since “the city forms an indivisible body with its region.”38
In time of war and invasions, in the most trying moments for communal liberty,
the unity between the region and the city was an extraordinary force; at times
128the region regenerated the destroyed city. The history of the city is the historyof civilization: “In the roughly four centuries of domination by the Longobards
and the Goths, barbarism grew . . . cities were not valued except as fortres­
ses. . . . The barbarians were extinguished along with the cities to which they
had laid waste. . . .”39
Cities constitute a world in themselves; their significance, their permanence, isexpressed by Cattaneo as an absolute principle: “Foreigners are astonished tosee Italian cities persist in attacking one another, although they are not sur­prised to see this between one country and another; this is because they do notunderstand their own militant temperament and national character. The proof
that the source of the enmity that encircled Milan was its power or, more cor­
rectly, its ambition, is that many of the other cities, when they saw it destroyed
and in ruins, thought that they would no longer have to fear it and joined to raise
it from the ruins. ”40
Cattaneo’s principle can be associated with many of the themes developed here;
it has always seemed to me that those very deep layers of urban life which he hadin mind are largely to be found in monuments, which possess the individuality of
all urban artifacts, as has been emphasized many times in the course of thisstudy. That a relationship between a “principle” of urban artifacts and form
exists in Cattaneo’s thinking is apparent, even if one only examines his writings
on the Lombard style and the beginning of his description of Lombardy, where
the land, cultivated and made fertile over the course of centuries, immediately
becomes for him the most important testimony of a civilization.
His comments on the polemics over the Piazza del Duomo in Milan bear witness,on the other hand, to the unresolved difficulties inherent in this complex prob­
lem. Thus his study of Lombard culture and Italian federalism finishes by refut­
ing all the arguments, real and abstract, in the debate over Italian unificationand over the old and new meanings that the cities of the Italian peninsula werecoming to have in the national framework. His study of federalism not only al­
lowed him to avoid all the errors endemic to the contemporary nationalist
rhetoric, but also, in recognizing the obstacles to it, to see fully the newframework in which the cities had begun to find themselves.
To be sure the great Enlightenment and the positivist enthusiasm that had ani­mated the cities had waned by the time of Italian unification; but this was not the
only cause of the cities’ decline. Cattaneo’s proposals and the local style which
Camillo Boito preached were able to give back to the cities a meaning that had
been obscured. There was also a deeper crisis, which was characterized by thegreat debate in Italy which took place after unification over the choice of a capi­tal. This debate turned on Rome. Antonio Gramsci’s observation on this subject
is most insightful: “To Theodor Mommsen, who asked what universal idea di­rected Italy to Rome, Quintino Sella responded, ‘That of science. . .' Sella’s re­sponse is interesting and appropriate; in that historical period science was the
new universal idea, the basis of the new culture that was being elaborated. But
Rome did not become the city o f science; a great industrial program would havebeen necessary, and this did not happen.”41 Sella’s response, that is, remainedvague and ultimately rhetorical, even if fundamentally correct; to achieve such agoal it would have been necessary Co implement an industrial program without
fearing the creation of a modern and conscious Roman working class ready toparticipate in the development of a national politics.
129

The study of this debate over Rome as capital is of great interest for us eventoday; it engaged politicians and scholars of all persuasions, all of whom wereconcerned over which tradition the city should be the repository of, and toward
which Italy it should direct its destiny as capital. Through this historical cir­
cumstance, the significance of certain interventions which tend to characterize
Rome as a modern city and to establish a relationship between its past and theimages of the other principal European capitals emerges more clearly. To see
this debate over the capital merely as a manifestation of nationalist rhetoric—
which was undoubtedly present—means to place this important process within
limits too narrow to judge it; a similar process was typical for a number of othercountries in various periods.
Instead, it.ismecessary to investigate how certain urban structures come to be
identified with the model of a capital, and what. .relatiohsMps.;are 'possible be­
tween the physical reality of a city and this model. It is noteworthy that for
Europe, 'but not only for Europe, this model was Paris. This is true to such a de­gree that it is not possible to understand the structure of many modern capi­tals—Berlin, Barcelona, Madrid, along with Rome and others—without recog­
nizing this fact. With Paris the entire historical-political process in the architec­
ture of the city takes a specific turn; but the meaning of this relationship can only
be discerned by elaborating the specific ways in which it came about.
As always, a relationship is established between the urban artifacts structuring
the city and the Imposition of an ideal project or general scheme, and the patternof this relationship is very complex. Certainly there are cities that realize theirown inclinations and others that do not.

With these considerations we approach the deepest structure of urban artifacts
and thus their form—the architecture of the city. “The soul of the city” becomesthe city’s history, the sign on the walls of the munieipium, the city’s distinctive
and definitive character, its memory. As Halbwachs writes in La Memoire Col­lective, “When a group is introduced into 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 framework that it has constructed. The
image of the exterior environment and the stable relationships that it maintains
with it pass into the realm of the idea that it has of itself. ”42
One can say that the city itself is the collective memory of its people, arid likememory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locm of the col­lective memory. Thisbetween the locus and the citizenry then becomesThacity’s predominant image, both of architecture and of landscape, andas certain artifacts become part of its memory, new ones emerge. In this entirely
positive sense great ideas flow through the history of the city and give shape toit.
Thus we consider locus the characteristic principle of urban artifacts; the con­cepts'"of locus, architecture, permanences, and history togetherTielp'us to un­derstand the complexity of urban artifacts. The collective memory participatesin the actual transformation of space in the works of the collective, a transforma­tion that is always conditioned by whatever material realities oppose it. Under­stood in this sense, memory becomes the guiding thread of the entire complex
urban structure and in this respect the architecture of urban artifacts is distin130' ...................................................................................................... .....

” ............

........ '............'

guished from art, inasmuch as the latter is an element that exists for itself alone,while the greatest monuments of architecture are of necessity linked intimately
to the city, . , The question arises: in what way does history speak throughart? It does so primarily through architectural monuments, which are the wiled
expression of power, whether in the name of the State or of religion. A people
can be satisfied with a Stonehenge only until they feel the need to express them­selves in form. . . . Thus the character of whole nations, cultures, and epochs
speaks through the totality of architecture, which is the outward shell of their
being. ”43
Ultimately, the proof that the city has primarily itself as an end emerges in theartifacts themselves, in the slow unfolding of a certain idea of the city, intention­
ally. Within this idea exist the actions of individuals, and in this sense not every­
thing in urban artifacts is collective; yet the collective and the individual natureof urban artifacts in the end constitutes the same urban structure. Memory,
within this structure, is the consciousness of the city; it is a rational operation
whose development demonstrates with maximum clarity, economy, and har­mony that which has already come to be accepted.
With respect to the workings of memory, it is primarily the two modes of actuali­zation and interpretation that interest us; we know that these depend on time,
culture, and circumstances, and since these factors together determine themodes themselves, it is within them that we can discover the maximum of real­ity. There are many places, both large and small, whose different urban artifacts
cannot otherwise be explained; their shapes and aspirations respond to an al­
most predestined individuality. I think, for example, of the cities of Tuscany,
Andalusia, and elsewhere; how can common general factors account for the very
distinct differences of these places?
The value of history seen as collective memory, as the relationship of the collec­
tive to its place, is that it helps us to grasp the significance of the urban struc­ture, its individuality, and its architecture which is the form of this individuality.
This individuality ultimately is connected to an original artifact—in the sense of
Cattaneo’s principle; it is an event mid a fo rm . Thus the union between the pastand the future exists in the very idea of the city that it flows through in the same
way that memory flows through the life of a person; and always, in order to berealized, this idea must not only shape but be shaped by reality. This shaping is apermanent aspect of a city’s unique artifacts, monuments, and the idea we haveof it. It also explains why in antiquity the founding of a city became part of thecity’s mythology.

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Athens

79
79 Propylaea, Athens.
80 Temple of Apollo Patroo-s, Athens.
81 The Parthenon, Athens.
82 Athens. Approximate plan of thecity at the time of Pericles, middle ofthe fifth century B.C., with residential
districts, dotted, surrounding
the public buildings, in black.
83 Plan of the Acropolis, Athens.
Among the principal buildings:
1) Beule gate. SjTemple of Athena
Nike, fi) Propylaea. 11) Parthenon.
12) Archaic T ample of Athena.
Ifi) Erechtheum. 16) Temple of Romeand Augustus. 28) Theater ofDionysus. 32) Stoa of Eunienes,33) Odeum of Her odos Attic us ■3Jf) Aqueduct.

It may seem strange that this chapter, which is dedicated to history, commei :e with the recalling of a myth, a myth which precedes the history of a city we canno longer refrain from speaking about: Athens. Athens represents the first clear
example for the science of urban artifacts; it embodies the passage from nat ir
to culture, and this passage, at the very heart of urban artifacts, is conveyed to
us by myth. When myth becomes a material fact in the building of the temple,
the logical principle of the city has already emerged from its relationship withnature and becomes the experience which is transmitted.
Thus the memory of the city ultimately makes its way back to Greece; there
urban artifacts coincide with the development of thought, and imagination be­comes history and experience. Any Western city that we analyze has its origins
in Greece; if Rome is responsible for supplying the general principles of ur­
banism and thus for the cities that were constructed according to rational
schemes throughout the Roman world, it is Greece where the fundamentals of
the constitution of the city lie, as well as of a type of urban beauty, of an architec­
ture of the city; and this origin has become a constant of our experience of thecity. The Roman, Arab, Gothic, and even the modern city have consciously emu­
lated this constant, but only at times have they penetrated the surface of its
beauty. Everything that exists in the city is both collective and individual; thus
the very aesthetic intentionality of the city is rooted in the Greek city , in a set of
conditions that can never recur.
This reality of Greek art and Greek cities presupposes a mythology and amythological relationship with nature. This must be more extensively studied
through a detailed examination of the city-states of the Hellenic world. At thebasis of any such study must stand the extraordinary intuition of Karl Marx, whoin a passage of the Critique of Political Economy speaks of Greek art as thechildhood of humanity; what makes Marx’s intuition astonishing is his reference
to Greece as the “normal childhood,” contrasting it to other ancient civilizations
whose “childhoods” deviated from the destiny of mankind. This intuition crops
up again in the work of other scholars, applied precisely to the life and the originsof the urban artifact:“The difficulty, however, does not lie in understanding that Greek art and the
Epic are associated with certain social developments. The difficulty is that they
still give us aesthetic pleasure and are in a certain respect regarded as unattain­
able models. A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But
does he not enjoy the naivete of the child, and does he not himself have to strive
on a higher level to reproduce the child’s veracity? In every epoch, does not its
essential character in its natural veracity live in the nature of the child? Why
should not the historical childhood of humanity, where it unfolded most beauti­
fully, exert an eternal charm, even though it is a stage that will never return?
There are ill-bred children and precocious children. Many of the ancient peoples
belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm their art
has for us does not conflict with the undeveloped stage of the society in which it
grew. On the contrary [its charm] is inseparably linked with the immature social
conditions which gave rise to it, and which alone It could give rise to, and which
can never recur.
I do not know whether Poete knew this passage from Marx; in any case, in de­scribing the Greek city and Its formation he felt the need to cMfferentiate it fromthe cities of Egypt and the Euphrates, which were examples of that obscure, un­developed Infancy, different from the normal infancy, of which Marx spoke. His
statements recall irresistibly the contrasting myths of Athens and Babylon
134

that run through the history of mankind:“Athens definitively offers us the lesson of a city different from those we haveseen in Egypt or in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris, in which the only
formative element was the temple of the divinity or the palace of the sovereign.
Here instead, beyond the temples—though they too differ from those of the pre­ceding civilizations—we find as generating elements of the city the sites of theorgans of a free political life (boule, ecelesia, areopagus) and the buildings con­nected with typically social needs (gymnasium, theater, stadium, odeum). A city
like Athens represents a higher level of communal human life.”46
In the structure of Athens, those elements wrhieh we have called primary urban
artifacts here are effectively defined as the generating elements of the city:
namely the temple and the organs of political and social life, variously locatedand in continuous evolution within the residential areas. The house too partici­
pates actively in the formation of the Greek city and constitutes a basic design
through which we can account for the city’s principal artifacts.
To understand more clearly the value ascribed to the Greek city and its modern­
ity as an urban artifact that persists throughout subsequent history, it is usefulto recall the original structure of the Greek city, especially in comparison toother cities, including Roman ones. Beyond its complex political composition, inthe sense spoken of by Poete, the Greek city was characterized by a develop­
ment from the interior toward the exterior; its constituting elements were its
temple and its housing. Only after the archaic period, for purely defensive
reasons, were the Greek cities encircled by walls, and in no case were these theoriginal elements of the polis. In contrast, the cities of the Orient made walls andgates their res sacra, the constituting and primary elements of the city; thepalaces and temples within the city walls were in turn encircled by other walls,
like a series of successive enclosures and fortifications. This same principle ofboundaries w7as transmitted to the Etruscan and Roman civilizations. But the
Greek city did not have any sacred limits; it was a place and a nation, the abode ofits citizens and thus of their activities. At its origin was not the will of a sovereign
but a relationship moth nature which took the form of a myth.
But this characteristic of the Greek city—and I repeat that it is an unparalleledmodel—cannot be completely understood without taking into account anotherdecisive factor. The polis was a city-state; its inhabitants belonged to the city but
in large part w7ere dispersed throughout the countryside. The city’s ties with the
regmu were erti emehr strong. It is useful "to cite another of Cattaneo’s stateTie _ ince 1 ’ . ~ . aaofts on the nature of the city shed much light on theconstitution of the Greek city in particular. To Cattaneo, as also to Poete, the dif­ferent destiny of the polis of the Oriental cities, which were nothing but “great
walled encampments” and barbarian installations and which “lived off theirneighbors” {per vims habitant), seemed very clear.4'
Cattaneo correctly intuited that the walled encampments of the East were com­pletely detached from the region around them, while in Italy “the city formed an
inseparable body with its region.”48 . . This adhesion of the country to thecity, where the most authoritative, wealthy, and industrious dwelt, establisheda political personage, an elementary, permanent, and indissoluble state.”49 We
do not know how7far Cattaneo took this analogy between the. free communal cityand the Greek city since he does not linger on this point. But this consonance be­
tween a historian’s intuition and the actual structure of the city casts a positive
light on the science of urban artifacts. Is not this link between the city and the re136

gion perhaps precisely what characterizes Athens as the democratic Greek cityand city-state par excellence?
Athens was a city formed by citizens, a city-state whose inhabitants lived scat­
tered over a reasonably large region that was still closely tied to the city. Even if
many centers of Attica had local administrations they did not compete with the
i b ’-state. “The term polis that designated the city also designated the State; ini lady it was applied to the Acropc :J tV . •imitiw nee «i -- fworship, an'yo urnment, and as such the point>i:g::i of the Athenian t g ^ , w oration. The/ .cropolis and the whole city in the sen w >fState—this is the Avur*. significancecf t>’e A'-m polls."50 Originally, tb“'i p lis meant the AcropAwword astu
was used more generally to indicate 'he inhabited area.
The historical vicissitudes of Athens confirm the fundamental fact that the link
uniting the Athenian citizen to his city was essentially political and administraive and not residential. The problems of the city did not interest the Athenian
xcept from a general political and urban point of view. Roland Martin’s obser­
vation on this subject is to the point; he noted that precisely because of this con­ception of the city as state, as the place of the Athenians, the first, reflections on
urban organization were of a purely theoretical type. That is, they were specula­tions concerning the best form of the city and the political organization mostfavorable to the moral development of the citizen.51 In this ancient organization
it seems that the physical aspect of the city was secondary, almost as if the citywere a purely mental place. Perhaps the architecture of Greek cities owes its ex­
traordinary beauty to this intellectual character.
It is at this point, however, that it seems detached from us, from our living ex­
perience. Whereas Rome in the course of its Republican and Imperial history re­veals all of the contrasts and contradictions of the modern city, perhaps with adramatic character that few modern cities know, Athens remains the purest ex­perience of humanity, the embodiment of conditions that can never recur.

The city, like all urban artifacts, can only be defined by precise reference tospace and time. Although the Rome of today and the Rome of the classical period
are two different artifacts, we can see the importance of permanent phenomena
linking one to the other; nonetheless, if we wash to account for the transforma­tions of these artifacts, we must always be concerned with highly specific facts.
Common experience confirms what the most thorough studies have indicated:that a city changes completely every fifty years. One who lives in the city forsome time gradually becomes accustomed to this process of transformation, but
this does not make it any less true. The literature of all periods is rich with de­scriptions and records and often nostalgic laments about the transformation of
the city’s visage.
Of course, there are certain epochs or periods of time in which a city is trans­
formed especially quickly—Paris under Napoleon III, Rome when it became thecapital of Italy—and when the changes are impulsive and apparently unex­
pected. Mutations, transformations, small alterations—all of these take differ­
ent lengths of time. Certain catastrophic phenomena such as wars or expro­
priations can overturn seemingly stable urban situations very rapidly, whileother changes tend to occur over longer periods and by means of successive mod­ifications of single parts and elements. In all cases many forces come into play
and are applied to the city, and these forces may be of an economic, political, orsome other nature. Thus, a city may change through its own economic well­being, which tends to impose strong transformations on styles of life, or, in
another instance, may be destroyed by war. Yet whether one considers thetransformation of Paris and Rome during the eras just mentioned, the destruc­tion of Berlin and ancient Rome, the reconstruction of London and Hamburg
after huge fires had devastated them, or the bombardments of the last war, ineach case the forces which governed the changes can be isolated.
An analysis of the city also allows us to see how these forces are applied; forexample, by studying the history of property through deed registries we canbring to light the sequence of landholdings and trace certain economic tenden­cies like the acquisition of land by large financial groups which, whenever ittakes place, causes the end of lot subdivision and the formation of large areas
destined for totally different programs. What still must be clarified are the pre­cise ways in which these forces are manifested and, above all, the relationshipthat exists between their potential effect and that which they actually produce.
If we study the nature of speculation, for example, purely as a manifestation ofcertain economic laws, we will probably be able to establish several laws that are
inherent to it; but these will only be of a general nature. Moreover, if we seek todiscover why the application of these forces of speculation has such varying ef­
fects on the structure of the city, using the same approach, we will be even lesslikely to come up with an explana* on. Far more useful for understanding theforces operating on the city are tl w - two orders of facts: first, the nature of thecity, and second, the specific way - vhich these forces produce transformations.
In other words, the princij -'. fror_ lint of view is not so much torecognize the forces per se, mi- r(j Wr v> fir <t •-»- they are applied, and second,
how their application causes differer changes to realize that changes depend,on the one hand, on the natui e of the ? irces. an 1. ,i the other, on the local situa­tion and the type of city in which the, arise. Yk must therefore establish a re­lationship between the city and the feces acting on it in order to recognize themodes of its transformation.
139

Chapter 4
The Evolution of Urban Artifacts
The City as Field of Application for
Various Forces; Economics

86a Facade of a typical Parisbourgeois apartment house
constructed during the Second,
Empire, from an English magazineof 1858.

In the modern period a significant number of these transformations can be
explained on the basis of planning, inasmuch as this constituted the physicalform in which the forces controlling the transformation of the city were man­ifested, By planning we mean those operations undertaken by the municipality,
either autonomously or in response to the proposals of private groups, which
provide for, coordinate, and act on the spatial aspects of the city. We have spo­
ken of planning especially as a modern phenomenon, but in fact cities , ever since
they were founded, typically have possessed and partially grown through plan­ning; the collective nature of urban artifacts in itself implies that a plan of some
sort has existed, either at the beginning or over the course of development.

86b Typical grou nd-floor plan of a
Paris bourgeois apartment house
constructed during the Second
Empire. This floor war used forcommercial purposes.
86c Typical first-floor plan of a Parisbourgeois apartment house
constructed during the Second
Empire containing three apartments.
B) Bedroom. C) Courtyard.
D) Drawing room. K) Kitchen.
S) Large Hall. V) Anteroom.
W) Bathroom. Y) Passageway withskylight.

We have also seen how such plans impose themselves from a structural point ofview with the same force as other urban artifacts; in this sense they too consti­
tute a beginning. Economic forces tend to exert the major influence over plan­ning, and it is interesting to study their application, especially in view of the factthat we have ample material on this subject. In the capitalist city the applicationof economic forces is manifested in speculation, which constitutes part of themechanism by which the city grows. Here we are interested in exploring the re­lationship bet ween speculation and the type of growth a city undergoes and how
the city’s form depends on this relationship—in other words, whether, or towhat extent, the configurations of urban artifacts are dependent on the economic
relationship. We know that forces like planning initiatives, expropriations, andspeculation act on the city, but their relationship to real urban artifacts is highly
complex.

In this chapter I wish to deal especially with two different theses that have been
proposed relative to the city, taking them as fundamental references. The first ofthese was developed by Maurice Halbwachs and analyzes the nature of expropri­
ations. Halbwachs maintains that economic factors by nature predominate in theevolution of the city up to the point when they give way to more general rules;
however, he asserts, often the mistake is made from an economic point of view ofascribing primary importance to the particular way that a general condition
arises. Economic conditions arise of necessity, in his view, and they do notchange in meaning because they arise in one particular form, place, or moment
as opposed to another.
For this reason, the sum total of economic factors fails to explain fully the struc­ture of urban artifacts. But then what is the explanation for their uniqueness?
Halbwachs attempts to respond to this question by examining the developmentof social groups in the city, and he attributes the relationship between the city’s
construction and its behavior to the complexly structured system of the collec­
tive memory. In his study of the nature of expropriations in Paris, Les expropri­
ations et le prix de terrains d Paris (1860-1900), which dates from 1925, thesame year as his Les cadres sociaux de la memoire, Halbwachs takes his scien­tific training as a point of departure for analyzing statistical information in mas­terly fashion, as he was also to do in his L ’evolution des besoms dans les classes
ouvrieres.1 Few works on the city based on these premises have been conceived
with such rigor.
■s*
The second thesis to which I will refer is that of Hans Bernoulli. Bernoulli main­
tains that private land ownership and its parceling are the principal evils of themodern city since the relationship between the city ancl the land it occupies
140...........
.................................

should be of a fundamental and indissoluble character. He therefore argues thats the land should be returned to collective ownership. From here, his discourse on; the urban structure extends to a number of considerations that are principallyarchitectural.in-nature. He -wes housing, the residential district, and public
facilitiesjall as strongly d ererren t on the use of the land. This thesis, presented
and.supported..with great clarity, obviously addresses one of the major' categories-of-urban-issues.2
Several theorists have asserted that state ownership of property—that is, theabolition of private property—constitutes the qualitative difference between
the capitalist city and the socialist one. This position is undeniable, but does it re­late to urban artifacts? 1 am inclined to believe that it does, since the use andavailability of urban land are fundamental issues; however it still seems only acondition—a necessary condition, to be sure, but not a determining one.
Of the many theses based on economics, I have chosen to emphasize those of
Halbwachs and Bernoulli because of their clarity and correspondence to the real­
ity of the city; I believe that they can provide valuable insights into the nature ofurban artifacts. Ultimately, however, behind and beyond economic forces andconditions lies the problem of choices; and these choices, which are political in na­ture, can only be understood in light of the total structure of urban artifacts.

At the beginning of his study,'3 Halbwachs undertakes to consider thephenomena of expropriation in a large city from an economic standpoint. He
starts out with a hypothesis which allows him to analyze expropriations in a sci­
entific manner, viewing them as detached from their context; that is, he assumes
that they possess their own character and constitute a homogeneous group.
Thus, he can compare different cases without worrying about their differences;whether the cause of expropriation is accidental (for example, fire) or normal(obsolescence) or artificial (speculation), it does not alter for him the nature of
the effect, which remains a case of either tearing down or building up, pure andsimple.
Expropriation does not occur in a homogeneous way in all parts of the city, how­ever; it changes certain urban districts completely while respecting others
more. It would seem to be necessary, then, in order to acquire a complete pic­ture, to examine the variations from district to district; only from an overview ofseveral districts at different periods can we measure the major variations inspace and time.
There are at least two characteristics of these variations which are noteworthy.
The first has to do with the role of the individual, that is, the effect exerted by acertain personality as such; the second simply with the order of succession of agiven series of artifacts. “ A street,” writes Halbwachs, “is called‘Rambuteau,’an avenue ‘Pereire,’ or a boulevard ‘Haussmann,’ not, one would think, to ren­der homage to these great speculators or administrators who served the public
interest. . . these names are signs of origin.”4
When municipal initiatives relate to‘needs that have been asserted and to pro­posals that have been discussed by the populace, there are many influences andfactors at work, including accidental ones. But on the other hand, when themunicipal government does not represent the popular wall (as in Paris from 1831
141

The Thesis of Maurice Halbwachs

to 1871), then we must attribute primary importance to ideas of aesthetics,
hygiene, urban strategy, or to the practices of one or a few individuals in power.
From this point of view, the actual configuration of a large city can be seen as aconfrontation of the initiatives of different parties, personalities, and govern­ments. In this way various different plans are superimposed, synthesized, andforgotten, so that the Paris of today is like a composite photograph, one thatmight be obtained by reproducing the Paris of Louis XIV, Louis XV, Napoleon
I , and Baron Haussmann in a single image. Surely the unfinished streets and thesolitude and neglect of certain districts are testimony to the diversity and rela­tive independence of many projects.
The second characteristic we mentioned concerns the sequence in which a seriesof artifacts appears. Throughout history, there are constant forces that promote
the building, acquiring, and selling of land, but these forces develop according to
the specific directions that are offered to them, and in accordance with certain
plans which they must address. These directions may change abruptly, often in
unexpected ways; but when normal economic forces cannot by nature be easily
modified, the intensity of their response to change may be much augmented ormuch diminished for reasons that are not strictly economic.
Haussmann suggested that there were certain tactical reasons, among others,
for the transformation of Paris, for example the destruction of districts thatwere not favorable for assembling troops. That such a consideration should ariseat the time of an authoritarian and non-popular government is not surprising,nor are others: for example, the attractions of working-class employment andrich prospects for speculators, both equally advantageous to a regime whichsought to compensate for the minimum of political rights it offered by affording amaximum of material prosperity. Thus the large-scale expropriations in Paris
under this regime are explicable on the basis of politics: the apparently decisivetriumph of the party of order over that of revolution, the bourgeoisie over theworking class.
Another characteristic example of the role played by specific historical cir­
cumstances during the revolutionary period in Paris is the planning of the great
boulevards following the nationalization of emigrant and clerical property. The
Commission of Artists simply marked out these large streets on the map, mak­ing use of the lands made available by the acquisition of the enormous new na­
tional property. The study of the transformations of Paris is thus bound up withthe study of French history; the form of the city’s transformations depends on
both its historical past and the deeds of certain individuals whose wills acted ashistorical forces.
Acts of expropriation seem to differ by their very nature from all other acts
which occur at the beginning of property changes. Related to this hypothesis is
the fact that they generally do not occur in isolation; they are not so much fo­
cused on this street or that group of houses as connected to an entire system ofwhich they are only one part. They are involved in the tendencies of the city’s de­velopment.
In all cases where historical reasons are given as explanations for the transfor­
mations of Paris, there are also different possible explanations which relate theeconomic factors of expropriation to other economic factors.”We have mentioned
the nationalization of clerical property; of course, not all of the streets projectedby the Commission of Artists were realized, but the expropriation of convent142

property in itself was an economic issue. These properties constituted impedi­ments, even in terms of their physical form, to the development of the city, andthus even under different circumstances, it is probable that they would havebeen expropriated by the king or sold by the clergy in a similar way to that which
occurred later with the railroads.
As was pointed out by_Halbwachs. it is not so much the precise way that a gen­e ra l condition arises which is significant; a condition arises out of necessity, andits meaning does not change because it arises in one particular form, place, andmoment as opposed to another. This can be said ofHaussmann’s planand all the
military, political, and aesthetic arguments we have cited for it. The assemblingof troops was not in itself responsible for modifying the street, not In its topo­
graphical form nor in its economic character, and thus it is no more necessary to
account for it than it is for the chemist to account for the form and size of the test
tube he uses for his experiments. Even if motives of order, hygiene, or aesthet­ics intervened, as they did not result in any important modification which can be
explained on the basis of economics, the economist need not be concerned withth em . Either these factors had a certain effect and therefore they cannot be ig­
nored , or, a f te r th o ro u g h research in which all the economic causes have beenelim in ated , th e ir ex isten c e can be said to have had a “residual effect.”
This hypothesis of the purely economic character of expropriations is predicatedon th e ir in d ep en d en ce with re s p e c t to individual artifacts and political history.
M oreo v er, since ex p ro p ria tio n s h av e a ra p id and comprehensive effect, their dif­fe re n t co m p o n en ts b ein g realized sim u ltan e o u sly and not successively, it is thetotal act that reveals th e d irec tio n an d influence of the forces present in a preced­
ing period. The specific way in which expropriations occur, then, is unimportant,eyen from a legal point of view.
Whenever a consciousness of a collective need takes shape and becomes clear,
total action can originate. Obviously the collective consciousness can be mis­taken; the city can be induced to urbanize lands where there is no tendency to ex­pand or to build streets where none are really needed, and such hastily createdstreets can remain deserted. (The causes of mistakes are many; for example, thecreation of a street for emergency reasons could lead to the construction ofothers by analogy'.) Thus expropriations themselves undergo a normal processof evolution.
Accordingly, Halbwachs does not consider expropriations as abnormal or ex­
traordinary phenomena, but instead chooses to study them as the most typicalphenomena of urban evolution. Since it is through expropriations and their im­
mediate consequences that the economic tendencies by which the evolution ofurban land can be analyzed are manifested in a reasonably condensed and syn­thetic form, the study of expropriations provides one of the clearest and surest
points of view for examining a highly complex totality of phenomena.
Because of the importance I attribute to this thesis of Halbwachs, I would like tosummarize the three elements that I consider fundamental:
1. the relationship between, and also the independence of, economic factors andthe design of the city;
2. the contribution of the individualpersonality to urban changes, its nature andits limits; thus also the relationship between the preciseThistorically determinedmeans by which a condition arises and its general causes:
3. urban evolution as a complex fact of social order which tends to occur accord;143

ing to highly precise laws and orientations of growth.
To these three points I should add the importance of expropriations as a decisive
moment in the dynamic of urban evolution, a valuable concept which Halbwachs
established as a fundamental field of study.

One could study many different cities on the basis of Halbwachs’s thesis. I at­
tempted something along these lines in a study of one Milanese district,0 stress­
ing the importance of certain apparently accidental occurrences in the succes­
sive evolution of the city, such as the destructive effects of war and bombarding.
I believe it can be shown, and I have attempted to do so in this study, that occur­
rences of this type only accelerate c e r ta in tendencies that a lr e a d y exist, modify­
ing them in part, but permitting a more rapid realization of intentions which arepreviously present in economic form and which would otherwise still have pro­
duced physical effects—destructions and reconstructions—on the body of thecity through a process which in effect would be hardly different from that of war.
It is nonetheless evident that the study of these occurrences, because of therapid and brutal form in which they arise, permits one to see far more vivid and
immediate effects than those which appear as the outcome of a long series of his­
torically sequential facts of land ownership and the evolution of the city’s realestate patrimony.
A modern study of this type derives considerable support from the study ofurban plans—plans for expansion, for development, and so on. In substancethese plans are closely linked to expropriations, without which they would not be
possible and through which they are manifested. What Halbwachs stresses rela­tive to the two important plans for Paris—that of the Commission of Artists andthat of Haussmann (and in both cases the form of these plans does not differ sub­stantially from that of many plans conceived under an absolute monarchy)—istrue for most if not all cities. I have elsewhere attempted to relate the evolutionof the urban form of Milan, for example, to the reforms promulgated by first
Maria Theresa and then Joseph II of Austria and finalized under Napoleon. The
relationship between these economically motivated initiatives and the design ofthe city is clearly apparent; above all it demonstrates the primary importance ofthe economic facts of expropriation in relation to the architectural artifacts ofform. It also sheds light on how by nature expropriations—disregarding for the
moment their political aspect, that is, how they can be used to the advantage of
one class or another—are a necessary condition in the overall evolution of thecity and are deeply rooted in urban social movements.
It can be shown how the Napoleonic Plan for Milan,6 which was one of the mostmodern plans created in Europe despite its derivation from that of the ParisianCommission of Artists, explains, in its very physical form, the long series of ex­
propriations and dispossessions of ecclesiastical holdings by the Austrian gov­
ernment. This plan thus is simply the precise architectural form of a particularinstance of expropriation and can be studied as such; within these limits, if they
can be so described, our study would benefit from an understanding of neoclassi­
cal culture, of the different personalities of architects like Luigi Cagnola andGiovanni Antolini, and of a whole series of spatial proprosals which, independentof economic considerations, preceded this plan and were revived in it.
The relative autonomy of these spatial proposals can be measured on the basis of
how strongly they survive in subsequent plans or link up with preceding ones
144

but do not promote economic transformations. Thus, the success of strada
Napoleone, at that time via Dante, is entirely comprehensible within the
dynamics of urban life. The same dynamics that allowed the Beruto Plan to suc­ceed in the northern section of the city insured its failure in the southern one,
where its hypotheses were either too advanced or too remote from economic
realities.
The economic dynamic erupted decisively following the acts taken by Joseph II
of Austria during the twenty-year period from 1765 to 1785 to suppress religious
orders. It was a m atter of both politics and economics; the suppression of theJesuits, of the Inquisition, and of the innumerable bizarre religious congrega­tions which were flourishing in Milan as in few other cities, even in Spain, notonly meant a step toward civic and modern progress but also signaled concretely
the possibility for the city to take charge of vast urbanized areas, to systematize
streets and rectify irregular situations, and to construct schools, academies, andgardens. The public gardens were set up directly next to the gardens of two con­vents and the Senate.
The Bonaparte Forum was certainly not an architectural necessity, but it wasbom of the city’s need to give itself a modem face by establishing a businesscenter for the new bourgeoisie that was in power. This need was independent of
its form and the specific topographical, architectural, and historical conditions
by which its location was chosen.
Antolini’s idea remained a purely formal one, but as such, in a totally different
political context, it was revived in the Beruto Plan with notable prominence, ex­
cept that for reasons which once again were economic, the business center was
no longer the Bonaparte Forum, and therefore, because of the complex nature ofurban artifacts, the plan had a different impact on the urban equilibrium. Thiseconomic impact, I wish to emphasize, was independent of its design.

The way that Halbwachs develops his theory helps us to perceive, conversely,
the confusion that generally arises in the theories of those who make presupposi­tions that are not at all scientific and ignore the nature of urban artifacts, blam­ing ruthless demolitions, grandiose plans, and so forth. In this regard, the way
Haussmann’s work is normally analyzed is typical. To avail ourselves of
Halbwachs’s point of view, one may or may not approve of Haussmann’s plan for
Paris when judged solely on the basis of its design—although naturally the de­sign is very important, and it is certainly one of the things I want to consider
here—but it is equally important to be able to see that the nature ofHaussmann’s plan is linked up with the urban evolution of Paris in those years;
and from this standpoint the plan is one of the greatest successes ever, not only
because of a series of coincidences but above all because of its precise reflectionof the urban evolution at that moment in history.
The streets Haussmann opened followed the real direction of the development of
the city and clearly acknowledged the role of Paris in the national and interna­
tional setting. It has been said that Paris is too big for France and at the sametime too small for Europe; this observation illustrates the fact that one cannot al­ways estimate the size of a city or the workings of a plan, whatever the actual
success of this plan, from a study of the urban condition that this plan
encompasses. Thus, on the one hand, Bari, Ferrara, Richelieu; on the other,146

88 Sectional rendering o f Bonaparte
Forum, Milan, Giovanni Antolini,
1801 ,

89 Plan o f Bonaparte Forum, Milan,
Giovanni Antolini, 1801.

90 P o r ta T ic in e s e , M ila n ,L u ig i Cagnola.
91a, 91b T w o o f th e v a r ia n ts p ro p o se dby the e n g in e e r Cesare B e n ito ,d e s ig n e r o f th e f i r s t m a s te r p la n o f
Milan, for the organization o f th e
zo n e o f th e C a stle , 1884.
92 Corso V itto r io E n u u m e le , M ila n ,b e g in n in g o f th e tw e n tie th c e n tu r y .

Barcelona, Rome, 'Vienna: in the former, the plan has undergone the effects oftime or has even become only an emblem, an initiative not translated into reality",
except in an occasional building or street; in the latter, the plan has channeled,guided, and often accelerated the propulsive forces that act on, or are about to
act on, the city. In still other instances, the plan tends to be projected toward thefuture in a particular way; for example, a plan which has been judged unfeasibleat the time of its conception and whose initial manifestations have been opposed
may then be recuperated in subsequent periods, demonstrating its foresight,
Certainly in many cases the relationship between economic forces and the de­velopment and design of the plan is not easy to define; one very important, andinsufficiently known, example is that of the Plan Cerda for Barcelona of 1859.7
This plan, extremely advanced technically and entirely responsive to theeconomic transformations that were pressing upon the Catalan capital, was ex­
tensive and appropriate even if it offered too grandiose a forecast of the city’s
demographic and economic development. Not realized as it should have been, orin a strict sense not at all, the plan still determined the subsequent developmentof Barcelona. In fact, the Plan Cerda was not realized precisely where its
technological visions were too advanced for the times and where the solutions it
offered demanded a level of urban evolution far superior to the existing one. Cer­
tainly more advanced than Haussmann’s plan, it would have been difficult torealize not only for the Catalan bourgeoisie but for any other European city.

f

To describe briefly the plan’s main characteristics, its viability was based on a
general grid that allowed for a synthesis of the urban whole, as in the case ofHaussmann’s plan, and within this, an autonomous system of districts and resi­
dential nuclei. The plan thus presupposed not just more advanced technical but
also certain political conditions, and fell short precisely on these points, as in theautonomous residential complexes it projected which demanded greater ad­
ministrative attention and which were partially revived by the GATEPAC
group in the 1930s.
At the same time, as Oriol Bohigas has rightly noted, the plan was untenable
where it presupposed a very low density, a hypothesis entirely counter to theway of life and the very structure of Mediterranean cities. However, where it
transformed the Hies, or city blocks,8 into massive constructed complexes andaccepted the general principle of the rectangular fabric, it ended up lending itself
magnificently to the aims of speculation, and as such only came to be realized in adegraded form. One can see in this case how complex the relationship between
the design and the economic situation was—which does not contradict
Halbwachs’s thesis; quite the contrary.
Subsequently, the urban growth of Barcelona occurred as if could, and the Plan
Cerda was used to respond to that growth; it did not have the power to transformthe city’s political-economic objectives and was little more than a pretext or animage to which to conform. Its importance, however, independent from and un­
related to the economic forces operating in Barcelona, was that it represented amoment in the city’s history and was taken as such.

As we have said, since the city is a complex entity, naturally it can coincide (andsometimes does so perfectly) or not coincide with a plan that issues from it.
When it does not, it is either because of deficiencies in the plan or because of the150«

93 P la n o f B a rc e lo n a .
9Jt B lo c k s i n the zo n e o f B a r c e lo n athat w a s to be e n la rg e d u n d e r thep la n of Idelfonso C e rd a , 1859. Above:T h e p ro g r e s s iv e in c re a se in d e n s ity o fa ty p ic a l b lo ck. Middle: S e v e r a l
blocks a s s h o w n in a 1989 r e g is tr ymap. B e lo w , left: Plan of a c o rn e r
b u ild in g , Calle Lauria n o . 80, Juli
M. F o s s a s i Martinez, 1907; lig h t:
Casa, Lamadrid, C a lle Gerona no .
113, Lints Domenech i M o n ta n e r ,
1902.

9h

particular historical situation in which the city finds itself. In each case the re­lationship can be judged only outside of the actual development. Thus the Dukeof Este’s plan for Ferrara must be judged apart from its failure to be realized; r 1
its lack of provisions for development; otherwise we would have to say that it
was worthless because of these shortcomings.
Another obvious example is the Muratti plan for Bari;9 this is a typical example
of expropriation as defined by Halbwaehs, and it is characterized here as
elsewhere by a series of precise political and historical circumstances. What isinteresting in this case is that the plan projected under the Bourbons and ap­
proved in 1790 saw a subsequent development which, although subjected to v ,rious transformations, lasted up until 1918. Here too, and still today, the plan wasaltered in various ways precisely where it worked against speculation and 'nfavor of isolated blocks, but it survives not as a mere .impression recognizable .o
the historian but as the concrete form of the city, constituting the typical patternof Bari and characterized by the separation between the old city and the modern
Muratti borgo, a pattern also immediately recognizable elsewhere in Pugliese
cities.
At the same time, it has rightly been observed that we should study not only how
cities evolve but also how they decline; from this perspective we could undertakea study along the same lines as that of Halbw'achs, but in the opposite direction.
For example, to say that the city of Richelieu,10 which was associated with thegreat cardinal-minister, declined rapidly with the disappearance of this person­
age from the political scene means nothing; he may have been the one who
prompted the establishment and actually founded this urban center, but the citythen should have been able to continue to grow on its own accord. The centuries
of decline of certain large cities as well as certain small ones have modified theseurban structures in different ways without damaging their original quality:
otherwise we would have to say that there never was an urban life in cities like
Richelieu and Pienza simply because they started out as artificial cities.
The same can be said of Washington, D. C., or of St. Petersburg. I do not thinkthat the difference of scale, often extreme, bet ween such cities matters here; ac­tually it confirms the fact that we must ignore size in studying urban artifacts if
we wish to arrive at a scientific framework for the problem. St. Petersburg canbe considered at its beginning an arbitrary act of the czar; and the continuous
bipolarity in Russia between Moscow and what is now Leningrad suggests thatthe growth of the latter to the rank of a capital and then to a great world me­
tropolis was hardly uneventful. The real facts of this growth are probably ascomplex as those of the decline of Nizhnii Novgorod in Moscow or, to takeanother example, the rise of Milan to predominance over Pavia and other Lom­bard cities after a certain time.

In Die stadt und ihr Boden , 11 Bernoulli illuminated one of the most important,perhaps the fundamental, problem of the city, one which constitutes a strong
constraint on urban development. In this modest study, which is clearer andmore basic than most of the articles and research undertaken subsequently on
the problem, Bernoulli focuses on two principal issues. Th^ first concerns not
only the negative character of private property ownership but also the harmful
consequence of its extreme division; the second, closely linked to this, sheds
light on the historical reasons for this situation and its consequences after a cer152

tain point for the form of the city.
Land ownership, observes Bernoulli, whether of rural land or urban land, tends
to be based on subdivision; the eccentric forms of fields are the equivalent of thecomplex and often irrational organization of urban property:. . . To every innovation there is immediately opposed a tangle of property bor­ers, defined since antiquity, and of a substantially different character fromthose rural borders along which the plow and harrow run, but no less rooted andimmovable. These lots are not just encircled with stone, they are occupied byconstructions of stone. As much as one knows that the new streets and new con-. ructions that ought to be built would be better than the narrow, mean, and ser­pentine streets and the exhausted hovels, nothing can be done until the inevita­
ble conflicts over property are resolved. These are long conflicts that demandpatience and money, and very often the original intention is deformed along theway.
In large measure the historical fact that initiated this process of dismembering
the urban land was the French Revolution. When in 1789 land became free, thelarge estates of the aristocracy and the clergy were sold to the middle class andto farmers. But just as all of the landed rights of the nobility were largely dis­solved, so also were those of the communes, and thus the great state-owned
areas were broken up. The monopoly on land was transformed into private own­
ership; land became a marketable entity like anything else:“. . . The land casually slipped away from the community and fell into hands ofprudent farmers and shrewd citizens, where it quickly became an object of true
and real speculation. . . . The city found itself once again at that turn in the roadwhere the right of private ownership of land was manifested in full in newr build­ing establishments. The new times, unexpectedly awakening to another indus­
trial activity, gave proprietors an almost unbounded possibility to increase thevalue of their own lands.”13This analysis very rationally and clearly describes the situation at a precise mo­ment of the city’s history, but it must be countered with the following argu­
ments. Bernoulli considers the evil of land subdivision to be among the specificconsequences of the French Revolution, or at least a result of the fact that therevolutionaries of the time were unaware of the enormous communal capital
they were alienating—the communal lands that should have been maintained ascollective property and the great property holdings of the nobility and clergythat should have been confiscated and held by the communities rather than sub­divided among private owners—thereby jeopardizing the rational developmentof cities (and countryside). On the other hand, where this did not occur, as inmost of Germany including Reilm. tne phenomenon occuned with similar con­sequences. When, in execution cf Adam Smith’s proposal, Berlin’s financial lawof 1808 permitted government land.- to be used to liquidate government debts
and to be transferred into private ownership “as freely and irrevocably as possi­ble,”14 here too the land. „ c mdietabie good, became the object of economic
monopoly. In his history of the modern development of Berlin, Hegemann13 has
portrayed in bold relief‘he +'eai:c i consequences that this had for the city and for
the German workers, up to tne ti. e of the notorious master plan of 1853 of the
President of the Poliw. ,.hhh . fixed the beginning of the famous “Berlin
courtyards.”. ,tBernoulli’s explanation and all the other theses of this type, though highly il­luminating in many respects , must also be criticized on two other bases. The first153

95 Organization and- stibdivision ofland, as see n in the evolutioyi of a.
suburban area of Basel, Switzerlandl:
comparison of property boundaries
in 1850, above; 1920, center; 19^0,
beloiv. Initially land was used for
agriculture, then reorganized forbuilding purposes, and finallyextensively subdivided into building
plots. After Hans Bernoulli.

has to do with the validity of this analysis over time. That is, it explains certain;
striking features but not the definitive ones of the capitalist-bourgeois city. i
Furthermore, these features were subject to general economic laws that would
have emerged anyway and thus, in my view, were actually a positive moment in
the development of the city. In short, the breaking up of the land on the one hand
led to the degeneration of the city, but on the other, it actually promoted its de­velopment.
We can return to Halbwachs’s conclusion again, which says that we need not at­tribute primary importance to the precise way a general condition arises; it mustarise of necessity, but it does not alter in meaning for having arisen in one form,
place, and moment as opposed to another. We have just seen how the great ex­
propriations and also the increased subdivision of urban land become central is­sues with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic occupation; however these
phenomena already had clear precedents in the reforms of the Hapsburgs andeven the Bourbons, and eventually they were even manifested in a country as
profoundly reactionary as Prussia.
These phenomena had to do, in sum, with the working out of a general law towhich all bourgeois states were subject, and as such it was positive. The divisionof the great estates, expropriations, and the formation of a new land registrysystem were all necessary economic phases in the evolution of Western cities.
What varies from city to city is the political context in which this process cameabout; and only here, in terms of political choices, are significant differences tobe found.
In fact, on this point the quite romantic aspect of socialists like Bernoulli andHegemann cannot be ignored. In a historical and economic key, these writers
echo the romanticism of William Morris and all the origins of the Modern Move­ment in architecture. It is in itself significant how Hegemann attacks the Mietkasemen—that is, without questioning whether in the end these large tenement
houses were not equally as valid from a hygienic, technical, and aesthetic point ofview as small houses. The same charge was to be made against the Siedlwngen of
Vienna and Berlin, where the critique took the form of a revival of certain local
features. It is revealing that these authors always appeal to the Gothic city or to
the state socialism of the Hohenzollerns—conditions that from an urban
standpoint clearly had to be superseded, even at the price of possibly making thesituation worse.
This reference to romantic socialism leads me to my second criticism of Ber­noulli’s thesis, which has to do with its connection to a vision in which the prob­
lem of modern urbanism is seen as determined by the city’s historical relation­
ship with the Industrial Revolution. In this vision, the emergence of the problemof the large city is taken to be coincident with the moment of the Industrial Rev­olution; before this time the urban problem is seen as qualitatively different.
From this premise it is argued that the philanthropic and utopistic initiatives ofromantic socialism were in themselves positive, and even constituted the basis
for modern urbanism, so much so that when they disappeared, the urban cul­ture, isolated from political debate, became increasingly shaped purely by tech­nical processes in the service of the dominating powrer. I will concern myself here
only with the first part of this assertion, since this entire book not only considers
but denies the assumption of the second in the terms in whifch it is postulated. I
maintain that the problem of the large city precedes the industrial period and isbound up with the city itself.
154

As Bahrdt has noted, the polemic against the industrial city issues from before
the latter was born; at the time the romantic polemic was initiated only London
and Paris already existed as large cities. The continuity of urban problems
within these cities clearly belies the romantics’ attribution of the evils of ur­
banism, real or presumed, to the growth of industry.16 Moreover, in the first
decades of the nineteenth century, Duisburg, Essen, and Dortmund were small
cities with fewer than ten thousand inhabitants, while in large industrial cities
like Milan and Turin, the problem of industry did not yet exist. The same is trueof Moscow- and Leningrad.
What is mysterious at first glance is to see how7most urban historians have beenable to reconcile the theses of the romantic socialists with the analysis made byFriedrich Engels. What is Engels’s thesis? Simply this: “that the large cities
have made the malady of the social organism, which was chronic in the country,
acute, and in so doing have illuminated the true essence [ofthe problem] and theway to cure it.’’1' Engels does not say that the cities before the Industrial Rev­olution w7ere a paradise; rather in his indictment of the living conditions of the
British working class he emphasizes how7the rise of big industry only worsened
and made apparent wrhat w7ere already impossible living conditions.
The consequences of the rise of big industry thus are not something that con­cerns large cities specifically; rather they are a fact that has to do with bourgeois
society. Thus, Engels denies that a conflict of this type may be resolved at all inspatial terms, and the proof of his critique is to be found in Haussmann’s proj­
ects, the attempts at slum clearance in the English cities, and the projects of theromantic socialists. As this implies, Engels also rejects the notion that thephenomenon of industrialism is necessarily bound up with urbanism; in fact, hedeclares that to think that spatial initiatives can affect the industrial process is apure abstraction, and practically speaking a reactionary point of view7. I believethat it would be a mistake to try to add anything to this position.

Further evidence of Engels’s position on the relationship between socio­ The Housing Problem
economics and the city is provided by his discourse on the problem of housing.
Here the position is unequivocal. To focus on the problem of housing in order toresolve the social problem is in his view7an error; housing is a technical problem
that may or may not be resolved on the basis of a particular site, but it is not acharacteristic of the working class. In this way Engels confirms what we havesuggested above, that the problem of the large city precedes the industrial
period. Rewrites, “. . . [the] shortage of houses is not something peculiar to thepresent; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modern proletariat incontradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all the op­pressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly from it . . ,”18
It is well known by now that t k . gr ..blem of housing in ancient Rome, as soon as
the city attained the dimensions of a large metropolis with all the problems in­herent to it , was no less serious than it is in today’s cities. Living conditions were
desperate, and the descriptions |h a t have come down to us from the classicalwriters show how this problem wte foremost and fundamental; it appeared assuch in the urban polities from Julies Caesar to Augustus down to the late days ofthe empire. Problems of this typo also persisted throughout the Middle Ages;
the vision that the romantics give us of the medieval city completely contradicts
the reality. From documents, descriptions, and what still remains of the Gothic
155

cities, it is evident that the living conditions of the oppressed classes in thesecities were among the sorriest in the history of mankind.
In this sense the history of Paris together with the entire subject of the urban
way of life of the metropolitan French proletariat is paradigmatic. This way of tlife was one of the characteristic and decisive elements of the Revolution, and itw
persisted up until the time of Haussmann’s plan. In this sense, Haussmann’s
demolitions, however else one may judge them, represented progress; those,
who are disturbed by his tearing down of the nineteenth-century city always- 'forget that it nonetheless represents an affirmation, even if demagogical andsingle-minded, of the spirit of the Enlightenment, and that the conditions of life
within the Gothic districts of the old cities represented something that was ob­
jectively impossible and indisputably had to be changed.
But the moralistic tendency implicit or explicit in the positions of scholars like
Bernoulli and Hegemann did not prevent them from arriving at a scientific visionof the city. No one who has been seriously occupied with urban science has failed
to note how the most important conclusions have always emerged from the workof scholars who devoted themselves exclusively to one city: Paris, London, andBerlin are indissolubly linked for the scholar with the names of Poete, Rasmus­
sen,19 and Hegemann. In these studies, so different in many respects, the re­lationship between general law's and the specific elements of the city is de­lineated in exemplary fashion. It is worth remarking that if for every branch ofscientific thought the monograph affords a larger vista on its specific object, inthe case of urban science it indubitably presents advantages because somehow,
related as the city is to the concept of a work of art, the monograph addresses thetotal element which is peculiar to the city and which otherwise risks becoming
ossified or opaque or even lost entirely in a more general treatment.
In this sense, one of the virtues of Bernoulli’s work is that he never loses sight of
the relationship with urban artifacts. He refers every general statement back toa specific urban artifact, and despite this never entirely becomes a historian, as
happens even in the most convincing parts of Lewis Mumford’s work. Bernoulli
saw the city as a constructed mass, in his owm definition, where every element
has its particularity and its differentiation v'ithin the overall plan.
The subject of the relationship between the land and its buildings almost sur­passes the economic relationship in scope, and perhaps for this reason it has
never been formulated completely. In the polemics of the theoreticians of theModern Movement, the treatment of the residential district as a single unit re­calls the theories of earlier historians on large building complexes; it is signifi­
cant how' in seeking a historical foundation for their urban polemic the moder­nists turned to the great theoreticians of the Renaissance, especially to
Leonardo da Vinci and his plan for a city containing a system of subterraneanroads and canals for transporting cargo and servicing basement levels, with a
network of streets for pedestrian traffic at the level of the ground floor of thehouses. Following Leonardo’s project, in a canonical succession that w'oukl beworth studying for its genealogical clarity, comes the project of the Adambrothers for the Adelphi residential district in London.
The Adelphi district was located south of the Strand between the City of London
and Westminster, and the Adam brothers obtained the right to build from theDuke of St. Alban, the owner of the land. The district was sufficiently large tocontain a building complex in which a system of superimposed roadways could be156

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Pin i >fbuilt whose} lower streets would connect with the banks of the Thames. These
are the terms in which the Adelphi project was presented. But is it only impor­tant in these terms? And can Leonardo’s project be seen as something other thana unique proposal of a remarkable scale and a strongly rationalizing impulse?
In Bernoulli’s view, Leonardo’s project was not entirely in the realm of some ofthe other highly ambitious statements of the Renaissance—those which madethe city into a supreme work of art at the limits of nature, engineering, painting,and politics. Leonardo’s project was quite different from such ideal schemes be­cause it was already in the city, a real city with its presumed relationships, asreal as the piazzas of Bellini and the Venetian painters. It was connected to an ac­tual experience of the city, and gave concrete form to the Milan of Lodovico ilMoro, just as the great hospital there that translated the designs of Filarete wasa concrete form, as the canals, the dams, and the new streets were concrete
forms. No city was so much constructed in its totality as that of the Renaissance;
I have already emphasized how this architecture was both sign and event, andwas based on an order superior to that of function. This is precisely the case withthe great Milan hospital, which is certainly not unrelated to Leonardo’s medita­
tions, and whose constitutive presence in the city has not changed in its impor­tance even today.
Two and a half centuries later the Adam brothers found it possible to construct awhole part of the city, an actual urban artifact, despite all the real difficulties ofthis undertaking. But maybe such a work is not so exceptional; rather it indi­cates that a great primary element could originate, perhaps in an exceptionalway, from a response to the problem of housing.

The Urban Scale|f

In the preceding section we pointed out several distortions which have characterized the study of the city: the overimportance attributed to the developmentof industry seen in a generic and conventional way with respect to the real
dynamic of urban artifacts, the abstracting of problems out of the actual context
of the city, and the confusion that certain moralistic attitudes have introduced,
preventing the formation of a scientific habit of thought in urban studies. Al­
though most of these distortions and prejudices do not issue from a single sourceand do not amount to a clearly systematic set of ideas, they are responsible formany ambiguities and it is worthwhile to consider certain aspects of them at gre­ater length.
A number of the arguments that have been arbitrarily invented to explain thegenesis of the modern city are to be found as the premises of various technicaland regional studies.20 These tend to turn on the problematical nature of theterm city today; the problem arises, it is argued, essentially out of the city’s
physical and political homogenization following the rise of industrialism. Indus­
try, the source of every evil and every good, becomes the true protagonist in thetransformation of the city.
According to these argum ents, the change wrought by industry is characterizedhistorically by three phases. The first phase, and thus the origin of the transfor­

mation of the city, is marked by the destruction of the fundamental structure of
the medieval city, which was based on an absolute identity between the place ofwork and the place of residence, both being within the same building. Thus
began the end of the domestic economy as a unified entity of production and con158#

sumption. This destruction of the basic form of life of the medieval city led to achain of reactions whose ultimate ramificat ions would come to be measured fullyin the city of the future. Contemporaneously, workers’ housing, mass housing,and rental housing appeared; only at this point did the housing problem emerge
as an urban and social problem. The distinctive sign of this phase in spatial
terms, then, was the enlargement of the urban surface, with the house and thework place beginning to be slightly separated in the city.
The second phase, which was the decisive one, was characterized by a progres­sive expansion of industrialization. It engendered a definitive separation ofhouse and work place and destroyed their former relationship to the neighbor­hood. The appearance of the first types of collective work-was accompanied by achoice of housing that was not always in the immediate vicinity of the work place.
Parallel to this evolution was the separation between work places that produced
merchandise and those that did not. Production and administration 'were distin­
guished, and the division of labor in its most precise meaning began. From thisdivision of work places the “downtown,” in the English sense of the word, origi­
nated, creating specific interdependencies between offices that had increasingneed for reciprocal contact. The central administration of an industrial complex,
for example, sought to have banking, administration, and insurance asneighbors rather than production places. At first, when there was still sufficientroom, this concentration came about in the center of the city.
The third phase of the city’s transformation began with the development ofmeans of individual transportation and the full efficiency of all means of public
transportation to the work place. This development must have resulted not only
from an increased technical efficiency but also from the economic participation of
public administrations in transportation services. The choice of the place of resi­
dence became increasingly independent of the place of work. Meanwhile, as theservice activities, which still tended to be located in the center, developed andacquired a primary importance, the search for housing outside the city in the ad­jacent countryside grew ever stronger. Work and its location came to play an in­creasingly subordinate role in the choice of housing. The citizen moved into any
part of the territory he wished, giving rise to the phenomenon of the commuter.
The relationship of residence and work now- became fundamentally bound up
with time; they became Zeitfunktion.

An explanation of this type contains a continuous mixture of true and false ele­ments; it has its most evident limitations in its description of artifacts, lapsing
into a sort of “naturalism” of the urban dynamic whereby the actions of men, theconstitution of urban artifacts, and the political choices that the city makes are
all assumed to be involuntary. It results in a consideration of certain legitimate,
and technically important, urban proposals (for example, the real problems of
decongestion and the work-resilience relationship) as ends rather than means,virtually as principles and laws rather than instruments. Above all it makes anumber of confused assumptions,;based on a facile and schematic mixture ofpoints of view, assertions, systems-of interpretation, and disparate methods.
The major theses to take issue witHJn tiiis explanation of the city are principallythose relating to the housing problem and to scale. I have already dealt
sufficiently with the first, given the scope of this work, particularly with refer­ence to the thesis of Engels. The second issue, that of scale, requires a very ex‘*

159

tensive analysis; here I intend to consider only a few of its principal aspects asthey relate directly to the arguments developed so far.
A correct treatment of the problem of scale ought to begin with the subject of the
field or area of study and intervention. I have already discussed this in the firstchapter of this book and again in my discussion of locus and quality in urban ar­
tifacts. Naturally this study of the field can also be applied in other senses, forexample in the sense of operative scale. Here I intend to speak of scale only in thesense of what has been seen by some to be a “new urban scale.”
It is logical that the extraordinary development of cities in recent years and the
problems of the urbanization of the population, of concentration, and of thegrowth of the urban surface have taken on prime importance in the eyes of ur­
banists and all social scientists studying the city. This phenomenon of increased
size is common to large cities and is noticeable to some degree everywhere; insome cases it has had extraordinary ramifications. Thus, in defining the region of
the northeast coast of the United States between Boston and Washington andbetween the Atlantic and the Appalachians, Gottmann used the term
megalopolis,21 already coined and described by Mumford.22 But if this is. themost sensational case of increased urban scale, no less important instances of ex­
pansion exist in the large European cities.
These expansions constitute phenomena in themselves and must be studied assuch; the various hypotheses of the megalopolis have brought to light interestingmaterial which will undoubtedly be useful for further studies of the city. In theseterms, the hypothesis of the city-region may truly become a working hypothesis,
and it will become increasingly valuable the more it serves to illuminate situa­
tions that preceding hypotheses have been unable to explain completely.
What we want to contest, however, is that this “new scale” can change the sub­stance of an urban artifact. It is conceivable that a change in scale modifies anurban artifact in some way; but it does not change its quality. Terms such asurban nebula may be useful in the technical language, but they explain nothing;
however', even the inventor of the term stresses that he uses it “to explain thecomplexity and the lack of clarity of [the city’s] structure,” disputing in particu­
lar the thesis of a school of American ecologists for whom “the old notion of city
as structured nucleus , defined in space and distinct from the neighboring area, isa dead concept” and who envision “the nucleus dissolving, forming a more or lesscolloidal fabric, the city being absorbed by the economic region or even the whole
nation.”2,5
The American geographer Ratcliff, coming from a different point of view fromours, has also disputed and rejected the popular thesis that metropolitan prob­
lems are problems of scale. To reduce metropolitan problems to problems ofscale means to ignore completely the existence of a science of the city, in otherwords to ignore the actual structure of the city and its conditions of evolution.
The reading of the city I have proposed here with reference to primary ele­ments, historically constituted urban artifacts, and areas of influence permits astudy of the growth of the city in which such changes of scale do not affect thelaws of development.
It seems to me that the inappropriate interpretation of the “new scale” by ar­chitects can also be explained through certain suggestions of a more figurative
nature. It is worth recalling how at the outset of the debate Giuseppe Samona160

cautioned architects against the error of too easily being led by a perception ofincreased urban scale to gigantism in their projects. “It is absolutely out of thequestion in my opinion,” he declared, “to nurture any idea of gigantic spatial
parameters. In truth we find ourselves, as at all times, in a situation th a t, from ageneral point of view, presents man and his space in well-balanced proportion,and in a relationship analogous to that of the ancients, except that in today’s re­lationship all the spatial measures are greater than were the more fixed ones offifty years ago.”2”

So far in this chapter we have been concerned with raising some questions which
are fundamentally related to the economic problems of the urban dynamic or atleast derivable from them, and which did not emerge in the discussion in previ­
ous chapters (or only partially, apropos of Tricart’s system of classification). I
began by describing and commenting on two theses: that of Halbwaehs, whose
work has notably increased our knowledge of the city and the nature of urban ar­
tifacts, and th at of Bernoulli, an agile and intelligent theoretician of one of themost widely debated problems of the modern city. These two authors introduced
several elements of discussion which have been recurrent throughout this study
and which continually demand to be reexamined. Bernoulli, developing his
thesis on the relationship between land ownership and the architecture of thecity, rapidly arrived at a scientific conception of the city; similarly, but startingfrom a design point of view, did architect-theoreticians like Le Corbusier andLudwig Hilberseimer in the same climate of the Modern Movement.
In the preceding pages we also noted the romantic aspect of scholars like Ber­noulli and Hegemann, and how their moralism, which so much gives value totheir position as polemicists and innovators, ends up by vitiating their studies ofreality. I am convinced that the moralistic component cannot so easily be elimi­
nated from our valuation of the works of theoreticians of the city and that it
would be an arbitrary act to do so.
Engels’s position was no doubt an easier one to maintain; he addressed the prob­
lem from outside, so to speak, th at is, from a political and economic point of view,
telling us from this vantage point that the problem did not exist. This conclusion
could appear paradoxical, but it is also the most clarifying aspect of his argu­
ment. When Mumford accused Engels of arguing that there were alreadyenough houses in existence provided they were divided up, and of basing this as­
sertion on his unverified presumption th at what the rich possessed was good,
Mumford was brutally deforming Engels’s thought, although in substance reafo'-ming the w wtw m hi- i-N «is.2b On the other hand, it is not surprising that
EngeLT thesis was not based on studies of the city; it could not have been deeloped in those term- because it was derived purely politically.
l im.~ poi.ii a imgni ue /elected th at while we have sought to comprehend thec » ndexfiv ■•t*oe urban nrobjem in all of its term s and to refer every specific ex-• • 4 1-n bac1'i ^ * ’Celfi' of the urban structure, we have failed to accounttw that vnicn conmitutes tne first*fact of the polis, politics, within our idea of thecLt a construct).m, 7a othei words] if the architecture of urban artifacts is theconstruction of the city, how can -politics, which constitutes the decisive mo­ment, be absent from this construction?
Yet on the basis of all the arguments we have raised here, we not only affirm the;161

Politics as Choicerelevance of politics but even maintain that it is of primary importance and, in­deed, decisive. Politics constitutes the problem of choices. Who ultimately
chooses the image of a city if not the city itself—and always and only through its
political institutions. To say that this choice is indifferent is a banal simplificationof the problem. It is not indifferent: Athens, Rome, and Paris are the form, of
their politics, the signs of their collective will.
Certainly if we consider the city a man-made object, as the archaeologist does,
then everything the city accumulates is a sign of its progress; but this does notdiminish the fact that there may exist different valuations of this progress, aswell as different valuations of its political choices. But here politics, which up to
now may have seemed extraneous to or remote from this discourse on the city,
makes its appearance in its own guise, presenting itself in the proper mannerand at the essential moment.
Urban architecture—which, as we have repeated many times, is a human crea­tion—is willed as such; thus the Italian piazzas of the Renaissance cannot be
explained either in terms of their function or by chance. Although these piazzas
are means in the formation of the city, such elements which originally start out
as means tend to become ends; ultimately they are the city. Thus the city has as
its end itself alone, and there is nothing else to explain beyond the fact of its own
presence in its own artifacts. This mode of being implies a wall to exist in a
specific way and to continue in that way.
This “-way” is what constitutes the beauty of the ancient city, which is always aparadigm for our own urban schemes. Certain functions, time, place, and culture
modify our cities as they modify the forms of their architecture; but such modifi­
cations have value when and only when they are in action, as events and as tes­
timony, rendering the city evident to itself. We have seen how periods of new
events make this problem especially apparent, and how only a correct coinci­
dence of factors yields an authentic urban artifact, one wherein the city realizes
in itself its own idea of itself and registers it in stone. But this realization must al­ways be evaluated in terms of the physical ways it occurs; there is as absoluteand unambiguous a relationship between the element of chance and the elementof tradition in urban architecture as there is between general laws and real ele­ments-.
In every city there are individual personalities; every city possesses a personal
soul formed of old traditions and living feelings as well as unresolved aspirations.
Yet still the city cannot be independent of the general laws of urban dynamics.
Behind the particular cases there are general conditions, and the result is that nourban growth is spontaneous. Rather, it is through the natural tendencies of themany groups dispersed throughout the different parts of the city that we must
explain the modifications of the city’s structure.
finally, a human being is not only an inhabitant of one country and one city, butof a highly precise and delimited place, and while no urban transformation does
not also signify a transformation in the lives of its inhabitants, the reactions ofpeople cannot be simply predicted or easily derived; to attempt to do so would be
to attribute to the physical environment the same determinism that naivefunctionalism attributed to form. Reactions and relationships^an be isolated foranalysis only with difficulty; they must be understood within the overall struc­ture of urban artifacts. This difficulty might even lead us to search for an irra­
tional element in the growth of the city. The city is as irrational as any work of162

art, and its mystery is perhaps above all to be found in the secret and ceaselesswill of its collective manifestations.
Thus the complex structure of the city emerges from a discourse whose terms ofreference are still somewhat fragmentary. Perhaps the laws of the city areexactly like those that regulate the life and destiny of individual men. Every biog­
raphy has its own interest, even though it.is circumscribed by birth and death.
Certainly the architecture of the city, the human thing par excellence, is thephysical sign of this biography, beyond the meanings and the feelings with which
we recognize it.