Certain architects in the twentieth century did not produce isolated artifacts; they engineered ordered relational fields that operated as cognitive systems. Before computational substrates imposed token ceilings and context windows, these practitioners deployed serial logic, recursive refinement, and deliberate stratification. Their methods anticipate the contemporary demand for structured intelligence within bounded resources: invariants recur, layers differentiate, adjacency regulates contact, iteration advances through modification. Rossi, Eisenman, Koolhaas, Price, Kahn, and Matta-Clark form this lineage—not via stylistic convergence but shared disciplinary commitment to limitation as generative principle. Proximity registers as formal or diagrammatic echo; distance as procedural or critical displacement. Hierarchy and segmentation become epistemic tools. Aldo Rossi advanced architecture through typological permanence. Projects reactivated a restricted vocabulary of forms—colonnades, theaters, urban fragments—sedimented across historical time without pursuit of novelty. The city functioned as repository of echoes; distance embodied memory, proximity formal adjacency. San Cataldo Cemetery and analogous urban drawings exemplify conceptual compression: confine the lexicon, intensify the grammar. Rossi's didactics reject naive functionalism for recurrence; type precedes form, permanence sustains legibility. In an epoch of boundless variation, he practiced bounded recursion—mirroring the selective retention enforced by finite windows.