Rossi, A. (1982) The Architecture of the City. Translated by D. Ghirardo and J. Ockman. Revised for the American edition by A. Rossi and P. Eisenman. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.

Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City advances a decisive theoretical proposition: the city must not be interpreted as a neutral container of functions, but as an accreting intellectual, material and mnemonic artefact whose meanings exceed immediate use. Against the reductive logic of modernist planning, Rossi reclaims architecture as a discipline grounded in urban permanence, arguing that housing districts, monuments, routes and civic forms persist through time not because they remain functionally unchanged, but because they acquire symbolic, spatial and collective authority. The city therefore becomes legible through its durable artefacts, which operate as both evidence and agents of historical continuity; a monument may retard urban life when fossilised as a museum-piece, yet it may also become “propelling” when its form accommodates new uses without surrendering its identity, as in the examples of Arles, Padua or Split, where inherited form becomes the condition of urban transformation rather than its obstacle . Rossi’s concept of locus deepens this argument by defining place as a fusion of topography, form, event and memory: the city is not merely where history occurs, but the very theatre through which history is spatially absorbed, formalised and transmitted . The case of Diocletian’s Palace at Split is especially revealing, because a single imperial structure becomes an entire city, demonstrating that the architectural object may contain latent urbanity and that urban scale is not quantitative but typological and experiential . Consequently, Rossi’s theory culminates in collective memory, whereby the city becomes the locus of a people’s recollection, continuously shaped by objects, places and resistances that prevent urban form from dissolving into abstraction . His definitive contribution lies in this reversal: architecture is not subordinate to programme, economy or picturesque context, but constitutes a rational yet poetic structure through which societies remember, inhabit and project themselves.